State of the Viewers Choice Awards

[Kireblue]

Hello everyone! I'd like to take this moment to start a discussion with you all about the state of the 2018 A-M-V.org Viewers Choice Awards. All of us on the moderator team are very well aware that the limitations of only cataloged videos being allowed to participate has always been one of its biggest flaws. Also, since the AMV community has become lot more diverse and spread out than it was when the VCAs first started, it makes less and less sense to hold a competition that only caters to our existing user base. As they are, we don't believe that the VCAs are something that can last forever. And so we've been discussing the possibly of either doing a complete overhaul of the current format, or canceling it moving forward.

One of the ideas that we considered is to conduct the Viewers Choice Awards in a way that's similar to Crunchyroll's Anime Awards. To do this, we'd create a jury of very reliable, experienced, and prominent people from multiple AMV communities. We'd also create nomination threads in the forum so that members can make suggestions for the judges to consider. The jury would then nominate a pool of videos that they believe to be the best AMVs of 2017 for each of the voting categories (possibly 15-20 videos per category). They'd even be able to nominate videos that haven't been cataloged on the org. We'd then use google verification to allow even non A-M-V.org members to vote on the videos that they feel should be finalists and subsequently the winners of each category.

So what do all of you think? Do you like this idea? Do you have a completely different idea in mind? Or do you think that we should just cancel the VCAs from now on? We'd like to hear from all of you within the next 2 weeks so that we can implement your suggestions, and potentially start the first round of voting by the beginning of March.

[MadMegatax]

Interesting!

An alternative to the Crunchyroll format is the way that r/anime on reddit is doing awards. From what I understand, they have popular vote determine three entries for a category, and then a panel of judges selects three additional entries for the category. So half are by popular vote, and half are jury selected. Then voting happens like you suggested.

I'm actually not sure which method is better for this contest (based on the number of possible entries and number of voters that usually participate). I suppose I like the method I described a bit more because it gives the audience a bit more room to participate.

On the topic of judges, I feel like it's important to be transparent about who is selected and why.

[Miracle_Falcon]

I'm no expert, but I'm just flat out against stopping the contest. I think it's fun, and it'd be a shams to see it end.

[seasons]

I'm no expert, but I'm just flat out against stopping the contest. I think it's fun, and it'd be a shams to see it end.

[Mol]

multiple communites judges sounds like pain in the ass to manage tbh, better have few random peeps that actually watch amvs

[zbynasuper]

Current AMV community is fractured and while that's not necessarily bad, I believe it would be great to have something that also connects us all. For me, VCA was always about choosing the best from the whole year while not being limited to one organization or contest or community. Accepting more "submissions" and opening up to as big part of AMV community as possible is, at least I believe, logical step in pursuing that goal and the purpose of the contest's existence itself.

But how to do that? There's a huge amount of AMVs produced every year, especially if we count in whole Youtube as well. Theoretically best results would be achieved only if every person would vote on every AMV made since last VCA, but of course that's impossible. So the problem lies in choosing the correct way of reducing the amount of AMV eligible for winning while not being too discriminating. I think that the best way to approach these nominations is to nominate videos on multiple levels:

1) Other contests results: There's a lot of different AMV contests and conventions throughout the year and often some of the best AMVs of the year get premiered there. We could automatically nominate - for example - BIS + best in each category from each contest since last VCA. Implementation is just an example, I don't actually know the numbers so we could exclude smaller conventions while automatically nominating more videos from more prominent contests.

2) Judges panel: A selected panel of Judges (it could be either a few veterans or bigger group of community figures) can choose to nominate a certain amount of AMVs that weren't automatically nominated as winners of a contest on first level. That's to ensure that even if there are good AMVs in some contest, but they were overshadowed by the winner, they are still nominated even though they weren't Top 1.

3) And finally, public nominations, where public suggests AMVs that weren't nominated on first two levels and then vote on those suggestions. A certain number of AMVs with most votes are then nominated.
(the last two levels are basically identical to MadMegatax's idea, I just added an automated selection as the first level)

After that it could probably continue with usual voting in categories.

[KeiichiFace]

An alternative to the Crunchyroll format is the way that r/anime on reddit is doing awards. From what I understand, they have popular vote determine three entries for a category, and then a panel of judges selects three additional entries for the category. So half are by popular vote, and half are jury selected. Then voting happens like you suggested.

I think this is a good idea. To just have judges choose the entrants gives a lot of space for bias, and I think one of the good things about the viewers' awards is the community involvement.

I also agree that this should be a very transparent process - maybe judges should give reasons why they chose the video (nothing too long, obviously--maybe a sentence or two). And I think it would be good to hear voices from all sorts of the AMV "spectrum", from seasoned veterans to newbies to candy editors to...everyone.

[Kireblue]

An alternative to the Crunchyroll format is the way that r/anime on reddit is doing awards. From what I understand, they have popular vote determine three entries for a category, and then a panel of judges selects three additional entries for the category. So half are by popular vote, and half are jury selected. Then voting happens like you suggested.

I think this is a good idea. To just have judges choose the entrants gives a lot of space for bias, and I think one of the good things about the viewers' awards is the community involvement.

I also agree that this should be a very transparent process - maybe judges should give reasons why they chose the video (nothing too long, obviously--maybe a sentence or two). And I think it would be good to hear voices from all sorts of the AMV "spectrum", from seasoned veterans to newbies to candy editors to...everyone.

multiple communites judges sounds like pain in the ass to manage tbh, better have few random peeps that actually watch amvs

Since the videos available to vote on will include AMVs not on the org, it will be pretty difficult to make sure that every eligible video from 2017 would be included in a voting list for the community. Even scouring the Org, AMV Central, AMV News, and every single contest result from 2017 might not be enough to make sure that we find every eligible video. So doing a round 1 audience vote might not be possible. But since the judges will be looking through the nomination forum threads for suggestions, everyone's voice will get heard and considered during the round 1 selection. And the voting for rounds 2 and 3 will be completely done by the community.

I also agree with MadMegatax that we should be transparent about who the judges are and why they were selected. Making this completely public knowledge is a must IMO. And I feel that having well known, knowledgeable, and respected members of multiple communities will help give credibility to the videos selected. Its a lot easier to accept a result that you don't agree with it it comes from people you believe to be knowledgeable on the topic.

I'm no expert, but I'm just flat out against stopping the contest. I think it's fun, and it'd be a shams to see it end.

Yeah, I feel the same. We hope that opening the VCAs up to non cataloged AMVs will help revitalize the community's interest in it.

Current AMV community is fractured and while that's not necessarily bad, I believe it would be great to have something that also connects us all. For me, VCA was always about choosing the best from the whole year while not being limited to one organization or contest or community. Accepting more "submissions" and opening up to as big part of AMV community as possible is, at least I believe, logical step in pursuing that goal and the purpose of the contest's existence itself.

But how to do that? There's a huge amount of AMVs produced every year, especially if we count in whole Youtube as well. Theoretically best results would be achieved only if every person would vote on every AMV made since last VCA, but of course that's impossible. So the problem lies in choosing the correct way of reducing the amount of AMV eligible for winning while not being too discriminating. I think that the best way to approach these nominations is to nominate videos on multiple levels:

1) Other contests results: There's a lot of different AMV contests and conventions throughout the year and often some of the best AMVs of the year get premiered there. We could automatically nominate - for example - BIS + best in each category from each contest since last VCA. Implementation is just an example, I don't actually know the numbers so we could exclude smaller conventions while automatically nominating more videos from more prominent contests.

2) Judges panel: A selected panel of Judges (it could be either a few veterans or bigger group of community figures) can choose to nominate a certain amount of AMVs that weren't automatically nominated as winners of a contest on first level. That's to ensure that even if there are good AMVs in some contest, but they were overshadowed by the winner, they are still nominated even though they weren't Top 1.

3) And finally, public nominations, where public suggests AMVs that weren't nominated on first two levels and then vote on those suggestions. A certain number of AMVs with most votes are then nominated.
(the last two levels are basically identical to MadMegatax's idea, I just added an automated selection as the first level)

After that it could probably continue with usual voting in categories.

For point 1, I think that we can totally go through all the contest result threads and post the videos that have won awards for consideration. But I don't believe that they should be automatically pushed through round 1. There are too many AMV contests each year for us to automatically nominate all the winners, and so leaving the decision to the judges will allow us to consider them without having to decide which conventions count as "big" cons and which should be excluded.

Points 2 and 3 are kinda similar to the initial idea, but as stated in to my response to MadMegatax, creating the voting list will be a massive task. So that's why I think using the forum threads for community input would be a easier idea

[KeiichiFace]

I also agree with MadMegatax that we should be transparent about who the judges are and why they were selected. Making this completely public knowledge is a must IMO. And I feel that having well known, knowledgeable, and respected members of multiple communities will help give credibility to the videos selected. Its a lot easier to accept a result that you don't agree with it it comes from people you believe to be knowledgeable on the topic.

But at the same time, what you constitute as a "well known", "knowledgeable", and "respected" editor may not be what someone else considers such. Wouldn't it make more sense to get a wider spectrum of judges, from con chairs to editors to people who just watch a lot of vids? And obviously, if one judge isn't able to convince the others that a video deserves an award, then that video doesn't get an award.

[Kroner92]

I honestly think it's a great idea to open the awards to all the vids out there. But how can it be possible? it's an hard stuff to collect every single video, or letting people propose whatever they want, that is the most difficult part of the job imho. For what I saw it everytime we let people vote and decide by themself we see problems and Complaints and people starting to to theorize strange plots.That cause of multiple things that most of time have nothing to do with differents tastes (friendship for example). I think that the best way is to find a way to people to propose videos ( i just can't came out with a smart idea btw), collect the most shared opinion and then let a jury( made by selected people from different countries) decide. In that way we can listen to every single people who want to vote, but be fair in the final judgment using ( I hope) super partes judges that should just think about the awards interest.