AnimeUSA: Winners determined by judges or the audience?

[VicBond007]

Like the title says, I'm thinking about going back to an audience-based voting system this year for AnimeUSA 2008 since I'm free of the FAIL that is Ohayocon. In the past we let judges pick the winners so that we could mix things up and not have Ohayocon's winners simply end up being everyone who took second place at AnimeUSA.

How do the attendees/creators feel about an audience vote? Did we do the right thing by letting a select few give awards to AMVs that may not have been major crowd pleasers, or were we letting down the audience by not awarding the fan-favorites?

[LantisEscudo]

I like a twin system like Anime Boston uses. Audience vote determines the category winners and the Best in Show, a judging panel chooses Best Editing, Best Concept, and Judge's Choice awards.

Both major viewpoints are covered that way.

[Rider4Z]

I like a twin system like Anime Boston uses. Audience vote determines the category winners and the Best in Show, a judging panel chooses Best Editing, Best Concept, and Judge's Choice awards.

Both major viewpoints are covered that way.

x2

[XiaoMovieMaker]

I like a twin system like Anime Boston uses. Audience vote determines the category winners and the Best in Show, a judging panel chooses Best Editing, Best Concept, and Judge's Choice awards.

Both major viewpoints are covered that way.

I agree

[JaddziaDax]

truthfully to me i kinda like the cons that do a bit of both, however i usually enter cons just to get my video shown and i try not to worry about awards so much..

[Brad]

One thing I've always been curious to see happen is a weighted average between audience and judge voting.

Lets say you have 5 pre-selected judges, and 500 audience members. Basically each judge vote would count for 100 audience votes. It'd involve a bit of math and more careful calculation, but I think the results would be interesting.

[Rider4Z]

One thing I've always been curious to see happen is a weighted average between audience and judge voting.

Lets say you have 5 pre-selected judges, and 500 audience members. Basically each judge vote would count for 100 audience votes. It'd involve a bit of math and more careful calculation, but I think the results would be interesting.

meaning they're likely to not match up

[Vlad G Pohnert]

To be honest, unless you handpick the judges and are people totaly free of the contest and both cons have different ones, then audiance is proably just as good over a room ful of creators judging...

Vlad

[NightMistress85]

Another vote here for mixing it up. The only con I've attended like that is Katsucon. I like to know that I can cast my ballot as a viewer, but at the same time it's cool to see judges award videos with other qualities that the audience as a whole may overlook. I didn't notice an overwhelming overlap between audience votes and judges' picks (though I don't have too many instance to go by). Besides, that's more encouraging for editors anyway to know it's possible for their work to be appreciated from multiple ends of the spectrum.

[dwchang]

One thing I've always been curious to see happen is a weighted average between audience and judge voting.

Lets say you have 5 pre-selected judges, and 500 audience members. Basically each judge vote would count for 100 audience votes. It'd involve a bit of math and more careful calculation, but I think the results would be interesting.

I don't like the idea since the idea that judges are equal to 100 audience members is a bit degrading of audience members. Then again, I agree they are more knowledgeable and technically you don't need to tell the audience members their votes are worth less, but it still kinda irks me.

Personally I like how Vlad does it (and the first suggestion) where you have a mix of both. Everyone knows audiences will vote for comedy of upbeat videos (regardless of category) and how it irks AMV creators about the 'legitimacy' of awards, but having those as 'Audience Favorite" and so on still gives them their vote while allowing judges to select other categories based on the 'correct' criteria and not just 'OMG YAY' (which is a legitimate criteria for an audience member).

It's like a best of both worlds scenario.