Hello, all. AC Cubed 2006 had 1200 attendees, who generally all left happy, including the enormous crowd who nearly packed a huge ballroom for the AMV Contest Showing. I wanna say thanks to everybody who entered the contest, so--thanks. If we didn't have you guys and gals, we'd have a big chunk of magic missing from the con experience. Only one video didn't have the crowd cheering afterwards--then again, I would have been surprised if they did. More on that one later. We had occasional technical problems and a couple of waits, but the audience was nice about them, as they at least got to see many more of the contest entries than they did last year.
Here are the winners of this year's contest, as determined by a panel of 15 judges:
Grand Prize and Most Original:
haunter103--Marine Land
Music: Marineland Ontario commercial
Anime: One Piece
The crowd was already cheering like mad at the opening title screen alone. I might add that this was the only entry this year that made the judges applaud. With that said--no cloning, please. And haunter: You should put this on the Org soon.
Best Composition and Runner-Up: Best Technical:
Insomnia Studios--
Overture Musica
Sheer class, I swear.
Best Technical:
Visualized Nightmare Studios--
Crimson Memories
One of the most stylish AMVs I've ever watched.
Runner-Up: Most Original and Runner-Up: Best Composition (not Technical as I mistakenly put on the credit screen--sorry):
Corndog VidVids--
Panda Punk!
Tweaked comedy anime + lo-fi Japanese indie punk = fun.
All the winners will receive a certificate commemorating their success and a DVD (courtesy of the good people at ADV Films). The runners-up will receive a commemorative certificate. As soon as the con heads have recovered (I anticipate it taking about a week), they will mail out the certificates and prizes. That's right; none of this "turn up at the con to claim it or lose it" crap here.
An honourable mention for Biggest Cojones to Corndog VidVids for the mind-shredding
Schism of the Epistle to Dippy. One of the reasons I love Japanese noise is that it extends your life by slowing down time and this 45-second monster feels three times as long. I'm positive I heard people in the audience cheering when the effects were churning away on screen in time to the distorted looping roar (I was standing in front of one of the speakers at the time), but everybody was stunned afterwards--like I expected. At least it kept them from rushing the stage and maiming me for unleashing that on them. A last-minute exhibition entry by the tech who helped me compile and run this helped at least bring the shounen-ai fangirls back to life, and helped me end the showing on a good musical note.
In general, the crowd was very appreciative, and even seemed to like my MCing skills; very kind of them. I am very much looking forward to running this again for AC Cubed 2007. In the interest of helping encourage quality, I am going to tell you three major changes to the rules that will happen for that right here and now:
--The preferred submission format will be DVD-ready NTSC standard MPEG2. To those of you who submitted in this format this year, bless you.
--WMV format will no longer be accepted. Almost all of the WMV submissions we got this year looked awful, and the only one that looked excellent sucked up processor power to play well. If you haven't already, read the Org's guides on developing your AMV-making skills, including encoding to non-crap formats (especially for your archive copies).
--More emphasis on NO CREDITS WHATSOEVER IN YOUR VIDEO. The only identification points I want are in the application form and the file name. If you have to run a credit roll to fill out the end of the song, you should learn to either edit/fade songs tastefully or think your concepts through a little bit more.
For my first contest, it went well, and I hope to make it even better next year. Thanks to all the entrants (again), the audience, the AC Cubed con chairs for entrusting me with this, the judges, Ashley for the tech work (and putting up with me), and ADV Films for the prizes. Hope to see y'all in 2007.
Dave Watson
AMV Contest Wrangler, AC Cubed 2006.