Otakon AMV Master's Invitational

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Otakon AMV Master's Invitational

Postby Superios » Thu Dec 18, 2003 5:56 pm

Hey all...

Some people may have noticed I said to 'keep an eye out for new things'...or something like that. Here's one of them

Premiering in 2005...

Otakon's SECOND AMV contest, which will allow people by invitation only.

I have a list of people who I will be inviting for this competition. You know you are invited when I hand a letter to you, personally, respectfully asking that you participate.

There are 4 categories...
Drama (all types)
Action (all types)
Comedy
Artistic/Technical

The only demand I'll make for this is that the invited creator submit a brad-spanking new amv, that has never seen the light of day at another convention.

Prizes will be better than the other contest (which you may submit for in addition to this contest).

Details are sketchy at this time, but I assure you...all questions will be answered and the rules for this contest shall be posted in-between late February and mid-March 2004.

If you have any questions, either email them to otakonamv1 at hotmail dot com

-or-

amv2004 at otakon dot com

or you can just IM me, but do not ask me to invite you as I am gathering info on creators I'd like in this contest and some of these invites I'll be handing out at various conventions over the course of this coming year.

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Postby AbsoluteDestiny » Thu Dec 18, 2003 6:11 pm

Hmmmm....

I need to think a little more about this before posting my thoughts, but

hmm

I dunno, it runs the risk of being elitist due to the innate exclusivity of it all. Especially with better prizes - people may well ask "Why am I not good enough?".

There are other concerns, but yeah... I'll post more when I've thought about it.
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Postby dwchang » Thu Dec 18, 2003 6:24 pm

AbsoluteDestiny wrote:Hmmmm....

I need to think a little more about this before posting my thoughts, but

hmm

I dunno, it runs the risk of being elitist due to the innate exclusivity of it all. Especially with better prizes - people may well ask "Why am I not good enough?".

There are other concerns, but yeah... I'll post more when I've thought about it.


I have to agree with Ian on that one, but see an alternative in that if you've won in a previous otakon contest, you could compete. This would have a fairly large # of creators in the pool of people invited. This seems a bit less exclusive (still a bit, yes I know). IIRC AnimeBoston does something similar in that a person needs to win X awards in "Journeyman" (I think?) to compete in the next level and so on. I could be mistaken and hopefully someone who is part of that con *cough* Ashyukun *cough* will say something.

At the same time, I'm not entirely saying that this will "fix" everything. I still see a lot of people being angry with the exclusivity and so on (since there would still be some), but at the same time think it could help a bit and it's always nice to have more videos :).
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Postby trythil » Thu Dec 18, 2003 6:31 pm

Assuming that the rules for selection will be made available and unambiguous in time, I'm not sure what makes this different from, say, AWA Masters.
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Postby Fungie½ » Thu Dec 18, 2003 6:33 pm

I hope this doesn't sound mean or anything, but it's really a slap in the face to those who enter Otakon not because of their editing mastery but because they enjoy to edit. Saying that certain "favorites" should be allowed in a disclosed contest is really just making a stereotype that the others aren't good enough to be in the masters contest. I dunno, but it seems kinda fishy to me... but since you're the coordinator, do as you please.
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Postby AbsoluteDestiny » Thu Dec 18, 2003 6:56 pm

OK This is gonig to be a long post, but I;ve had a good think about the subject.

I have the following uncertainties:

1) As I mentioned earlier, the nature of admittance by invite suggests some people are good enough and some are not. This creates a negative atmosphere in a community which mostly believes that anyone has the potential to make that winning video irrespecitive of reputation. Joined with the notion of better prizes this could lead to suspicions of fixing.

2) It degrades the contest that Otakon has built up over many years to be probably the finest publically voted open amv contests there is. The winners of the "vanilla" contest will no longer feel the achievement of being the best in their field as all the others were competing at the top level. This is a different situation from the AWA Masters as the AWA Masters has a particular kind of flavour - the knowledge that there is only one winner, judged in a particular way and that there is no real prize except the title.

3) It reduces the spread of good videos. Personally I prefer to see someone who entered a video on a whim at their local con and won become encouraged to send it in to Otakon to see if it can make it all the way to the top.

4) It supposes quite a demand on the creator, essentially saying that they must perform well in order to live up to their invitiation. That's not what amv making is about. Likewise, most highly considered creators dont actually produce that many videos a year. Saying that they can still enter the "vanilla" contest is all very well but it's more than likely that they will have one Otakon video and that's it. Again, degrading the original excellent contest.

5) There are too many categories for an invite-only contest. If you look back at the previous years winners you'll find that there are a lot of categories won by creators who are fairly new. If you took out these new creators you wouldnt have many left and certainly not enough to warrant a higher tier with multiple categories. It's also presuming that the invitation will be accepted. The only way around it is to have LOTS of invites, which really defeats the purpose anyway.

At the moment I'm very uncertain about this contest. I think that as it stands it is likely to cause elitism arguments and interfere with what is an already excellent amv contest. This isn't a bonus extra - it completely changes AMVs at Otakon and at other cons too and I think that needs to be seriously consiered.
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Postby dokool » Thu Dec 18, 2003 7:36 pm

dwchang wrote:IIRC AnimeBoston does something similar in that a person needs to win X awards in "Journeyman" (I think?) to compete in the next level and so on.



Instead of having set categories, Anime Boston has three divisions: Novice, Journeyman, and Masters. You can enter whichever category you want if you don't place into it (i.e. a novice can entry Journeyman or Masters, a journeyman can enter Masters), but if you've actually won awards, then you can't enter below the level you placed into.

However, if you're, say, a real Novice who enters Masters and wins in that category (I think you'd actually have to win Best Masters instead of one of the categories, which I'll get to in a moment), then you're stuck in Masters if you enter AB next year.

While they have these divisions, there's also Drama, Action, and Comedy. However, the audience chooses which (out of all the videos) deserves to win what: A video can have votes for it in more than one category (as mine and a few other's did), so the audience can be a smartass and give a dramatic video their Comedy vote, or vice versa (as probably happened to Tom the Fish's Fight!)

As far as the point of this thread, I agree with what d-dubya and AD have said before. I also think that having an Otakon Masters competition is definately ripping off AWA, which is somewhat unoriginal. We can do better than this, and I'm not alone in thinking that plans for a second Otakon contest should be shelved.

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Postby BogoSort » Thu Dec 18, 2003 8:24 pm

First off, what's wrong with making a contest that might be similar in scope to the AWA Masters contest? Last I checked, AWA didn't have the idea for a high class(read elitist) amv contest patented. To think that there are many who would wish to see the spread of Iron Chef(another idea that started out as an AWA exclusive), and yet the AWA Masters has to stay there seems a bit contradictory. His details haven't even been set in stone. With just the info that he's given, there's potential for a vastly different amv contest.

With that said, there are several issues that need to be addressed:

1. What is the criteria for determining who gets an invite? Just having an arbitrary judge definately promotes some bad blood among those who are and aren't invited. Setting it to be just Otakon winners, severly limits the number of creators that would be willing to participate in it, but it does add a bit of flavor to make the contest something that's more Otakon's own contest, rather than Genericon AMV contest. Potentially allowing runner ups into this contest could alleviate these problems.

2. What category are contestants going to be allowed to enter into? Are they going to be forced into the category that they won in taking one of the possibilities in #1, or do they get free reign? How are you going to deal if they become unbalanced? Will the creators have to announce the categories that they are going to be in before all is said and done?

3. How is this going to be judged? Will there be a sekrit L33T panel like in AWA Masters? Entriant vote? Or possibly audience vote, like the traditional Otakon contest? Will it be a straight vote for the best ballot, or a ranking where a best preference decision is made? Or how about ripping off some of the audience gameshow methods, or maybe have a random panel of congoers to sit down and watch and vote on the videos while at the con.

4. How are you going to keep the quality of the normal Otakon contest from being affected by this? Lots of creators would have trouble making more than one video in a year, and to make a video of the calibur that you seem to be expecting will generally take a lot of time.

5. Will there be any sort of content restriction/suggestion? The normal Otakon contest trys to avoid mature themes, though it tends to be fairly liberal. How about themes, or anime/song choices? Those coupld potentially spice things up, esp since from what I'm told, Otakon tries to have a theme every year, and having the amv contest reflect that would be neat. Or maybe providing copies of the CD of the musical guest of the year to all of the entriants make videos to songs by that artist(though that'd probably result in a very boring contest with lots of similar videos).

6. Is there actually time allotted for this contest at Otakon? I know there tend to be scheduling issues at Otakon, and even recently they cut one of the 3 showings of the Otakon AMV contest last year. Or will this one sneak into the place of MAT3K?

7. Will this contest take the stand of requiring that entriants attend Otakon?

And remember, this contest is for 2005, unless that's a tyop. There's plenty of time for us creators to make out thoughts known about this contest. I'm sure that he's willing to take our suggestions and try to implement them for a contest.
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Postby jbone » Thu Dec 18, 2003 8:41 pm

Well, I was going to post about my own distaste about the idea, but AbsoluteDestiny and BogoSort covered everything I would have mentioned.

I dislike the sound of the idea because, at this point in the hobby's life, there's not a large pool from which to draw potential "masters."

Golf? Tennis? Sure, hundreds of athletes. Anime music videos? Uh... a couple of dozen, maybe, who you'll see fit to "invite?"

Plus, a good number of people don't "make videos for cons." I know I don't. I'll make videos here and there, and I'll send them to a con if the deadline happens to be around when I have a new-ish video available. Were I to be "invited" to _any_ contest, I _might_ consider sending something if I had anything lying around... but putting extra effort in because "d00d this is 1337!"? Hells, no.
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Postby Nappy » Thu Dec 18, 2003 8:44 pm

So your personally handing out letters o_O Well if it's in 2005 I guess one would assume you need to be at 2004 to accept the letter >_> And you already have a list? hmm, that would exclude anyone new in 2004 as well as 2005.

Making prizes even better for this exclusive group, seems just wrong even if they are making videos exclusivly for this contest. I mean you already have a no troll rule in the normal contest, so many already make videos mainly for the normal contest (or at least debuting at or around that time).
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Postby dwchang » Thu Dec 18, 2003 9:22 pm

I've thought about it and I'd like to voice my own opinions.

I'm not sure the motivation behind such a move, but I imagine it's to distuigish Otakon's contest(s) from other cons and to a degree to reward the creators. I (as well as others I'm sure) recognize this and I for one appreciate the fact that you're thinking up new thoughts and trying to please the creators. That's very thoughtful of you. I mean a new contest sure seems pretty nice right? More prizes? More videos? and so on.

At the same time, I've read over the responses and a lot of good points have been made and I'll try not to repeat them too much. Anyway, other than the most obvious gripe about "elitism" which comes with the group of "invite-only," (which has been covered heavily) my second main concern is with the quality of the "regular contest." I know Ian covered it, but I'd like to voice my personal experiences to somewhat help.

I'll be honest in saying that Otakon 2003's contest was easily one of the (if not the) most impressive AMV contests I have ever had the pleasure of participating in/seeing in both the way it was handled and the competition itself. It was handled marvelously all the way from the submission, pre-judging and showing. I know I wasn't the only one sitting at the contest going "Wow!" to nearly every video. The strength of the competition was quite high and the videos equally high in quality. IIRC some category winners only won by < 10 votes!

All of this can all be easily attributed to A) Otakon's reputation for doing things "right" which in turn leads to B) a lot of creators submitting. IIRC ~180 entries were submitted with just under 30 making it into the contest. I don't mean to imply some sort of arrogance here, but I for one was quite proud to have gotten into the contest which such stiff competition and sheer # of entries. I was told it was "a big deal" and somewhat scoffed at it, but after seeing the contest itself, I now believe it. It was a great contest with great videos.

That leads me to my point. By segregating editors into two seperate contests, the "normal" contest will suffer greatly and as stupid as it sounds, lose prestige. I'm going to guess that some of the motivation behind creating another contest is for the benefit of having such a highly regarded contest and the same prestige to the winners. I can understand that, but at the same time....you already have it :). Ask any of us on here :).

Basically if one of the reasons behind this is to have a highly regarded contest, please don't. You already have it. I mean the fact many editors even create a unique entry *just for* Otakon should tell you that much. Hell, I'm planning on one as well. By creating *another* contest, you will lose that magic you currently have. Not to mention all the other negative things which create rifts within our community.

I realize this is not your intent, but please keep all these things in mind and again I appreciate your efforts to try and make things better for both the audience and creators. Hopefully we can all discuss this and figure it all out.
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Postby outlawed » Thu Dec 18, 2003 9:46 pm

I will keep this fairly short.

My advice:
Keep the same plan but scratch the invite only. Make it so those people who have won an Otakon category before MUST submit into the new contest (let's call it advanced) for that category and CAN NOT submit for that category into the regular contest (let's call it beginner). This will give people who have won before stiffer competition and allow new submitters or past non-winners a better chance to win a category. Also it will allow you to present the high quality 2nd contest (i.e. best of the best) for your audience which is what I gather you made this 2nd contest for.

On the posted contest concept:
Whether the current system announced breeds elitism is unknown until it actually takes place. Only then would be know if the selected individuals take and elitist attitude. What it may lead to before it occurs is a lot of bitter feelings of those not selected against those who were. In other words those snubbed will be the ones upset.
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Postby Scintilla » Thu Dec 18, 2003 10:07 pm

trythil wrote:Assuming that the rules for selection will be made available and unambiguous in time, I'm not sure what makes this different from, say, AWA Masters.

If I read the AWA Masters rules correctly, you didn't have to be <i>invited</i> to that one as long as one of your videos had won an award... right?
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Postby dwchang » Thu Dec 18, 2003 10:23 pm

Scintilla wrote:
trythil wrote:Assuming that the rules for selection will be made available and unambiguous in time, I'm not sure what makes this different from, say, AWA Masters.

If I read the AWA Masters rules correctly, you didn't have to be <i>invited</i> to that one as long as one of your videos had won an award... right?


Yeah AWA's only criteria is that you've won an award in the past. It's a bit more selective, but a lot less than "invite only."
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Postby TnAdct1 » Thu Dec 18, 2003 10:36 pm

outlawed wrote:I will keep this fairly short.

My advice:
Keep the same plan but scratch the invite only. Make it so those people who have won an Otakon category before MUST submit into the new contest (let's call it advanced) for that category and CAN NOT submit for that category into the regular contest (let's call it beginner). This will give people who have won before stiffer competition and allow new submitters or past non-winners a better chance to win a category. Also it will allow you to present the high quality 2nd contest (i.e. best of the best) for your audience which is what I gather you made this 2nd contest for.


One thing to add here (if the Masters contest does take place at Otakon 2005): have first runner-ups also be eligible as well. If memory serves me right, there's currently 22 people or groups that have won the Otakon AMV contest, and of those 22, some of them have retired from the AMV creation business, which means there's less people who will be eligible for the Masters. Also, with the first runner-ups being in the Masters, this would mean more of the experts of AMV's (i.e. VicBond007 Productions, Aluminum Studios) will be involved in that part of the AMV contest as well.

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