Discussion: Editor Opinions on Convention Contests

[Kireblue]

Yes. Most people only go to one con per year. But did we forget that most people also have the internet? And people who would want to see an AMV contest at a con have probably also seen AMVs online - might even seek them out! Weird!

Cons have different freshness rules and that's cool and obviously at the discretion of each coordinator depending on their convention needs - but don't tell me that your reasoning is that people only see AMVs at cons and only go to one con. It's 2017, gosh darnit.

yeah, I think you make a pretty good point.

To be honest I wish there was just more self-policing amongst editors. It gets really frustrating to see the same names and the same videos over and over again in every contest. I don't think that freshness or award limit rules manage to curb that enough. If you're the type of person who makes a lot of videos and inevitably makes the finalists at every convention you submit to, maybe knock it off a bit and give the rest of us schmucks a shot. ಠ_ಠ

And I always felt that freshness rules should be more of a self-policing thing. Like MaboroshiStudio said, editors used to be a lot better at retiring a video once it got its fair share of wins or had been around for a while. But over time, the unwritten rules of entering contests started to get neglected, and so coordinators had to add in official ones. I kinda went with the middle ground for the contest that I run (MomoCon). Instead of having a hard freshness rule, its listed as more of a guideline and says that videos made before a certain point are simply discouraged.

[MaboroshiStudio]

Yes. Most people only go to one con per year. But did we forget that most people also have the internet? And people who would want to see an AMV contest at a con have probably also seen AMVs online - might even seek them out! Weird!

Cons have different freshness rules and that's cool and obviously at the discretion of each coordinator depending on their convention needs - but don't tell me that your reasoning is that people only see AMVs at cons and only go to one con. It's 2017, gosh darnit.

yeah, I think you make a pretty good point.

To be honest I wish there was just more self-policing amongst editors. It gets really frustrating to see the same names and the same videos over and over again in every contest. I don't think that freshness or award limit rules manage to curb that enough. If you're the type of person who makes a lot of videos and inevitably makes the finalists at every convention you submit to, maybe knock it off a bit and give the rest of us schmucks a shot. ಠ_ಠ

And I always felt that freshness rules should be more of a self-policing thing. Like MaboroshiStudio said, editors used to be a lot better at retiring a video once it got its fair share of wins or had been around for a while. But over time, the unwritten rules of entering contests started to get neglected, and so coordinators had to add in official ones. I kinda went with the middle ground for the contest that I run (MomoCon). Instead of having a hard freshness rule, its listed as more of a guideline and says that videos made before a certain point are simply discouraged.

I think a little playful shade via gifs can help with this...


When I was trolling Scott Sterling like a whore some of my friends were like enough man. It is good when our friends can keep us honest and I did honestly feel like I was being a dick to my fellow editors. Winning sure feels great, but I love videos made by other creators too and want to see them get the recognition they deserve.

[BasharOfTheAges]

One thing I've actually noticed from a coordinator / prescreener / judge wrangler point of view is that back, say, 10 years ago, you could tell right away if something was terrible - It LOOKED terrible. If people couldn't put the effort in to clean up footage, they probably couldn't put in the effort to structure their video well enough for it to be worth anything. Nowadays, though, it's a lot easier to hide "bad" and there's a lot more "good but not amazing" content being put out (most big cons keep breaking submission records year after year). This combines to make the prescreening and judging process a degree of magnitude more complicated than it used to be and WAY more susceptible to biases of personal taste.

On a completely unrelated note, and, fully stepping on a hornets nest here, but there's been a lot of ultra-left professionally offended SJW types infesting convention management and really fucking with the status quo in terms of imposing their views upon some contests. Personally, I hate censorship quite a bit. I've quit staffing cons over it. It should be, but it's becoming an issue that editors should be aware of.