The AWA 2015 Professional Awards Video Review Thread

[jingoro]

Sorry, not going to happen with me in charge. I strongly disagree with the practice, and won't do it.

[MaboroshiStudio]

I agree usually I do not like combo categories

[BasharOfTheAges]

Approximately how many categories are we going to have? Depending on how many we have will affect if I want to vote for a few of these categories.

I think it's normally like 14?

[GloryQuestor]

Approximately how many categories are we going to have? Depending on how many we have will affect if I want to vote for a few of these categories.

I think it's normally like 14?

- 16 categories in 2013: Best Adult, Best Non-Anime, Best Fight, Best Parody / Trailer, Best Upbeat, Best Character Profile, Best Technical, Best Artistic Endeavour, Best Storytelling, Best Sentimental, Best Horror / Dark, Best Romance, Best Drama, Best Comedy, Best Action, and Best In Show.

- 13 categories in 2014: Best Adult Video, Best Upbeat, Best Storytelling, Best Trailer, Best Character Profile, Best Sentimental, Best Technical, Best Artistic Endeavor, Best Romance, Best Drama, Best Comedy, Best Action, and Best Video.

So, everything last year was the "classic" division of major general categories: The general categories (Action, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Sentimental, Trailer, Upbeat), what normally is reserved for contest judges (Storytelling, Character, Technical, Artistic), and the Adult category. The year before was largely the same, but had "non-anime" and two seemingly combined categories (Parody / Trailer and Horror / Dark) that are the same thing just two ways to say it -- Trailers & Commercials are Parodies and Dark videos are usually Horror-based.

My opinion would be to see a division between the two main type of "Upbeat" videos (I did see Most Fun and Best Dance on the checklist), and maybe an original award that could be up for grabs by a good many of the videos on the list, but otherwise last year's category structure is a good way to give every video some chance to win (i.e. a Drama video that also has some solid Action or Romance elements could go for any of these categories). I don't want to see an overage of custom, excessive categories that lock me out immediately from any chance of winning, and I'm hoping all of you feel the same with your videos.

[Warlike Swans]

Going to weigh in with my opinion on combined categories.

I like seeing them. A contest with Horror/Psychedelic award is great. Ordinarily those videos would be awkwardly relegated to a more standard category like drama. Combining categories doesn’t downsize a contest by smooshing together two independently viable categories, it expands the contest by creating a new viable hybrid.

The only time I don't like seeing combined categories is when primary categories get mashed up, like Drama/Romance, or (to a less extent) Action/Upbeat.

This year for Pro I am not voting for Upbeat, Dance, or Fun. Upbeat is traditionally synonymous with Dance, and functionally synonymous with Fun for most contests. If none of those categories make it into the contest I will be shocked, but I think the odds of a redundant category is much higher than a categorical gap here. If they were clearly combined under one umbrella category I would have been happy to vote for it.

[jingoro]

A category such as Horror / Psychedelic is an awful travesty. Let me give you a hypothetical. You're judging a motion picture contest with such a category and the finalists are:

Best Horror / Psychedelic
314 - 2001: A Space Odyssey
404 - Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho
666 - The Omen
420 - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

How the !@#$ are you supposed to judge that? You're no longer comparing the merits of the videos... there's fantastic things there however you interpret the category... now you're playing your own personal preferences for Horror or Psychedelic off each other. Not a horror fan? Fear and Loathing wins ... for you. For someone else, Psycho trumps everything. For me, not a fan of either of these genres, I'm rooting for 2001 and wondering if we can add Best Sci-Fi next year.

No No No No No, never again, not while I'm here.

[jingoro]

OK, the last (!) round of category selection is up.

After a nice (long) quiet dinner, I've gone back through all the recent emails and baring any unintentional human error on my part have added every suggestion and some variants of suggestions I could find. This is what you, the editors, seem to have asked for.

As pointed out by others, our trophy budget (in terms of time in the ceremony and actual budget) is "about 14 trophies", but to be honest 14 is really pushing it for time during a Master's year. Please keep this in mind when you revisit the survey.

[jingoro]

Important note... "Trailer / Parody" is now just "parody"... as someone pointed out, trailers by nature are parodies... however for fairness, Best Trailer is available should you so choose as its own category in keeping with my *cough* rant about slashed-categories.

[Ileia]

This is what you, the editors, seem to have asked for.

Thank you! Pro has traditionally been a sort of "For Us, By Us" contest and that's what I like about it and why I enter. We spend all year entering contests where we can't do much about their rules and specific guidelines so we edit around it. It's nice to just be able to edit whatever we want and decide as a group how we want to award/judge them.

[Shin-AMV]

I don't think the awesomecore award is a good idea and can potentially be pretty derogatory. While I know there are some people who would love to win this award based on the video they made specifically to be awesomecoreish, handing out an award because their video was so bad that it ended up being entertaining could turn out to be unintentionally mean and hurtful.