Competition Structure

[Infinity Squared]

Change for the sake of change isn't always a good thing in my opinion which is why I'm needing some opinions right now regarding running an AMV competition.

In the past, I've run the competition whereby I had a panel of judges watching every single AMV entered and then deciding who deserves Best Drama, Best Comedy, Best Action, etc. I would also screen the finalist videos to the convention crowd of course where the fans also get to decide which is their favourite. This method has worked fine for me for 3 years.

Now I'm considering a different set up which isn't at all new, but I thought is feasible now that the competition is as large as it is. This method is where judges decide on the finalist and maybe award their own technical awards, however the actual decision regarding the best in each category is decided by the fans as it is screened to them during the convention and they are allowed to vote.

The first and foremost reason why I would think this would be a good idea is that it would alleviate from frequently happening situation where in the past, the singular Fan Favourite category almost always went to the comedy videos as well. That did not mean that they didn't enjoy the other category of videos, but I just thought to peg every single video against each other in a crowd situation, of course comedy will almost always win. The second reason is to do with what I mentioned already and that is that judges can recognise merits such as technicality and artistry instead, where I believe their expertise would be better utilised.

Obvious first objection to this method would be that the audience will probably contain people who support a particular video and would be more unscrupulous about giving them biased scores as of course, they're in a crowd and it will be hard to monitor this. To counter that however, having enough people vote will hopefully smooth this variance a bit so that in the end it doesn't matter.

So question then is, which method of picking out winners is your preference as an editor? One where the crowd really enjoyed your video? Or one where some snotty no-life judges brought the hammer of justice upon you?

[Kionon]

Suggestion: two awards per category: fan favorite and panel favorite,

[Fall_Child42]

Suggestion #2

[Brad]

I've been in this thought process myself recently due to being asked to run a contest at a new convention in San Antonio. I have since declined the offer (since it's happening the same weekend of Otakon, which I am planning on attending), but nonetheless, here's some thoughts.

I've always been a supported of fan participation in AMV contests. It makes the entire event much more interactive and thusly more enjoyable for the fans. However, when it comes to actual results, I can't deny that seasoned judges more frequently make "better" decisions. I use the quotes because obviously it's all subjective in first place, but you know what I mean. An experienced judge will more often than not take many factors into account when choosing a winner, as opposed to fans who more often than not take pure visceral in-the-moment reaction into account and simply choose a video that they enjoyed more in the moment, which is almost always a comedy video. And that's not to say that comedy videos don't deserve that type of recognition. I think visceral enjoyment is a huge factor. I just think it gets weighed far more heavily amongst fan voters than amongst experienced judges.

So to sum up that whole paragraph, I support fan voting on the basis of making the contest event more interactive and enjoyable for the audience, but generally rely on seasoned judges to make more informed decisions.

Lets look at a breakdown of some of the various methods employed by some of the more prominent American contests:

Anime Central
- 2 separate panels of judges. 3 fans and 3 editors (this past year that method kind of broke down and it just ended up being 5 editors, but in the previous years, thats how it was done). The editor judges can't vote in categories they're included in. Also, no video can win 2 awards.

I'm not entirely sure how much I really liked this method simply because with the editor judges, it seemed like their opinions on videos were a bit more scattered amongst good videos in each category, whereas the fan judges (they were picked randomly from the audience before the showing) seemed to really champion specific videos, which would end up winning. This also doesn't help things when your editor judges have videos in the contest, and reduce the ratio of fan judges to editor judges. Even still, ACen's contest is typically really good so, no major complaints from me.


Otakon
- All audience judging of the finalists, which are decided by prescreenings that are run primarily by editors (and I believe one special "Coordinator's Choice" award is also given)

So the finalists are whittled down to about 5 per category by editor judges in prescreenings. The contest is then handed over to the audience who vote via ballots. The major difference here is that there is no Best of Show. They tried it one year and it was overwhelmingly obvious that the Best of Show winner was just always going to go to the comedy winner. The fact that they do this I think gives the whole audience vote a bit more validity.

AWA Expo
- All videos judged by a panel of AWA staffers

One unique thing about this contest is that going into it, they don't have set categories. They watch all of the videos, and then basically award videos they think deserve certain awards special recognition. Of course you're always going to have staple categories like Drama, Comedy, Romance, Action, etc. But sometimes they'll give something like Best Gratuitous Violence (to, you guessed it, Gratuitous Violets). It's a really fun contest since you can tell the judges have fun rewarding the creators.

AWA Pro
- Each creator who submits a video is a judge. They receive all of the video entries in the mail on DVDs. They watch them, then on a private web site, they nominate categories, nominate videos in each category, then vote on finalists. The judging is also BLIND judging, meaning the videos had no bumpers/credits to show who made what, so you wouldn't just vote based on name recognition.

Probably the most unique and fun contest around. It's really unfortunate that in the past couple years it's started to drop in participation. I don't remember exact numbers but I think it's dropped like 25% each time for two years. Regardless, it's still my favorite contest and the one I look forward to the most each year.


Now, theoretically for the contest I would've run, I was simply going to have a private judging panel before the con, sending the videos to people who I thought would be knowledgeable, experienced, fair, and weren't in the contest themselves (similar to how Vlad does Anime Evolution). Then at the convention itself, I'd already have the winners and awards ready to go, but I'd also do a Fan Favorite award, only for the sake of making the event interactive and fun. Granted, I know that the fan favorite would more than likely be a comedy video, but regardless, I'd be doing it for the sake of the audience.

My main reasoning for doing it this way is purely based on time constraints on what I'd be able to accomplish as far as getting prizes and such. If I wasn't concerned with knowing the winners beforehand, one method I've always been interested in seeing implemented was doing both audience vote and judge's vote, and having them weighted against eachother. Like, lets say I have 5 judges and 500 audience voters, and I split the weight evenly (I'd probably do 60% judges 40% audience). Essentially each judge's vote would be worth 100 single votes. And through the magic of math, we arrive at our winner! :O

So yeah, there's several roads you could go down, and if you can come up with a more unique scheme, that'd be awesome and I'd love to hear about it

[Vlad G Pohnert]

Well, I actually did have it that way at Animethon.. The judges picked the finalists and then award the technical and artistic award... But I only gave the audinace the best overall (equal to the judges one).. But I've seen it that way too... It all depends how it works, so for at Animethon and AE, the judges and audiance best overall have been ociked real well.. Hell, last year at Animethon, the audiance picked a Drama video as best overall!

Vlad

[neorose]

Im gonna be running a AMV contest next year for a con called Anime Wasabi. My hole thought on it was mostly like how AWA does theres due to the fact that I have staffed the VAT room for 5 years and think its a solid way to do things. Me im gonna have a staff vote before the con of all submissions and then have a Fan Fav vid. If the Fav vid happens to be a comedy vid so be it.

[Autraya]

I hear compiling fan votes in each category is time consuming, you want a small panel Mark lest you have to count 1000 ballot papers next manifest.
The double award per category (judge & audience) sounds good. But allot of work , at least you dont have to run the entire con this year

[Infinity Squared]

I hear compiling fan votes in each category is time consuming, you want a small panel Mark lest you have to count 1000 ballot papers next manifest.
The double award per category (judge & audience) sounds good. But allot of work , at least you dont have to run the entire con this year

That's a fact

Last year for the Fan Favourite, I think I took a random sampling of about 25-30 voters from the audience. Each one graded each video they saw and yeah, it was all primarily about enjoying the moment, hence the top were the comedy videos. I could do a similar counting system, and I could probably put in the work (it'd only take maybe an hour of tallying). My main issue with having a double award would be getting the convention to actually accept practically doubling the number of prizes given out. However, considering that AMVs are the only other event in the convention (apart from cosplay) which attract a full theatre crowd, maybe it's not all that impossible to get.

I wasn't going to get a vote from each person in that theatre because not all of them were there at the start or intend to stay in the room the whole time and I'm not crazy enough to count unless there's some electronic/automatic way of doing it

So yeah, there's several roads you could go down, and if you can come up with a more unique scheme, that'd be awesome and I'd love to hear about it

Ha! This topic has probably been pondered by many-an-AMV Coordinator the world over by now and through the process of entering contests around the world, I think I've got a fair idea of what's already out there. Coming up with something new is a lot of pressure

Anyway guys, thanks for the responses so far. It's still a work in progress and I'll probably open up the competition submissions in a week or so. I'd like to get more people's thoughts, particularly from an editor's point of view, as in which kind of competition would you prefer to actually be judged by.

[Kionon]

I suggested the double award idea because I know that opinions differ. Me, I weight audience reaction and judge reaction differently. So getting an award for the same reason from both groups would mean very different things to me. They're actually two different awards entirely. It allows the audience to participate, but it also allows editors to be judged by their peers at the same time. I'd rather have the award by a judge's panel than by the audience, but not all editors feel the same.

[JudgeHolden]

BTW, when editors from the org are involved there is not a true "Blind" judging.


As for Fan voting, I'm all for it the way you set it out in your first post.