So... here we are yet again.
I'm sure that many of you out there may be un-familiar with this tournament, or rather, it's series of "interest gauge" threads that have gone up since late 2008. I'm also sure that many of you remember the broken promises*, the potential for exuberance** and the nomination for Best Troll 2010***. But let us forget the past and move on. I was in a different place back then and my renewed motivation is at it's peak (another way of saying, I've been fairly bored as of late and I'm looking for a new project). So, lets get on to the meat of the thread.
I am very interested in starting up The Online AMV Iron Chef Tournament v4.0. The point of this thread is not only to find out roughly how many people would be interested in joining as participants, but also because I'm looking for unique ideas to help make this tournament special. I have some ideas of my own, but I want to get some feedback from the community at large. I certainly can't promise that I will use everybody's ideas, but I will definitely take everything under consideration. I also wanted to share the ideas for the tournament that I have so far.
MY CURRENT PLANS FOR THE TOURNAMENT
This will (potentially) be a 96-person tournament, broken up into 3 32-person brackets. The finals will be a 3-person single-elimination match done over two matches to select the final winner. I want the prizes to be bigger than ever and the matches to not only be exciting for the contestants but for the spectators as well. The biggest thing that I found disappointing about the previous tournaments is how many people essentially stopped caring once either they or their friends were knocked out. My real goal here is to create an event that brings the community together in a way that we haven't really seen before.
The main plan to do this is to present the tournament as a web video series. Now, what the hell does that mean? Utilizing the assistance of my fellow Chicagoans, I will be hosting a series of video "episodes" that talk about the tournament as it's progressing. The series will be done in a very professional and high-production-value method to help the entertainment value of the event. To some people this may seem like a rather pointless venture, but I'm also looking at it as a way to gauge my own personal skills in tackling a large multimedia series. This series will be presented and hosted on a new site I'll be setting up, AMVIronChef.com. The first episode of the series will be Episode 0, and it will accompany the sign-up thread. It'll basically be an explainer episode, going over the rules, introducing the judges, etc.
THINGS I'M LOOKING FOR FEEDBACK ON:
1. The Judging
How does everybody feel about the way judging has been done in the past. For the first 2 tournaments we had 3 judges, and in the 3rd we had 5. Each time the judging has been blind (meaning, each contestant would upload their videos to my server. I would rename them at random VideoA and VideoB. I would send links to both videos to all of the judges and they would pick either A or B, not knowing who made what video) and the judges have been picked by me beforehand. Now, I don't know how most people felt about the judge selection but I really only heard complaints from a couple people. Nevertheless, I wanted to get some ideas from people on how the judging should be done. Do you think having it be entirely audience voted would work? Should we stick with the 5 judge system? If so, should I pick the judges myself or should we have a judge nomination process? From a personal standpoint, I'd probably prefer to stick with the 5 judges I select. My reasoning behind this is that I select people that I know to not only have a very good knowledge of AMVs, but I also know to be reliable and un-biased. Whereas if we go with nominated judges, I'd potentially end up working with people that I really don't know.
2. Song Selection
I'd like to find out people's ideas about song selection. Here's how it's gone in the past (and may stay this way if people are fine with it). Before the tournament begins, I work out the rules for each round. Because some rounds handle music differently (such as having multiple song options for each person) I have to put together a huge list of songs and assign them to the matches randomly. Now, due to the fact that we have a random match setups and people end up using a very wide variety of sources, sometimes people don't necessarily get the best source-song pairings. Unfortunately, I really don't know of any other way around this other than to say, that's just how the game goes. And honestly, there have been plenty of times when people have taken a bad pairing and turned it into something really cool and fun. The one thing I don't want it turn into is "eh, just let people pick their own music and anime and go with it." That really is outside of the spirit of AMV Iron Chef. There needs to be that element of surprise or else it's just not a challenge. Regardless, like I said, I'm open to ideas.
3. Round Themes
So last tournament, I brought in the idea of giving one round a "theme" (Todd, no need to say they weren't REAL themes). The one I went with for Round 3 was using songs from widely-known/popular AMVs. This ended up being a ton of fun and I might do it again for one of the rounds this time as well. But I wanted to see if you guys had any more ideas for overall themes. I'd prefer to shy away from "genre" themes (like, preferably nothing like "for this round, you have to make a romance video" or something). I'm more interested in fun sort of "modifiers" for the round if that makes sense.
So yeah, that's pretty much it. Any other ideas or comments are very welcome. If all you want to say if that you'd definitely be down for joining once this goes through, that helps as well. As I had stated in the thread from '09, while I want this to be a 96-person tourney, if less than 88 people sign up, I'm bringing it down to 64. So this thread is also a way to generate some excitement so that when the sign-up thread DOES go live, we'll have more people getting into it.
* = Never actually used the word promise.
** = Keyword there being "potential."
*** = Never got nominated :\
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emote much better than the 
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