Competition Structure

[inthesto]

Double elimination for life.

[JudgeHolden]

Double elimination for life.

Better yet, the Editors who win the People's vote and Judge's vote have to fight to death in a cage match.

[godix]

If I were running a contest I'd have two concerns about audience voting. First off, don't a fair number of people show up halfway through and missed all the earlier videos? Secondly if you know you're going to be judging the videos you tend to pay more attention, perhaps even go so far as to take notes if you're really anal. I doubt most audience members would do that. Instead they'd probably just vote on whatever they remembered at the end of the contest which would tend to tilt things in favor of videos shown near the end. So if an audience award was in a con I'd hope thought was given to both those issues and how to try and lessen their impact.

OTOH I'm not running a contest and never have. For all I know these are totally bullshit issues and don't affect anything.

[Vlad G Pohnert]

Well, there are many different ways to do it. Actually, it good that contest have different methods as it would be boring and less variety if they all did it the same way. There are arguments both ways for all methods as there is no perfect one.

For myself, I have a panel of hand picked judges (mix of educated AMV fans, organizers and AMV creators) pick the finalists and the best of each category. I then have two top awards, one picked by the judges and the other by the guidance voting. This method has worked very well for Animethon and Anime Evolution as in many some cases both the judges and fans have agreed upon the same video (twice now!) and the category winners have been videos that do represent the category quite well... I have now added a coordinators award that allowed "me" to pick a video that did not win, but was a close second and deserves some sort of recognition. In the end, I try very hard to ensure recognition of videos that deserve something.

One other thing to add, for Anime Evolution, I do not announce the six categories until all entries are in and let contestants pick the best three out of a list of many possible variations when they enter. The balances out the types a lot better, for example, if half the entries are DRAMA type, there might be a category for Romance and Dramatic, etc... One year I had a separate category for Drama Serious, romance and Sentimental. This provides a lot more even distribution of the categories. And hell, if it warrants an additional category because of the diverse entries, I always consider that as well! That’s what adds uniqueness to AE’s contest (as all contests have their own uniqueness in some form or another as it should be).

As for having both (judges and fans) for all, I don't disagree however I do agree that this gets costly in how many winners there are and for all the events I run we include free shipping to the winners to recognize all the international ones we get, so having a pile more would make it less practical in that respect. Also, it's no guarantee that what is considree4d by creators are the best is picked by both anyway, but there is nothing wrong in a contest doing it this way as well

As for AWA, as everyone seems to compare to them, I like some of thier methodology for thier contests, however, likw anything it's not totaly perfect as well.

Just my 2 cents worth...

Vlad

[Fall_Child42]

All this downplaying Comedy

you are all just jealous.

[Vlad G Pohnert]

If I were running a contest I'd have two concerns about audience voting. First off, don't a fair number of people show up halfway through and missed all the earlier videos? Secondly if you know you're going to be judging the videos you tend to pay more attention, perhaps even go so far as to take notes if you're really anal. I doubt most audience members would do that. Instead they'd probably just vote on whatever they remembered at the end of the contest which would tend to tilt things in favor of videos shown near the end. So if an audience award was in a con I'd hope thought was given to both those issues and how to try and lessen their impact.

OTOH I'm not running a contest and never have. For all I know these are totally bullshit issues and don't affect anything.

Actually, for the contest I run I ONLY hand balltos out at the beginning and then don't count the ones that are dropped off early...

Vlad

[Fall_Child42]

If I were running a contest I'd have two concerns about audience voting. First off, don't a fair number of people show up halfway through and missed all the earlier videos? Secondly if you know you're going to be judging the videos you tend to pay more attention, perhaps even go so far as to take notes if you're really anal. I doubt most audience members would do that. Instead they'd probably just vote on whatever they remembered at the end of the contest which would tend to tilt things in favor of videos shown near the end. So if an audience award was in a con I'd hope thought was given to both those issues and how to try and lessen their impact.

OTOH I'm not running a contest and never have. For all I know these are totally bullshit issues and don't affect anything.

Actually, for the contest I run I ONLY hand balltos out at the beginning and then don't count the ones that are dropped off early...

Vlad

Actually godix is right, there is something called the serial position curve...where people typically remember the first and last items in a list. They are going to write down the ones they remembered ... which will almost certainly be from the beginning or the end.

[Vlad G Pohnert]

Actually godix is right, there is something called the serial position curve...where people typically remember the first and last items in a list. They are going to write down the ones they remembered ... which will almost certainly be from the beginning or the end.

well, to some degree... however to most of the contests I run people actually circle thier favorates and then tend to cross off the ones they don't want and most of the time they are not the last or first ones... Last year at Animethon, the winning video was almost in the middle of the list... I starting to notice that more and more people are actually taking the time to think about it!! as more they seem to pick a lot of diverse videos a lot more then they use to about 5 years ago. that's based on ballots from three contests over 6 years.

Also, since at both of my contests the vidoes are all mixed up (not in category order), I noticed the winning videos for the past five years don't follow a pattern of where they are on the list relative to winning...

However, I do still agree that comedy tends to have a slight edge, however it's usually a WELL made comedy that get the crowds attendtion and not just anything, hence why I've seen even drama's win best audiance overall...

So yea, nothing is perfect, however I don't agree compleatly that the audiances opinion does not count, just not for everything

Vlad

[dwchang]

For the most part, I like how Vlad does it since (like Brad's post) it gives both audience AND 'professional' opinion (maybe not all editors, but you get the idea). At the same time, I think there is a time and place for each and I actually like that various contests across the nation are different (Otakon - purely fan, AWA Pro - purely editor, etc.).

If all contests were the same, it'd be boring. I know a lot of us aren't fans of well...fans voting, but they have their say at some cons and editors have theirs at others. My main point is, contests shouldn't conform to one standard and should stay unique. I mean if I win say at Otakon in a fan vote and then win another fan vote at AX, did I really gain anything? I learned that video X is good among fans, but that's it. Having different types of contests, gives me as an editor more incentive to submit to them. That's probably the main reasons I enjoy submitting to both Otakon (fan) and AWA Pro (editor). It's a different (and fun) experience.

As for other things, I kind of agree with Godix on the location on the ballot. I know it's not always the case, but I remember Matt Pyson telling us that the last position on the ballot on each category had a higher % chance of winning or something like that. The same goes for the first entry and thus he put the 'strongest' videos on the head and tail of each category (start strong, end strong). It probably goes back to the whole "audience members will vote for what they remember."

At the same time, I've won a number of times while being in the middle of the pack and thus this is not an absolute.

[Infinity Squared]

Well, I don't actually employ a "voting" method per se on the fan votes. The random selection of fan voters (who were only handed out voting papers at the start and I don't count the ones that don't finish till the end, like Vlad) are given a score sheet to grade each video (typically out of 10). That way I think at least that this idea of a position of a video in the screening list doesn't play as much of a part as each video is scored and practically put out of the voter's mind right after they've watched it and given their score.

Of course there's the problem here whereby a voter, particularly in the early stages of the voting, will not know the full spectrum of videos available and can perhaps score in an uneven fashion. For example, they might think that the video number 1 was pretty cool and they decide to give it a score of 8, but they won't know that video number 15 down the list is about three times as awesome as video number 1 and so consistency may not be preserved. I have noticed voters in the past actually change their scores around because they probably realised they've hit the ceiling in their scoring pattern prematurely.