AnimeUSA: Winners determined by judges or the audience?

[dwchang]

I don't know what the best weighting system would be, but I think some kind of mix of the two to pick the same award should be attempted.

Well in that case you're gonna have to do some testing with numbers and weights to find the right one. I can be down with that if it leads to a better system, but again I have my reservations since it'll be tough to find the 'right' weights where everything works out fairly. That's my main concern (if you hadn't noticed ).

[Pwolf]

honestly they each have their flaws.

I like audience voting because you have a larger base. To me, winning an audience vote is huge. When you have a room of 3000-5000+ (AX and Otakon mostly) people watching and voting for you video, it means a lot compared to a panel of 5-10 people. I don't like audience voting because people can make videos that will pander to the audience to get votes by using popular sources. You can make an action video with 50% or more comedy in it and the audience will vote for it because it was funny and didn't have to be a good action video. I think for an audience vote to be the most effective, you have to clearly label each video and the voting ballot. I've been to more then one contest where you couldn't tell which video was which on the ballot. I poorly designed ballot will force the audience to vote blindly, literally. Also take a break between each category to give the audience a chance to vote for the best video in the previous category. Also play a short replay of the categories videos. AX did that and I thought it was really effective.

I like judge voting because the panel of judges can look for other things that make a video better then the rest and not just because it uses source that are popular. But that depends on who's judging. You can get a panel of audience judges and that only brings you back to the above but on a much smaller scale. Or you can have a very strict technical panel that will tear each video to pieces. Acen tries to put both audience members and amv editors on the judging panel but honestly I don't like that. The amv editors on the panel are either in the contest or have close friends in the contest. Not saying that any of them would rig the contest in their or their friend's favor but I think that having that bias does make someone judge differently. Plus, you have the amv editors with the non-editors and that can be intimidating so they might not vote the same either. A judging panel has to be blind and limited to people who aren't in the contest for it to be effective and fair IMO. I think the best way to do it is to get editor judges to judge the videos before the weekend of the con, then select willing and random audience member during the contest to vote (non-editors).

I like the way Scottanime has done it with Fanime in the past: separate audience and judge awards. best (and worst) of both worlds.


Pwolf

[Adv1sor]

I believe that this has been tried already...
http://www.hookiedookiepanic.com/comic.php?ID=29

Well, I'd have to see the trophy first but...

[Miracle_Falcon]

Okay, a little bit more awake than when I first posted, let's see if I can get out something a little more intelligible

In all truth, you're never going to get people who are all unbiased from friends and know the best techniques for making AMVs, and have also seen every anime out there so that they won't like a video more just because they know the anime. So there's a problem right there.

Audience voting, I feel, is like that on crack, to the point where, the way AUSA did it last year, it was an excuse for the vast majority of comedy/upbeat (I don't remember all that well) AMVs to get a different type of recognition each. There may have been an exception to that rule, but if there was, I can't recall. That, I feel, is unfair in that it forces all other AMVs to be ranked much harder. It's near impossible for a good drama to beat a decent comedy by audience participation standards, I think.

So, to mitigate that problem, what if you were to have audience members vote for best in each category, and also have the judge's decide a best in each category? When the two had the same opinion, the judge's could use their second pick as their choice. Whether or not that should be made clear to the audience is up for grabs, though I think it'd be interesting to know for the contestants, just to see if there was (and how big of one there was) a disparity between the audience and the judge's on the higher ranked videos. For best in show, I say it should be judge's pick under this model, just because the judge's would be ducking out the rest of the time if the audience picked their video. I dunno, maybe that's a dumb build, but I thought it was worth throwing out there.

[Vlad G Pohnert]

There is no perfect system. Everything has its good and bad points.

Although having both judges and audience awards for each category or title seems the best, it too is not perfect. For one thing, it makes for a lot more winners and as most cons have prizes or some sort of trophy, etc, and thus a lot bigger budget, or else a lot less categories of winners. (i.e. 6 categories or types of awards, you need to have 12 for each side). I myself an not too keen on duplicating the types or categories either and if you end up with a lot of awards it makes the winners a lot less unique to the contest in some respects, especially at small cons.

One thing for sure, it's nice to have variety and each contest be different as it would be boring to have al the contests judged the exact same way anyway.

Vlad

[CorpseGoddess]

There is no perfect system. Everything has its good and bad points.

Although having both judges and audience awards for each category or title seems the best, it too is not perfect. For one thing, it makes for a lot more winners and as most cons have prizes or some sort of trophy, etc, and thus a lot bigger budget, or else a lot less categories of winners. (i.e. 6 categories or types of awards, you need to have 12 for each side). I myself an not too keen on duplicating the types or categories either and if you end up with a lot of awards it makes the winners a lot less unique to the contest in some respects, especially at small cons.

One thing for sure, it's nice to have variety and each contest be different as it would be boring to have al the contests judged the exact same way anyway.

Vlad

That being said, I really like the Coordinator's Award you introduced to AE last year. I think that's a great concept.

[Vlad G Pohnert]

That being said, I really like the Coordinator's Award you introduced to AE last year. I think that's a great concept.

I added that to award a video that did not win anything but should of, or should get recognition.

Vlad

[aquastar831]

When I was at Tekkoshocon and Anime Mid-Atlantic, I think both were done by audience vote, and there were judges awards too. I didn't really think about pros and cons of each. Though I would tend to lean more towards the audience vote system more.

It is true that there may be bias in either type of system, and some examples include say people voting for an AMV just because it's from a popular series, or voting for friends and such, and that may well be the same case in a judge based panel, with the downside of a possible disagreement from the audience.

One thing that might be a fun idea is if you do integrate a judge based system in some way to maybe have the guests as judges, though it might be difficult since they have their own panels to do and may not have time to sit for an AMV contest.

A category that might be fun would be for newcomers to AMV creation where they have their own category and would strictly be for those who have never submitted an entry to a contest. Might be fun to encourage more people out there to try their hand at making AMVs.

[JaddziaDax]

AMA does judges and audience >.>

However, I've advised Gene for future contests that if something wins best of show, it shouldn't take the category as well... while i like my 3 AMA trophies, I didn't like that the runners up in my category didn't really "win" anything though and it felt like I was "getting too much" for it (2007)..

[SilkAMV]

What we need are a British guy, a black guy, and a woman. I dare anyone to disagree.