AWA 2016 The Video Art Track - Deadlines SEP 4 & SEP 13 [EXTENDED]

[Scintilla]

Less than 16 hours left!

[jingoro]

I updated the form last night. You may now skip the upload video step and simply put a link in the additional notes. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

[jingoro]

Category selection for The Professional Awards is complete, however over the past two years I've been very unhappy with this stage of the awards. Category suggestions that come in late never poll very well (because people have to come back and re-vote the new categories), and I don't know how to fix that... it's difficult to know what categories to suggest prior to seeing the videos, but adding a fourth stage where we get suggestions, then select categories, then nominate videos, then vote... well it just pushes the deadline earlier, and we all know how much editors love that!

Also, the intent of even having this step is to seek out unique and creative awards, such as "The Derpy Hooves Award for Equestrian Excellence" that year we had all the My Little Pony videos. Now... first, because of our switch to the nice glass trophies, I seriously doubt I could even fit that name in the engraving, and two... I don't get suggestions like that, instead I get arguments over "most fun" or niche categories that cater to only one or two submissions.

I feel this stage is not serving its purpose. These are The Professional Awards. At this level of competition, y'all shouldn't need cute categories or token awards for "Best Video using Animation from Southwest Texas Not Japan".

Next year, this stage is going away. That decision isn't final. Feel free to discuss what I'm about to say among yourselves, here on the Org, and, MOST importantly, with me personally at the convention or during VAT Closing Ceremonies... but here are my thoughts.

What this contest is supposed to award is artistic and editing skill. These skills do not come from the kind of source material you use ("best non-anime"). Awards such as "Most Fun" or "Best Mood" sound to me like runner-up awards for things that can't win "Best Comedy" or "Best Artist Endeavour".

I am proposing locking down the professional awards to a small set of pre-defined categories that are as broadly applicable and descriptive of editing styles as possible. These categories with their explanations (which can evolve over the years) will be included in the official rules and available in advance.

I know I will be including the AWA "Big 5" awards (Action, Comedy, Drama, Romance and Horror), and of course "Best Video". I am willing to consider between 4 and 6 additional awards and would like your input. "Best Live Action" is a good example because, as I have explained to some of you, editing live action is a different skill set, to some degree, than editing animation ("anime"). "Best Storytelling" is another in which a new story is created. "Best Technical" lets you call out editing prowess in a video that doesn't, necessarily, win an artistic category for whatever reason. These are the things we want to award.

We have time to go over this. Generally I don't consider the rules for the next year "published" until January 1. Please, think about these awards like The Academy Awards... as editors, you are looking for those things you aspire to, that you really want to recognize year over year such that the nominees (yes, it IS an honor, just being nominated, or it should feel like that) and the winners build a legacy for each award.

This will give us time for reasoned discussion of awards for three months, October through December. This removes a voting stage in which only 35 of 60 eligible people voted. This makes the targets very clear when we ask editors to make new and original videos for our event and our fans.

This would raise the bar. And that is a very good thing.

Daric "Jingoro" Jackson
-Director, The Video Art Track at Anime Weekend Atlanta

[Warlike Swans]

My suggestion would be this:
Set the list we have this year as a standard category list.
Create a forum thread for category discussion.
If you get an odd year with say, only 2 clear romance videos, remove it based on forum feedback. If there are at least 4 adult videos, add that category automatically.
Then for the category suggestion phase have people vote for flex categories (even if it’s just 1, though 3 would be nice). Allow every suggestion to go through, and use administrative powers only to remove the negative ones that go against the rules, or to combine redundant categories. Use the forums to help determine what’s redundant, and what phrasing people seem to like best.

And send an email reminder to people to vote for categories the day before the voting ends, when all the categories are in place, and they aren’t distracted by just watching all the videos.

[MaboroshiStudio]

Where is Parody? Last year wasn't Parody all trailers and a single parody... from what I remember? I just can't help but laugh... my luck 2 years in a row.



I am in favor of locking it down, but I have to say this is how I feel 2 years in a row lol... but it all good

[jingoro]

Good suggestions. I have considered only voting "flex" categories, however this leaves me with the issues of encouraging voting participation and leaves me unable to extend the deadline by removing a week of voting.

It also doesn't solve the underlying problem of dilution of broad categories... for example almost every argument I've heard for "best mood" revolves around "but this video would lose to xyz in best nostalgic or best artistic endeavour", or whichever. The purpose of "flex" categories, if we keep them, can't just be to award more trophies because we want to... we need to be recognizing consistent achievement. My specific example of the Derpy Hooves award, as much as I liked it, was calling out how much the award only served the whims of that specific year. With that said, I think we can hash out over the next months a true "canonical list" of awards Pro is willing to award (both from my end, the convention's end and, of course, the editing community's end).

This might be a large pool of awards than we are willing to fund with trophies, in which case we'll have to come up with some mechanism for deciding what to trim... and if I use any method other than my own judgement, I have to distribute the videos, give y'all time to actually watch them, and poll you to garner your reactions, and we're right back to square one.

Best Adult is a very special case. We have only one Under-18 participant this year, and we have only one truly "adult" video this year. Having both Under-18 participants and adult videos causes me a lot of logistical issues, specifically I have to create two shares of videos, one with adult content removed, and then be very very careful I don't screw up which is which, ever. The reason we've had adult videos in Pro at all has been because several adult editors feel they have a shot at "Best Video" or another major award, which Frosty the Snowman proved last year is actually true. Because of this, and please forgive the unrelated tangent, I suspect I will close the contest to those under 18 next year. Expo is wide open for young editors. More to the topic, having a "Best Adult" category that only applies (even in a very Adult year) to a tiny subset of the videos in the contest goes against the idea of broadly applicable categories... again it is an "Award Because of Source Footage"(tm) and the more I think and write on the topic, the more opposed to those I am growing.

Warlike Swans, let me ask you this... beyond the mechanics you suggested, why do you want these mechanics? What would you, if you were me, say about why you have things this way, when you're asked? Do you feel the craft and community of music video editing, which in some respect is defined by the way we recognize our own artistic works, is advanced more through these suggestions than other possibilities?

[jingoro]

Where is Parody? Last year wasn't Parody all trailers and a single parody... from what I remember? I just can't help but laugh... my luck 2 years in a row

I was surprised too, and I admit, I got tired of my own words defending my ideas around how these categories should work during the voting process (as you can see by my very long-winded posts above).

That said... I haven't created the next round of voting yet, and can't until later tonight... so y'all have all afternoon to campaign for it... "Best Trailer", or "Best Parody (including trailers)"... have at it. If I hear nothing but silence, I, personally, will go with Best Parody (including trailers) as I did last year for the same reasons as last year (trailers are, inherently, parodies of the original trailer).

[ChaosProjects]

Honestly I think I would be good with this.

All AMV's contests have their basic categories (Best Action, Best Drama, Etc.) so as editors for this contest you should be shooting for your video fitting into those categories as they are pretty basic and even some videos can work in different categories based on their content. So the work should strive to be the best it can in its category. Having the additional nominations for categories does get a bit messy for the points that you said if a category is added late then everyone has to go back and review that category to see if it is was even valid or some may just miss it all together.

So like you mentioned you want this to be similar to an Academy Awards show. So the videos that are nominated are of the quality level and match their categories as best they can. Comedy videos should be overall funny. Action videos display a good bit of action and so on down the list. So there is no real need for niche categories as if you want one of the main awards then make sure the video is made so it can be identified in such categories. This can be difficult some times and even with anime they can have mood shifts so a happy show can become dark quickly depending on where the anime story is going. As the editor a decision has to be made as to what type of video over all you want to make at this point.

I also believe in category eliminations. Didn't get enough Action videos? Category should be dropped. We shouldn't be shoehorning videos into spots just because we want to give away an award for it. Want an action award? Make an award winning action video. That is how you do it.

I also believe that the categories should be flexible. So I know Horror is one such category. Some years there are tons of horror videos and other years there are none. So aside from the base categories we have a few side categories for genre of videos that you may see from time to time. Live action videos are like this. Some years we get tons of amazing live action but an other times not. So I can agree there may need to be a reserved categories on occasion as well.

Over all I think raising the bar is a good thing and makes the reward more amazing at the end that your work was recognized out of a pool of tough entries that you fought it out with rather than it being the best of the worst and got awarded by default.

This is truly the contest at AWA that the editors have their hands and approval stamps all over. So it is up to us to make sure that what we consider as a whole is truly the best that the contest has to offer. If we don't, then we are failing at our own contest. So use your entries and votes to make it the best contest we can and always have fun!! This is suppose to be a fun hobby and we should be encouraging others to join and make quality AMVs along with us not to just win awards, but enjoy the friendly competition.

[Warlike Swans]

Warlike Swans, let me ask you this... beyond the mechanics you suggested, why do you want these mechanics? What would you, if you were me, say about why you have things this way, when you're asked? Do you feel the craft and community of music video editing, which in some respect is defined by the way we recognize our own artistic works, is advanced more through these suggestions than other possibilities?

I've never really seen contest awards as a way to advance the craft of editing. I think participation in contests can inspire editors to improve as people get better exposure to refined videos, and and the chance to judging them critically, but that's not quite the same thing. (A good prescreening process will provide that even if all the videos are put into a single pool and the audience just ends up voting for the most panderific video in the end.)

The reason I personally value AWA Pro, (and the only videos I've edited in the past 2 or 3 years have been created solely to participate in Pro,) is that I value it as a social experience. I like watching the videos with people and discussing them. I like reading other peoples comments on the videos. I like arguing about what categories are worth having, and how this year compares to last. It's fun and social, and I feel more involved than I do in other contests.

Having flex categories give the editors something to discuss and gives us a bigger piece of ownership in the process. So whether or not it does much to advance AMVs as an art form, I'd keep category voting because it's part of a unique experience for editors.

As far as the mechanics of my suggestion; reminders are always good, flex categories I just explained, and the forum thing is a way to crowd source opinion without slowing down the process.

The balance between the 18+ videos and allowing editors under 18 to enter isn't one I have a strong opinion on, but i do want to say that since I consider AWA Pro participation a social experience for editors, I'd feel bad for teenagers denied the opportunity to join their friends in it at all.

(Edit) Additional Note: One of the reasons to support off-beat categories is that some AMV are at a frequent disadvantage in contests because they do not fit into standard categories neatly (or practically at all). It's nice to be able to give them a suitable playing field, if you can find one.

Note on "Parody": There was basically one true parody video (in my opinion). I don't particularly object to an award being Best Trailer or Parody, but Best Parody (Including Trailers) sounds odd to me, especially since I don't consider trailer AMVs to be parodies by nature.

[ngsilver]

Best Adult is a very special case. We have only one Under-18 participant this year, and we have only one truly "adult" video this year. Having both Under-18 participants and adult videos causes me a lot of logistical issues, specifically I have to create two shares of videos, one with adult content removed, and then be very very careful I don't screw up which is which, ever. The reason we've had adult videos in Pro at all has been because several adult editors feel they have a shot at "Best Video" or another major award, which Frosty the Snowman proved last year is actually true. Because of this, and please forgive the unrelated tangent, I suspect I will close the contest to those under 18 next year. Expo is wide open for young editors. More to the topic, having a "Best Adult" category that only applies (even in a very Adult year) to a tiny subset of the videos in the contest goes against the idea of broadly applicable categories... again it is an "Award Because of Source Footage"(tm) and the more I think and write on the topic, the more opposed to those I am growing.

I am very much for this. We have seen many examples of 'adult' videos which deserve to win awards in the standard categories. Snow Blower is one, Cenit's The Real Material Girl, SD's 3D & The EP, and others. I'm very much of the opinion that adult videos can and should compete at the same level, especially in the Pro contest, as everything else. It's why I did away with the separate contest for Youmacon because I am sick of seeing entrants putting videos into the adult contest that would be strong contenders in the normal competition simply because of content.

Closing off Pro to anyone under 18 I think is a great way to resolve the problem of voting for those that can't watch adult videos, but it doesn't exactly resolve the issue for entrants who simply won't watch such material. There have been very vocal entrants in past years who will not watch an adult video because of it's content, no matter how deserving of an award it is. It is true any entrant could just not watch any video if they please and play favorites or what not if they also please. We really have no way to stop this, but it is expected as an entrant that you are taking every video seriously (and I would argue this is even for the 'troll' entries) and at the very least with adult entries there is a contingent group of entrants whom for whatever reason (religious, moral, ect.) will not take such entries seriously or even watch them. I'm not sure what can be done to resolve this issue, but it is something I think should be discussed if this is the direction we are going with this competition.