Abunai! 2019 AMV Competition - WINNERS ANNOUNCED!

[MarikoAMV]

As promised here is the overload list in alphabetical order:

[smells like pineapple and suffering editors]
AllyKatAVR
Best Girls
CrackTheSky
Dubbel-D
E_01
EKG
FT
Keiichiface (2)
ManlyMangodes
MinetChan
Moonpie
Nuke
Opner
PaNTSU oF d00m
Pikapwn
Radical_Yue & Aerialesque
Re:Set
Shilo
shorisquared (2)
Sonicfreak
Susan

[KingAtlas]

The fact that one of the judges made the finals with 2 of their edits really makes me doubt the integrity of the ones hosting this competition (AMV Netherlands)... Not abnormal for them though, they usually make their friends win. But it's foolish to make it that obvious that you make one of your own judges make it to the finals not once but twice.

[Silent Hero Studios]

Quoted Image converted to link:
https://i.imgur.com/N5FhA7x.jpg

The fact that one of the judges made the finals with 2 of their edits really makes me doubt the integrity of the ones hosting this competition (AMV Netherlands)... Not abnormal for them though, they usually make their friends win. But it's foolish to make it that obvious that you make one of your own judges make it to the finals not once but twice.

That is dumb. And (not to be selfish here) the fact that I didn't make the finalist list this year... I can live with that. But to not even be added to the overload list... well... u know where this is going

[MarikoAMV]

There is some misunderstanding here and I am the only one to blame for and I truly apologize for that. The judges shown in the video are the judges of our local AMV conpetition and didn’t took part in choosing our finalists for the Advanced Competition. It was a bit stupid to combine those two competitions into one video and I realized that too late that this could cause a misunderstanding.

This won’t be the case next year. We sat down with a small group of editors that did not participate in the advanced competition to choose our finalists and overload. Sadly we have limited time so we can’t let everyone in. The winners will be chosen by the public using our voting ballots on the convention. I hope this clarifies the situation.

[Kagacie]

Quoted Image converted to link:
https://i.imgur.com/N5FhA7x.jpg

The fact that one of the judges made the finals with 2 of their edits really makes me doubt the integrity of the ones hosting this competition (AMV Netherlands)... Not abnormal for them though, they usually make their friends win. But it's foolish to make it that obvious that you make one of your own judges make it to the finals not once but twice.

Hi there, Kagacie here one of the founders of AMV Netherlands I’d to clarify a few things regarding the competition that seem to cause confusion.

This is a contest hosted by Abunaicon itself not by AMV Netherlands, for those that do not know. MarikoAMV is a member of AMV Netherlands but also a member of the Abunaicon staff.


A short backstory of AMV Contests at Abunai.
So far Abunai has only had a local competition, we have been told that there was one international competition in its very beginnings (so we have been told by one of the old hosts we cannot confirm this ourselves).

Hosts
This competition is as it says and only allows local Dutch entries. The contest has switched hosts throughout the years same as any convention and not each host was properly instructed by the last one.
After several years one of the host stopped being a part of the staff and so last year’s host was one with no experience when it comes to hosting contest, no knowledge about AMV’S and no to little information about the previous years by the previous host.
Because Mariko is a veteran editor for the convention, she decided to join the staff and become host for this year’s edition of the competition. Because she is a veteran she is informed about the past years as well as some background information about the process of hosting the competition. but as said the previous host did not transfer any information so a lot of it is figuring out on her own how things work combined with having a pretty big role in the staff. This can cause for mistakes to occur or miscommunication towards contenders.
She is planning to be the host again next year so if you have any feedback for her on this year kindly sent it to her so that she can improve the contest to make it the best possible.

Judging
The local competition has always worked with a pre-judging system (for those that do not know this means the videos get watched by a group of judges and they decide the winners of the contest) and this has always caused some controversy with the audience. There has even been a year where sponsors were allowed to join and then also won with a video that the audience did not agree with. Obviously, we understand that it is impossible to please the entire crowd.

I will try to explain the way videos were judged as best as I can.
In previous years the judges were random members of the Abunai staff members/friends or family members of the host that have no to little knowledge about AMV's for the general ranking and 2 to 3 editors that did not participate in the contest for the technical judgement. The editors voted both technical and general with the general voting counting twice to the final ranking.
As you can imagine this is a system that can easily be manipulated by judges and has created for more than one situation where the whole crowd (both editors who participated and the audience) were very displeased with the winners.

A perfect example would be last year’s competition where Mariko was also a judge of the competition, and the 3rd place was a strange choice in her opinion (this was of course before the convention itself) a few days before the convention she did some checking of the scores and she was able to find out another judge was able to manipulate the scoring in such a way that the 3rd place was changed and that the excel sheet was used had several formula errors which gave different results. This led to a forced tie breaker vote by 2 random judges on the day before the contest in the end one that won the 3rd place was the "incorrect" one. Both the judges, the audience, the editors and even the editor of the video were all shocked and disagreed with the results.

We have had a year where a winner knew the judge and made a joke the judge when getting on stage to take his price, he intended to thank the host for giving him the idea for the video but as expected it was taken the wrong way by many of the audience as "helping a friend win".

So as you can read judging has never been this conventions strong point when it came to the local competition, This is why when it comes to judging Mariko has changed things up a lot.

Local competition
This is still done by pre-judging but with only editors, also this is a group of well-known and skilled editors. As this is for the local competition almost the entire competition is blind to them, Mariko herself and Liquified (another member of the AMV Netherlands team) are also part of the judging but both have judged for the contest before (will explain that more in another point regarding the involvement of AMV Netherlands with Abunai).
The judging form which I set up in cooperation with Mariko is set up in such a way judges cannot see the other judges their scored only the host can see all of these for the final ranking (which is automated).
Both general and technical are equal in scoring now, none is above the other in points and the accumulated points of all judges are collected automatically counted together (and can only be changed by the judges themselves, the host has access to the scoring sheets but as she is the only one other than the judge being able to change the scores it would be obvious if any changes were made) the scoring is automated in the final ranking sheet meaning that it would not be possible for the host or any of the judges themselves to change or manipulate the ranking.
On top of that judges were only given video titles, this prevents judges from knowing who made the video and being biased towards a specific editor.
All this was done to prevent problems to occurs as the previous years and to get a fair judging both the audience and the editors can agree with.
As an extra all participants get written feedback on their videos so that they themselves can see points to improve and to give a better understanding to the editors of the rankings.

International competition
For the international competition there is a combination of pre-judging and public voting.
Pre-judging is used to determine which videos go through to the final, this year it was judged by having all the judges together and voting which videos would be let through, and which we want for the overload.
For this I was also one of the judges, as I did not participate in this competition.
In the judging sheet all judges were only given the video titles and category, due to the time restraint of the competition a lot of video we would have loved to get in the competition did not get in.

The finalist are judged by the public using voting ballots during the competition and votes are counted afterward, with the winners being presented during the ending ceremony of the con.

Anyone who wishes to know why they did not get in or would like feedback on their video is more than welcome to sent a message to Mariko. She confirmed with me that she will be more than willing to provide people with feedback.

Overload
Overload as stated before are the videos that we would still want to show but just couldn't make the main competition.
For this we tried to keep it to 5 max of each category with once again main reason being time and to also not make it (for example) 20 drama videos as that would also not be interesting for the audience to watch , so if your video did not make it into overload there is a chance it was on the backup list but didn't make it due to time or category limit.

AMV Netherlands involvement

And now for a bit of a different topic but related.
As stated before the host of this competition is Abunaicon with Lydia in the lead.
But as she is also part of the AMV Netherlands team and this is the first year she requested help and opinions (when it came to organizing) to organize the competition from the rest of the AMV Netherlands team which at the time of this writing includes Liquified, Sonicfreak and myself.
Our whole team has assisted in creating the opening for the competition. outside of that separate members assisted in various tasks.
I assisted in setting up the sheets for the judges, create voting ballots and assisting with the international competition. Liquified assists in the judging for the local competition.

The international competition is a new event at Abunai, as anyone can imagine having to host not one but two AMV competitions at a convention for the first time brings a lot of pressure with it so requesting for help is only natural.
As the whole AMV Netherlands (including Mariko) we have held multiple IC's, done judging and given feedback this has been both for our own contests as well as other conventions.

Our goal as a team is to help the editing community in the Netherlands grow and improve as much as possible and to make sure competitions are fair for all involved.
As such we throughout the time we have been up and running we have been helping many editors improve this has resulted in a lot of editors involved with AMV Netherlands to start winning conventions. As we are a very tight and friendly community it may have come across as "making our friends win" this was a no point our intention and we do apologize if we made it come across as such.
We have a very strong sense of justice when it comes to judging and try to judge all videos fair and square, being a friend of us could result in us even being more strict as we know your editing abilities.

Final
We do realize that the way the video was edited gave the wrong impression which competition the judges are for combined with the fact that one of the judges for the local competition is finalist for the advanced competition.
This is clearly a learning point for the next edition, if anyone has more point of improvement please send them to Mariko, as stated before this is a first edition so many places of improvement but with your help and feedback we will be able to create a great competition as without any of you this would not be possible.

sorry for the long post but just wanted to make it transparent and clear how everything in the background goes and to prevent further confusion

[Marsepein]

Quoted Image converted to link:
https://i.imgur.com/N5FhA7x.jpg

The fact that one of the judges made the finals with 2 of their edits really makes me doubt the integrity of the ones hosting this competition (AMV Netherlands)... Not abnormal for them though, they usually make their friends win. But it's foolish to make it that obvious that you make one of your own judges make it to the finals not once but twice.

Weird how you made an account specifically for this. But then again, I made an account specifically for this. If you have a problem with this, you should talk to the organizers themselves, privately. But MarikoAMV already made it very clear, but if you are man enough, you would reply to that as well.

[KingAtlas]

There is some misunderstanding here and I am the only one to blame for and I truly apologize for that. The judges shown in the video are the judges of our local AMV conpetition and didn’t took part in choosing our finalists for the Advanced Competition. It was a bit stupid to combine those two competitions into one video and I realized that too late that this could cause a misunderstanding.

This won’t be the case next year. We sat down with a small group of editors that did not participate in the advanced competition to choose our finalists and overload. Sadly we have limited time so we can’t let everyone in. The winners will be chosen by the public using our voting ballots on the convention. I hope this clarifies the situation.

Yeah... that ain't smart. And even then, I would never allow staff (which includes judges) to participate in your own competition at the same event. Even if its the other competition, it raises some questions if the judging staff can be trusted to treat everyone fairly/equally.

Also interesting choice to let the public vote. I mean, it makes sense since pre judging is usually a bad idea (especially at Abunai which is infamous for its pre-judging/judging in general) and editor voting is even less reliable... with the whole AMV-Netherlands cult going around. They surely wouldn't all vote for eachother. Definitely not an obvious pattern that is seen across multiple competitions.

Hi there, Kagacie here one of the founders of AMV Netherlands I’d to clarify a few things regarding the competition that seem to cause confusion.

This is a contest hosted by Abunaicon itself not by AMV Netherlands, for those that do not know. MarikoAMV is a member of AMV Netherlands but also a member of the Abunaicon staff.


A short backstory of AMV Contests at Abunai.
So far Abunai has only had a local competition, we have been told that there was one international competition in its very beginnings (so we have been told by one of the old hosts we cannot confirm this ourselves).

Hosts
This competition is as it says and only allows local Dutch entries. The contest has switched hosts throughout the years same as any convention and not each host was properly instructed by the last one.
After several years one of the host stopped being a part of the staff and so last year’s host was one with no experience when it comes to hosting contest, no knowledge about AMV’S and no to little information about the previous years by the previous host.
Because Mariko is a veteran editor for the convention, she decided to join the staff and become host for this year’s edition of the competition. Because she is a veteran she is informed about the past years as well as some background information about the process of hosting the competition. but as said the previous host did not transfer any information so a lot of it is figuring out on her own how things work combined with having a pretty big role in the staff. This can cause for mistakes to occur or miscommunication towards contenders.
She is planning to be the host again next year so if you have any feedback for her on this year kindly sent it to her so that she can improve the contest to make it the best possible.

Judging
The local competition has always worked with a pre-judging system (for those that do not know this means the videos get watched by a group of judges and they decide the winners of the contest) and this has always caused some controversy with the audience. There has even been a year where sponsors were allowed to join and then also won with a video that the audience did not agree with. Obviously, we understand that it is impossible to please the entire crowd.

I will try to explain the way videos were judged as best as I can.
In previous years the judges were random members of the Abunai staff members/friends or family members of the host that have no to little knowledge about AMV's for the general ranking and 2 to 3 editors that did not participate in the contest for the technical judgement. The editors voted both technical and general with the general voting counting twice to the final ranking.
As you can imagine this is a system that can easily be manipulated by judges and has created for more than one situation where the whole crowd (both editors who participated and the audience) were very displeased with the winners.

A perfect example would be last year’s competition where Mariko was also a judge of the competition, and the 3rd place was a strange choice in her opinion (this was of course before the convention itself) a few days before the convention she did some checking of the scores and she was able to find out another judge was able to manipulate the scoring in such a way that the 3rd place was changed and that the excel sheet was used had several formula errors which gave different results. This led to a forced tie breaker vote by 2 random judges on the day before the contest in the end one that won the 3rd place was the "incorrect" one. Both the judges, the audience, the editors and even the editor of the video were all shocked and disagreed with the results.

We have had a year where a winner knew the judge and made a joke the judge when getting on stage to take his price, he intended to thank the host for giving him the idea for the video but as expected it was taken the wrong way by many of the audience as "helping a friend win".

So as you can read judging has never been this conventions strong point when it came to the local competition, This is why when it comes to judging Mariko has changed things up a lot.

Local competition
This is still done by pre-judging but with only editors, also this is a group of well-known and skilled editors. As this is for the local competition almost the entire competition is blind to them, Mariko herself and Liquified (another member of the AMV Netherlands team) are also part of the judging but both have judged for the contest before (will explain that more in another point regarding the involvement of AMV Netherlands with Abunai).
The judging form which I set up in cooperation with Mariko is set up in such a way judges cannot see the other judges their scored only the host can see all of these for the final ranking (which is automated).
Both general and technical are equal in scoring now, none is above the other in points and the accumulated points of all judges are collected automatically counted together (and can only be changed by the judges themselves, the host has access to the scoring sheets but as she is the only one other than the judge being able to change the scores it would be obvious if any changes were made) the scoring is automated in the final ranking sheet meaning that it would not be possible for the host or any of the judges themselves to change or manipulate the ranking.
On top of that judges were only given video titles, this prevents judges from knowing who made the video and being biased towards a specific editor.
All this was done to prevent problems to occurs as the previous years and to get a fair judging both the audience and the editors can agree with.
As an extra all participants get written feedback on their videos so that they themselves can see points to improve and to give a better understanding to the editors of the rankings.

International competition
For the international competition there is a combination of pre-judging and public voting.
Pre-judging is used to determine which videos go through to the final, this year it was judged by having all the judges together and voting which videos would be let through, and which we want for the overload.
For this I was also one of the judges, as I did not participate in this competition.
In the judging sheet all judges were only given the video titles and category, due to the time restraint of the competition a lot of video we would have loved to get in the competition did not get in.

The finalist are judged by the public using voting ballots during the competition and votes are counted afterward, with the winners being presented during the ending ceremony of the con.

Anyone who wishes to know why they did not get in or would like feedback on their video is more than welcome to sent a message to Mariko. She confirmed with me that she will be more than willing to provide people with feedback.

Overload
Overload as stated before are the videos that we would still want to show but just couldn't make the main competition.
For this we tried to keep it to 5 max of each category with once again main reason being time and to also not make it (for example) 20 drama videos as that would also not be interesting for the audience to watch , so if your video did not make it into overload there is a chance it was on the backup list but didn't make it due to time or category limit.

AMV Netherlands involvement

And now for a bit of a different topic but related.
As stated before the host of this competition is Abunaicon with Lydia in the lead.
But as she is also part of the AMV Netherlands team and this is the first year she requested help and opinions (when it came to organizing) to organize the competition from the rest of the AMV Netherlands team which at the time of this writing includes Liquified, Sonicfreak and myself.
Our whole team has assisted in creating the opening for the competition. outside of that separate members assisted in various tasks.
I assisted in setting up the sheets for the judges, create voting ballots and assisting with the international competition. Liquified assists in the judging for the local competition.

The international competition is a new event at Abunai, as anyone can imagine having to host not one but two AMV competitions at a convention for the first time brings a lot of pressure with it so requesting for help is only natural.
As the whole AMV Netherlands (including Mariko) we have held multiple IC's, done judging and given feedback this has been both for our own contests as well as other conventions.

Our goal as a team is to help the editing community in the Netherlands grow and improve as much as possible and to make sure competitions are fair for all involved.
As such we throughout the time we have been up and running we have been helping many editors improve this has resulted in a lot of editors involved with AMV Netherlands to start winning conventions. As we are a very tight and friendly community it may have come across as "making our friends win" this was a no point our intention and we do apologize if we made it come across as such.
We have a very strong sense of justice when it comes to judging and try to judge all videos fair and square, being a friend of us could result in us even being more strict as we know your editing abilities.

Final
We do realize that the way the video was edited gave the wrong impression which competition the judges are for combined with the fact that one of the judges for the local competition is finalist for the advanced competition.
This is clearly a learning point for the next edition, if anyone has more point of improvement please send them to Mariko, as stated before this is a first edition so many places of improvement but with your help and feedback we will be able to create a great competition as without any of you this would not be possible.

sorry for the long post but just wanted to make it transparent and clear how everything in the background goes and to prevent further confusion

Long post so long post in response.

Anyways, being a member of AMV netherlands, and multiple judges being from that group basically makes it the same.

As for the old competition thing.. why not reach out to some older/veteran editors? I am certain somebody knows about this detail?

Host part:

Yeah, I have heard rumors about Abunai mismanaging events from insiders before, so not that big of a surprise there.
If I had to give any point of feedback, it would be to make sure no other AMV Netherlands members are involved with the judging, as the judging process can't be trusted otherwise.

Judging part:

Sponsors joining sounds bad yeah. There is no perfect judging system right now. The only one that is kinda dependable is random public voting. Pre-judging and editor voting both are very flawed, and can introduce a lot of personal bias towards the voting process, like the popular editors winning instead of the best amv(s)

Oh wow, that previous system was outright dumb. Literally involving people that barely know anything about AMVs? What a joke.

As for the part with a "friend" winning the competition... Yeah, that was stupid. It was pretty obvious he was joking. Then again... Some people are just outright stupid.

Local Competition judging:
Yeah great... Except you are able to pick apart who edits which AMV easily, most editors have their own style. So if you pick veteran editors for judging there will be bias introduced... especially when done by AMV Netherlands members.

"Both general and technical are equal in scoring now"
This sounds like a bad thing. Unless you have actual technical faults (bad quality, logos etc) the enjoyment/story etc of the anime should count for way more.

" this prevents judges from knowing who made the video and being biased towards a specific editor. "
Which... does not work. Many editors have their own style, and especially in a tight knit group like AMV Netherlands you will recognize eachothers work anyway.

International competition:

So... first off.. why the hell is this on saturday anyway? It's not like people have been wanting the local competition to be on saturday for a while or anything...
For the rest of the process.. Guess it seems fair besides once again multiple AMV netherlands editors being involved.

AMV Netherlands involvement:
Honestly, the less I see of this "community" the better.
Ruining small competitions wasn't enough huh...

The International event makes no sense in the first place. Abunai is known for its unrealistically high entry barrier for many editors in the first place, and by letting randoms from across the world particiapte in a contest with old edits doesn't help the case either.
It's one of these things that nobody wanted but yet here it is...

"Our goal as a team is to help the editing community in the Netherlands grow"
By making a contest for international editors, prioritizing it over the local competition by giving it the better time slot, and calling it the "advanced" AMV competition making the local editors/AMVs sound like some kind of side event for low level editors and making it sound like the lesser competition... Great job.
Also the cult like status of AMV Netherlands if anything scares away even more people from entering. So you aren't exactly helping anything grow, you are more like the final nail in the coffin of a type of event that hasn't been relevant for a while anyway.

"make sure competitions are fair for all involved."
Haha... Nice joke. I actually know some editors that just avoid competitions because they know AMV Netherlands doesn't know how to hold fair contests. It's obvious you guys aren't hosting fair competitions. Amv Netherlands members often win events when their work is far from the best. Especially when editor voting is present this becomes obvious.

"this was a no point our intention and we do apologize if we made it come across as such. "

Hmm yeah... One of the editors I spoke to before making this post outright refuses to enter a lot of competitions because they know there is no point, if AMV Netherlands is involved in hosting it the competition is rigged from the start.

Weird how you made an account specifically for this. But then again, I made an account specifically for this. If you have a problem with this, you should talk to the organizers themselves, privately. But MarikoAMV already made it very clear, but if you are man enough, you would reply to that as well.

Hmm.. is it really weird?
Let's say, I was an editor and did this with my own nickname... one can assume what would happen if I aimed any criticism towards them and proceeded to enter one of their competitions. I would surely get fair treatment
Also bold of you to assume my gender.
And if you talk about an issue like this privately it's really easy to lie... forcing them to answer it publicaly ensures they atleast have to think about the way they lie.

[Kionon]

All,

While no one has yet crossed the line here, a few things have been said that are straying from civil discourse. Let's stay well clear of personal attacks, ad hominems, and unsubstantiated accusations. Legitimate criticism of events/contests/conventions/etc is, of course, encouraged. Just keep it in the spirit of constructive criticism.

Thanks.

Your friendly neighborhood Old!Mod,

Kionon

[Kagacie]

Spoiler :

There is some misunderstanding here and I am the only one to blame for and I truly apologize for that. The judges shown in the video are the judges of our local AMV conpetition and didn’t took part in choosing our finalists for the Advanced Competition. It was a bit stupid to combine those two competitions into one video and I realized that too late that this could cause a misunderstanding.

This won’t be the case next year. We sat down with a small group of editors that did not participate in the advanced competition to choose our finalists and overload. Sadly we have limited time so we can’t let everyone in. The winners will be chosen by the public using our voting ballots on the convention. I hope this clarifies the situation.

Yeah... that ain't smart. And even then, I would never allow staff (which includes judges) to participate in your own competition at the same event. Even if its the other competition, it raises some questions if the judging staff can be trusted to treat everyone fairly/equally.

Also interesting choice to let the public vote. I mean, it makes sense since pre judging is usually a bad idea (especially at Abunai which is infamous for its pre-judging/judging in general) and editor voting is even less reliable... with the whole AMV-Netherlands cult going around. They surely wouldn't all vote for eachother. Definitely not an obvious pattern that is seen across multiple competitions.

Hi there, Kagacie here one of the founders of AMV Netherlands I’d to clarify a few things regarding the competition that seem to cause confusion.

This is a contest hosted by Abunaicon itself not by AMV Netherlands, for those that do not know. MarikoAMV is a member of AMV Netherlands but also a member of the Abunaicon staff.


A short backstory of AMV Contests at Abunai.
So far Abunai has only had a local competition, we have been told that there was one international competition in its very beginnings (so we have been told by one of the old hosts we cannot confirm this ourselves).

Hosts
This competition is as it says and only allows local Dutch entries. The contest has switched hosts throughout the years same as any convention and not each host was properly instructed by the last one.
After several years one of the host stopped being a part of the staff and so last year’s host was one with no experience when it comes to hosting contest, no knowledge about AMV’S and no to little information about the previous years by the previous host.
Because Mariko is a veteran editor for the convention, she decided to join the staff and become host for this year’s edition of the competition. Because she is a veteran she is informed about the past years as well as some background information about the process of hosting the competition. but as said the previous host did not transfer any information so a lot of it is figuring out on her own how things work combined with having a pretty big role in the staff. This can cause for mistakes to occur or miscommunication towards contenders.
She is planning to be the host again next year so if you have any feedback for her on this year kindly sent it to her so that she can improve the contest to make it the best possible.

Judging
The local competition has always worked with a pre-judging system (for those that do not know this means the videos get watched by a group of judges and they decide the winners of the contest) and this has always caused some controversy with the audience. There has even been a year where sponsors were allowed to join and then also won with a video that the audience did not agree with. Obviously, we understand that it is impossible to please the entire crowd.

I will try to explain the way videos were judged as best as I can.
In previous years the judges were random members of the Abunai staff members/friends or family members of the host that have no to little knowledge about AMV's for the general ranking and 2 to 3 editors that did not participate in the contest for the technical judgement. The editors voted both technical and general with the general voting counting twice to the final ranking.
As you can imagine this is a system that can easily be manipulated by judges and has created for more than one situation where the whole crowd (both editors who participated and the audience) were very displeased with the winners.

A perfect example would be last year’s competition where Mariko was also a judge of the competition, and the 3rd place was a strange choice in her opinion (this was of course before the convention itself) a few days before the convention she did some checking of the scores and she was able to find out another judge was able to manipulate the scoring in such a way that the 3rd place was changed and that the excel sheet was used had several formula errors which gave different results. This led to a forced tie breaker vote by 2 random judges on the day before the contest in the end one that won the 3rd place was the "incorrect" one. Both the judges, the audience, the editors and even the editor of the video were all shocked and disagreed with the results.

We have had a year where a winner knew the judge and made a joke the judge when getting on stage to take his price, he intended to thank the host for giving him the idea for the video but as expected it was taken the wrong way by many of the audience as "helping a friend win".

So as you can read judging has never been this conventions strong point when it came to the local competition, This is why when it comes to judging Mariko has changed things up a lot.

Local competition
This is still done by pre-judging but with only editors, also this is a group of well-known and skilled editors. As this is for the local competition almost the entire competition is blind to them, Mariko herself and Liquified (another member of the AMV Netherlands team) are also part of the judging but both have judged for the contest before (will explain that more in another point regarding the involvement of AMV Netherlands with Abunai).
The judging form which I set up in cooperation with Mariko is set up in such a way judges cannot see the other judges their scored only the host can see all of these for the final ranking (which is automated).
Both general and technical are equal in scoring now, none is above the other in points and the accumulated points of all judges are collected automatically counted together (and can only be changed by the judges themselves, the host has access to the scoring sheets but as she is the only one other than the judge being able to change the scores it would be obvious if any changes were made) the scoring is automated in the final ranking sheet meaning that it would not be possible for the host or any of the judges themselves to change or manipulate the ranking.
On top of that judges were only given video titles, this prevents judges from knowing who made the video and being biased towards a specific editor.
All this was done to prevent problems to occurs as the previous years and to get a fair judging both the audience and the editors can agree with.
As an extra all participants get written feedback on their videos so that they themselves can see points to improve and to give a better understanding to the editors of the rankings.

International competition
For the international competition there is a combination of pre-judging and public voting.
Pre-judging is used to determine which videos go through to the final, this year it was judged by having all the judges together and voting which videos would be let through, and which we want for the overload.
For this I was also one of the judges, as I did not participate in this competition.
In the judging sheet all judges were only given the video titles and category, due to the time restraint of the competition a lot of video we would have loved to get in the competition did not get in.

The finalist are judged by the public using voting ballots during the competition and votes are counted afterward, with the winners being presented during the ending ceremony of the con.

Anyone who wishes to know why they did not get in or would like feedback on their video is more than welcome to sent a message to Mariko. She confirmed with me that she will be more than willing to provide people with feedback.

Overload
Overload as stated before are the videos that we would still want to show but just couldn't make the main competition.
For this we tried to keep it to 5 max of each category with once again main reason being time and to also not make it (for example) 20 drama videos as that would also not be interesting for the audience to watch , so if your video did not make it into overload there is a chance it was on the backup list but didn't make it due to time or category limit.

AMV Netherlands involvement

And now for a bit of a different topic but related.
As stated before the host of this competition is Abunaicon with Lydia in the lead.
But as she is also part of the AMV Netherlands team and this is the first year she requested help and opinions (when it came to organizing) to organize the competition from the rest of the AMV Netherlands team which at the time of this writing includes Liquified, Sonicfreak and myself.
Our whole team has assisted in creating the opening for the competition. outside of that separate members assisted in various tasks.
I assisted in setting up the sheets for the judges, create voting ballots and assisting with the international competition. Liquified assists in the judging for the local competition.

The international competition is a new event at Abunai, as anyone can imagine having to host not one but two AMV competitions at a convention for the first time brings a lot of pressure with it so requesting for help is only natural.
As the whole AMV Netherlands (including Mariko) we have held multiple IC's, done judging and given feedback this has been both for our own contests as well as other conventions.

Our goal as a team is to help the editing community in the Netherlands grow and improve as much as possible and to make sure competitions are fair for all involved.
As such we throughout the time we have been up and running we have been helping many editors improve this has resulted in a lot of editors involved with AMV Netherlands to start winning conventions. As we are a very tight and friendly community it may have come across as "making our friends win" this was a no point our intention and we do apologize if we made it come across as such.
We have a very strong sense of justice when it comes to judging and try to judge all videos fair and square, being a friend of us could result in us even being more strict as we know your editing abilities.

Final
We do realize that the way the video was edited gave the wrong impression which competition the judges are for combined with the fact that one of the judges for the local competition is finalist for the advanced competition.
This is clearly a learning point for the next edition, if anyone has more point of improvement please send them to Mariko, as stated before this is a first edition so many places of improvement but with your help and feedback we will be able to create a great competition as without any of you this would not be possible.

sorry for the long post but just wanted to make it transparent and clear how everything in the background goes and to prevent further confusion

Long post so long post in response.

Anyways, being a member of AMV netherlands, and multiple judges being from that group basically makes it the same.

As for the old competition thing.. why not reach out to some older/veteran editors? I am certain somebody knows about this detail?

Host part:

Yeah, I have heard rumors about Abunai mismanaging events from insiders before, so not that big of a surprise there.
If I had to give any point of feedback, it would be to make sure no other AMV Netherlands members are involved with the judging, as the judging process can't be trusted otherwise.

Judging part:

Sponsors joining sounds bad yeah. There is no perfect judging system right now. The only one that is kinda dependable is random public voting. Pre-judging and editor voting both are very flawed, and can introduce a lot of personal bias towards the voting process, like the popular editors winning instead of the best amv(s)

Oh wow, that previous system was outright dumb. Literally involving people that barely know anything about AMVs? What a joke.

As for the part with a "friend" winning the competition... Yeah, that was stupid. It was pretty obvious he was joking. Then again... Some people are just outright stupid.

Local Competition judging:
Yeah great... Except you are able to pick apart who edits which AMV easily, most editors have their own style. So if you pick veteran editors for judging there will be bias introduced... especially when done by AMV Netherlands members.

"Both general and technical are equal in scoring now"
This sounds like a bad thing. Unless you have actual technical faults (bad quality, logos etc) the enjoyment/story etc of the anime should count for way more.

" this prevents judges from knowing who made the video and being biased towards a specific editor. "
Which... does not work. Many editors have their own style, and especially in a tight knit group like AMV Netherlands you will recognize eachothers work anyway.

International competition:

So... first off.. why the hell is this on saturday anyway? It's not like people have been wanting the local competition to be on saturday for a while or anything...
For the rest of the process.. Guess it seems fair besides once again multiple AMV netherlands editors being involved.

AMV Netherlands involvement:
Honestly, the less I see of this "community" the better.
Ruining small competitions wasn't enough huh...

The International event makes no sense in the first place. Abunai is known for its unrealistically high entry barrier for many editors in the first place, and by letting randoms from across the world particiapte in a contest with old edits doesn't help the case either.
It's one of these things that nobody wanted but yet here it is...

"Our goal as a team is to help the editing community in the Netherlands grow"
By making a contest for international editors, prioritizing it over the local competition by giving it the better time slot, and calling it the "advanced" AMV competition making the local editors/AMVs sound like some kind of side event for low level editors and making it sound like the lesser competition... Great job.
Also the cult like status of AMV Netherlands if anything scares away even more people from entering. So you aren't exactly helping anything grow, you are more like the final nail in the coffin of a type of event that hasn't been relevant for a while anyway.

"make sure competitions are fair for all involved."
Haha... Nice joke. I actually know some editors that just avoid competitions because they know AMV Netherlands doesn't know how to hold fair contests. It's obvious you guys aren't hosting fair competitions. Amv Netherlands members often win events when their work is far from the best. Especially when editor voting is present this becomes obvious.

"this was a no point our intention and we do apologize if we made it come across as such. "

Hmm yeah... One of the editors I spoke to before making this post outright refuses to enter a lot of competitions because they know there is no point, if AMV Netherlands is involved in hosting it the competition is rigged from the start.

Weird how you made an account specifically for this. But then again, I made an account specifically for this. If you have a problem with this, you should talk to the organizers themselves, privately. But MarikoAMV already made it very clear, but if you are man enough, you would reply to that as well.

Hmm.. is it really weird?
Let's say, I was an editor and did this with my own nickname... one can assume what would happen if I aimed any criticism towards them and proceeded to enter one of their competitions. I would surely get fair treatment
Also bold of you to assume my gender.
And if you talk about an issue like this privately it's really easy to lie... forcing them to answer it publicaly ensures they atleast have to think about the way they lie.

Well I can only speak for myself here not for the whole amv netherlands team, but if you wish to talk this through publicly perfectly fine by me I see no problem in that.

Very interesting reply I must say, let me point out a a few misconceptions in it.

but let's start with this, you make it very clear that your issues are not with the convention and offer almost none to little actual feedback to the contest or the convetion itself.
Most of your comments seem to be personal attacks towards the main organizing members of AMV Netherlands which includes Mariko,Sonicfreak,Liquified,me and the group inside the community that is considered the more active and vocal group.

When it comes to the general judging you are correct there is no perfect system a fully random public voting system is as you say 'kinda dependable" if you know a lot of people in the crowd and they all vote for you, you get the same problem with pre judging.
Hence why in my opinion a combination of the two is a better system, with pre-judging with only editor makes you capable of filtering out the videos that have more technical problems than the audience would be able to see in a single viewing and then having the audience eventually be the one to decide the final winners and by doing a full audience voting instead of a random voting you can have a wider pool of votes creating a more honest voting system imo.

Also pretty sure a contest(advanced competition) with about a 100 entries would be difficult to have it done purely by public unless you have con that is just watching amv's non stop and an audience that wants to sit through all of it. With such a large amount of entries you HAVE to pre-judge.

When it comes to the international competition

The choice to have a seperate competition makes more sense instead of having 1 contest that also allows international especially with the current state of amv's in the dutch editing scene. As you say abunai known for it high entry barrier as together with animecon it is one of the biggest conventions in the country and having only one contest that allows both would not be a good thing for the local editors. Hence why there are two competitions.

I actually got many request throughout my years as an editor from people online why there was no international competition at our convetion, and even from the audience over the years I started hearing phrases like "I saw an amv online but it was made better by x editor" more and more with the editor being an international editor.
Getting an international competition only seems smarter for a convetion to do as it means you will reach a wider audience, get different videos than you regular competition,have an extra event at your convetion and for us editors it would mean an extra chance to make the hobby shine.
There have been multiple veteran editors who joined the advanced competition but not the regular competition already showing a sign that for some editors the local competition has lost it's flavor to them and they would prefer a bigger challenge pool.

OH man(or any other gender) I agree that the name is demeaning for the local competition but this was not a name chosen by Mariko, me or any other AMV Netherlands member. This was a name chosen by Abunai. Mariko had a chance to offer a name and requested help with the name as we both agreed that it would give the feeling that the local competition was less compared to the advanced but our offers for names were shot down. so ye I fully agree that a new name is needed if you have any suggestions please let us know!
The time slot is also a choice that Mariko got offered by Abunai this also has to do with the location where the competition is held as this is not the usual location for amv competitions.

As I stated at the start, your reply to my previous post cleary shows your disliking of the organizing members AMV Netherlands as it is filled with multiple things that are untrue, not researched or assumptions that are stated as facts. Even going as far as saying an editor "refuses to enter a lot of competitions because they know there is no point, if AMV Netherlands is involved in hosting it the competition is rigged from the start".

Considering this is the first competition where AMV Netherlands as a team is involved in any way other than the competition opening video and assisting with judging (on request of the convention itself) and even with the judging almost none of the dutch conventions ever make their judges known, none of the conventions at which amv netherlands member were judging had the judges announced.
Combined with the fact we only have a very low amount of conventions (only 2 or3) a year we attend as AMV Netherlands to hold events that are not related to any competitions. the statement you made would make no sense and it is obvious you have a problem with the current state of the dutch editing community.

to end it look man(or any other gender) idk if me or any other member of the community killed your puppy or insulted your grandma at some point but if so than sorry?

We all try to have a fun time with this hobby and make it the best for everyone if you have any critism towards our events, the competitions or people themselves and know of ways we could improve than you are more than welcome to let us know(although this forum post would not be the best place as that would no longer be related to the contest)
We would be more than willing to have a conversation with you on how we can improve the community and ways to better construct a competition.
It seems you have contact with editors we do not know inside the community and have a vocal opinion for that group, I think knowing what you and those editors think can be improved and how could be a great thing for the whole dutch editing scene.
We cannot wait to hear from you!

[Rider4Z]

if you are man enough, you would reply to that as well.

yeah be a man kingatlas