ForeverZeroo wrote:hackerzc wrote:
Oh yeah and I'm leaving the AMV contest so =^P
you're not heading the contest any more?
At this point I still am, but in a month or two I hope to have a replacement. Already have a couple people to hand things off too, it's just a matter of figuring who is doing what exactly.
This is the only year I've actually run the contest, but I've done work on it for the past 4. It's just getting stale at this point, plus each year I sorta put a lot of my own stuff on hold for a good 9 months of the year. I figure it's time to get back to doing my own thing again.
If there is anything at all that would get me to stick around it's the fact that this year went so... smoothly. I know some people are saying the contest wasn't as strong as it was in past years, and I can agree with that (I didn't agree with the decisions of some prescreeners, but I remained impartial), but everything else went pretty damn good. My entire goal for this year when I came into the Dept. Head position was to (hopefully) get the contest back on track and return it to some of it's former glory. I think we did that...
FTP has returned, deadline was later, we had more submissions, we had adequate space for the contest screenings with total attendance around 7000 over the weekend (making it more popular than any other programing item), the trophies were freaking awesome this year, we returned to using a video server (and had no technical issues at all during playback), and best of all... NO DRAMA! Everyone was surprised about this, and it honestly scared me at first. I was expecting complaint after complaint about deadlines and various other petty things. When I didn't see ANY of that I had honestly though a lot of editors had banded together to boycott the contest.
Mind you, I had to work hard to get a lot of the stuff we had this year that made it so great, but it only happened because the rest of Otakon staff worked with me. I'm hoping everyone will see how well things went this year and it'll leave a positive impression on them so that my replacement will be able to get the same time, space, and resources as we had this year (or better).
Otakon's AMV Contest is no AWA (yet), but I doubt 7000 people saw AWA's contests either. Otakon may not be the best contest... but without a doubt it's the best place to be seen.