Well as usual i am not personally pleased with all of the results (i got a batting average of 7 out of 26, or 1.8 above totally random, and i can't believe XXXXX won in YYYYY instead of ZZZZZ! *grrr*!) but congratulations to everyone involved! They were all great videos, even if they weren't always my personal favorites
I threw together a couple numbers on the finalists, for anyone that's interested.
(And my apologies, i tried to post the data here but for the life of me i can't figure out how to do tables in BBCode, or even just insert some tabs, so you get to go to my blog if you want to see all the numbers.)
http://donaithnen.livejournal.com/1189815.html#cutid1
In short, for the finals there were 70 videos by 53 different members that were nominated a total of 126 times. The 24 (non-editor) awards were split between 18 different videos.
seiry's "The Fox" is clearly the big winner, making it into 6 categories for the finals and winning 3 of them.
And clearly the biggest non-winners were BakaOppai with "A Piece of Toast" and BecauseImBored1 with "Otaku Paradise". 5 and 6 entries in the finals respectively and not a single win between them =/ One wonders if there might have been a little bit of self-sabotage there? Or am i the only one who ever thinks "I already voted for video X in several other categories, maybe something else deserves a chance here?"
It's a bit surprising that even though several of the winning members got multiple wins it was always for a single video.
One also wonders if there was some self-sabotage going on in some of those cases, especially for VivifxAMV, who got the most total nominations but only came away with 2 wins. The only categories in which "Ship Happens" won were categories in which it was _not_ competing against "Anime 101".
Ileia also really stands out, 7 full-length videos in the semi-finals, 3 in the finals, just one of them won, and even though i voted for her multiple times the winner was one of the few of hers that i didn't even vote for in the semi-finals =P And then there are Rider4Z and PieandBeer who had a huge number of nominees and got a couple each into the finals but didn't win anything =/ And of course there's drewaconclusion who had a massive number of nominations but didn't make it into the the finals at all
On the other side of things, Anicsi gets the "Veni, vidi, vici" award for multiple wins and 0 "losses", Stray Tracks was their only nominated video, it was nominated in two categories, it made the finals in those two categories, and it won those two categories. That's some really focused effort!
So again, congrats to everyone, winners and not-quite winners alike!
(I considered doing something similar for all of the nominees, but that would be significantly more work, and i have no idea if anyone else even cares.)
Edit: In conclusion, given how often i was torn between "what i really want to win" vs "what i kind of want to win and i think has a chance of winning" combined with the some of the correlations above (such as Ship Happens vs AMV 101) i _really_ wish the VCAs used some form of instant run-off voting for the Finals. (Trying to rank 20 items in each category for the semi-finals would be a nightmare, but having done it numerous times for the Hugos it's not bad for just five items per category.)
"To create something that appeals to the emotions of users, you need to make something that sways your own heart. You can't move others hearts unless you can move your own." - Kazuki Fujisawa
