MaboroshiStudio wrote:BasharOfTheAges wrote:PieandBeer wrote:BasharOfTheAges wrote:
You shouldn't HAVE other participants as beta testers or talk about your entries AT ALL. Period. That's how it used to be treated by most people, even if it wasn't in the rules. It was the accepted way of doing things... Or at least that's how it appeared to be. Maybe I'm wrong. In which case, I'm sorry to have ever entered under that false premise.
i get what youre saying, i'm just saying that this is entirely unenforceable and the contest can't be based on an unattainable standard. jingoro and other competitors do not have telepathy and nsa surveillance. instead of expecting the contest to fit your blind ideal, we can all work together to try to mitigate some of the issues you think are caused by the less-than-perfect blindness. we can go back and forth about the "good ol' days of awa pro", but i guarantee you that it was probably not 100% blind
That's why I'm bowing out. Obviously people want something else. They should have their contest without people like me complaining about it.
Before I retired way way way back when it was 100% blind as far as I could tell. Obviously this was a time of 56k modems and getting the entries on VHS tape lol so technology has impacted the contest and honestly there is no going back.
I would have no issues with dropping the Pro name as the contest has morphed into something else... so why not just hit the reset button and make a new contest calling it something else. Might get rid of baggage / arguments...
I think you nailed it, Maboroshi, and it's something ToothpickVic was trying to tell me last night.
When I created Pro, the rule was "Do not include credits, studio bumpers, or anything identifying in your video." Why did I do that? It wasn't some noble attempt to create a blind contest, it was because (as I've publicly said many times) I hate credits on videos. TV shows have credits, Movies have credits, Music Videos DO NOT. They get little MTV-style notes in the corner and that's it... and for consistency, MTV puts them there... they all look 100% the same... font, size, placement. I hoped, as technology advanced, we could do that with a video overlay, and I didn't want a bunch of credit sequences messing up the exhibition of the actual video when that happened. I'm a child of the 80s, so sue me.
So, anyway... entries without any identification went onto VHS tapes and were mailed to participants. I honestly don't recall if we included a list of videos with every tape or not, (I'm pretty sure I did one year because I put still frames on them and I remember the one for Roller Coaster Of Love) but if we did, it's very likely it did not list the creator either. Was that a conscious decision? I can't remember, honest. Eventually this became the blinds, and even unspoken a feature of the contest.
People didn't have a lot of chat rooms, conference calls or live streams at their disposal. They watched the videos in private, and they voted in private for the most part. Also, since things were often still edited and submitted on video tape, having a lot of beta testers was impractical. If you did so at all, it was most likely local people, who might not even edit themselves, who you showed your finished work to and asked "So, think I'm ready for this?"
Slowly things changed. Digital submissions (for some people still via dial-up!) became a thing, and we dutifully recorded them to tape for a year or so... this was when I handed things off to Matt, so if you want to be sure, you'll have to ask him. By the time I returned, the digital era was upon us. I'm pretty sure video tape submissions had been killed off long before (capturing video tape and keeping audio in sync was the bane of my existence). We moved from complex instructions on MPEG-2 encodes (to get them down to a reasonable, but still large size that took hours to upload) to h.264 and so on. Now, people could share videos, clips, experiments, whatever all over the place, almost instantly. We had cable modems and fiber connections.
So... I can see how a tacit blind slowly but surely morphed into the situation some people are unhappy with today. I can understand your desire to "go back to the old days".
So, I listened, and I knocked some ideas around. I want to thank Mr. Pilkington and Kireblue as they were my in-person sounding boards. Here's what it came down to... how can we make the blinds official? Well, we'd have to ban beta testing, at least among voting participants.
Let that sink in a bit. I know studios exist not just for a sense of community, but to make your videos stronger. With the technology we have at hand, if you wanted to make the best video possible you would get input from as many experienced editors and friends as you could... you'd be silly not to. But if you're doing that among your studio, and you encourage everyone in your studio to enter, of course you know each other's videos. I understand that's just the way some studios work.
Other groups of editors, who'd been in the game longer, treated their Pro videos differently. They took it upon themselves to edit in isolation. It was a matter of pride, seeing if their own skill, and their skill alone, could compete and win.
And here's where I failed. I've mentioned before, The VAT does not have any contests or prizes. We have events and we award recognition. With my own blinders on, I saw the videos competing against each other for the entertainment value of my convention audience. If you don't understand, as a convention runner, I have to keep that audience entertained. If I don't... you don't get the reactions you want to experience. If I don't... the convention tells me there's better uses for that 3 hour block in main events. Do you understand now why I hate calling these events contests? My worst fear is being told by my convention that AMVs just aren't drawing the crowds anymore and we're going to need Grand Panel for a movie premiere this year. (That really stings, anyone can watch a move in the comfort of their own home... taking time away from participatory fandom, where someone got off the couch and /did/ something... that would sting.)
But that's not how other people see them. For some, it's an opportunity to match wits and skill. As an editor, that's one thing you could take away from all this... one thing that might make it fun for you. And, if we assume you're one of those editors who views this as a very personal challenge, I can understand getting quite upset that you're not competing mano-y-mano with those editors who take advantage of the support and collaboration of their friends or studio.
Those who do that know they're not only competing one on one, they're also competing studio to studio. And that, for some, is part of the fun too. Those who have a different background, though, feel blindsided.
So... the means available to us have changed over the years. Thanks to technology, collaboration is so much easier than when I started this event. These are wonderful times to live in.
The realities of running a convention haven't changed. I need as many of you as possible making as many great and wonderful things as you can, and sending them to me so that I can hold a crowd and justify the existence of what I devote much of my free time to. I have always said, don't give someone a reason to /not/ send me a video.
Unintentionally, through the passage of time, I have.
