Vlad G Pohnert wrote:I find several probelms with pre-screening so many vidoe in a few video viewing sessions.
One is that it ends up being 6 or more hours. Even the best of use have a hard time seeing so many videos all at once and that for sure will have a profound influience on the judging of the vidoes since as the hours go on, peole get more tired and less interested and the scores start to change for the better or worse.
We took a lot of breaks. I mean a lot of breaks. Every 60 min. of videos would be met with at least 15 min. of break, and when doing the individual vhs submissions, there was a good 2 min. between each one as the tapes were swapped, cued, rewound, etc.
I'm also pretty sure that I voted the same way all day - I've barely seen any AMVs that aren't my own or my friends' since Katsucon, so I was able to go in without fear of burnout or boredom. Could the other creators comment on their pattern? One of the reasons I was so tired at the end was because I'd been up since 7 with little sleep the night before. Thank goodness for pizza and dr. pepper.
In short, people have relativly short attendtion spans. O know, since I did audiance judging at Anime Expo in 2000. We watched videos for over 6 hours and after about 4 the heckling got worse and people were in a daze and yet judging continued! By the time the evening was over, 60% had left, 1/3 were almost asleep, another 1/3 didn't care anymore and we were still judging videos!!
I, for one, think it's crazy that AX waits until the last minute to do their judging at the last minute like they do - having a series of screenings in advance would have made their jobs a lot better and let them do things like avoid the tech flaws that killed the contest screening last year.
You'd thing people come to these screening to watch and judge videos. I think this task has to be taken somewhat seriously and quite frankly people who heckle video I thing should end up being alsked to leave. But, I know that wilth the shear hours and videos one has to watch, this kind of behaivoir will be inevitable so throwing people out for heckling in the end just will end up pretty much clear the room...
Pretty much. The other two screenings should have significantly fewer videos - 2xT-120 at each, which is what they were last year and what was planned for yesterday. However, due to the inadequacies of Express Mail (delievered by noon my ass...), we had the time and everyone who was around after four hours was up for more.
I think the only serious way to judge such a sheer amount of videos is to watch only a fixed amount of hours each day by the same group of people. Now I know that's sound great in theory and this may not be possible in actuallity. If it is desired to have a larger crowed judge the vidoes then this would basically become totaly impossible! I agree that this is not something easily resolved, but with the number of submission on the rise, eventually something different will have to be done in order to be as fair as possible to all those who enter....
Interesting idea, and by having clubs sponsor the screenings there's a good chance of the same people showing up each time (they're local, they'd come anyways, etc.) Whatever the current problems are, though, I think we can all agree that it's better than, say, having Matt and Quu have to sit and judge everything themselves like in the old days. While I'm not putting their taste or abilities into question, having 20-50 people watch the videos in (large) chunks does (IMHO) a damn good job of eliminating claims of bias by organizers - the ballots are all filled out, with names filled in, and it's a micro-cosm of what will be present at the con.
"I'm recording an album tonight. Funny material and laughter will be dubbed in later."
--Bill Hicks
