AMV League Feedback Thread

[Pathos Prime]

Why is this in General AMV and not contests? The League is a contest, right? I think it should be moved, but if you had a particular purpose for putting it in General AMV, I'll hold off until I get an explanation.

I was thinking that the AMV Contest forum was specifically for promoting and advertising contests and wasn't sure the org would find this thread appropriate there. If you think it needs to be in the Contest forum, then move it, by all means.

[Pathos Prime]

But more than that, our strict scoring system means that every single award we give has to be logically justified. If an editor emails us asking for their score, they get an in-depth explanation of why it ranked the way it did. [...] We want to give editors specific feedback rather than just making broad-stroke comments like "It's amateurish" or "This style is overdone."

I'm curious about this. How often DO you get editors contacting you asking for feedback?

Before I became a contest coordinator in 2012, I always expected to get a lot of that kind of request. But now that I've done five years of contests totalling hundreds of videos, only one editor that I can remember ever asked how his/her video scored in the prescreenings, and I don't think that was even in pursuit of specific feedback.

About a dozen or so editors over the three seasons, mostly the newer editors with lower-scoring videos. We'd like to see it happen more often, to be perfectly honest. Both of us here think we need to make it more well known that we do this; maybe if more veteran editors, especially, asked for their scores and feedback, they could see where we're coming from.

[Kionon]

I was thinking that the AMV Contest forum was specifically for promoting and advertising contests and wasn't sure the org would find this thread appropriate there. If you think it needs to be in the Contest forum, then move it, by all means.

The description of the AMV Contest forum is as follows: "This forum is for the announcement and discussion of anime music video contests." Emphasis mine. This seems to me to be a discussion of an anime music video contest. So, I'll move it.

About a dozen or so editors over the three seasons, mostly the newer editors with lower-scoring videos. We'd like to see it happen more often, to be perfectly honest. Both of us here think we need to make it more well known that we do this; maybe if more veteran editors, especially, asked for their scores and feedback, they could see where we're coming from.

Veteran or experienced doesn't necessarily mean anything. By anyone's measure I'm a veteran, and I have almost two decades of experience in editing. I also remain unpopular and obscure. By my experiences of most contests, as stated, I expect to lose. What would I learn from AMV League feedback? Is there any more likelihood I'd win in AMV League? What would I get out out of participation?

[KiddTheManiac]

You didn't answer the question at all. Why would you expect anyone to help out a system that's actively working against their own interests? Because it produces less entertaining contests?

To me, a "less entertaining contest" is one where I have seen more than 25% of the videos before. A less entertaining contest is one where I sit there in the audience and think
"Wow...the Exhibition comedy entries were really really good, I wonder what kind of vid beat them out...Wait, hang on. Isn't this that vid I saw at ACen? ...And AWA? Holy crap, how many contests is this vid gonna be in? Oh well, at least there's the Best Action winner...JFC it's that goddamned Bleach vid that won three awards at BlahCon."

We need more variety in AMVs that're shown and in AMVs that win awards, because right now, there are a number of cons out there where the winners list is near identical, with The Big Six AMVs Of The Year taking up most of the top spots. A lot of the time, when I compare results from different cons, the only major difference is that rather than "Best Action", Video X is "Best Technical", or "Judge's Choice". The overall list of winners is often nigh-identical, and I think that is a serious problem.

When we were first putting this all together, preventing repeat submissions was one of the first regulations we came up with. The logic behind it is to prevent The Big Six AMVs Of The Year from crowding out the rest of the submissions and making things too homogeneous.

[KiddTheManiac]

Veteran or experienced doesn't necessarily mean anything. By anyone's measure I'm a veteran, and I have almost two decades of experience in editing. I also remain unpopular and obscure. By my experiences of most contests, as stated, I expect to lose. What would I learn from AMV League feedback? Is there any more likelihood I'd win in AMV League? What would I get out out of participation?

I'm not gonna say I'm the final authority on what makes an AMV good or bad. No one is. But I will say that when someone emails me and asks "Why did my video rank so low" or something similar, I do everything I can to be completely and utterly honest. I can't give advice that'll help you win every competition, but I can tell you what I, as a judge, am looking for.

One of the many things that used to bother me as an editor was that I didn't really "get" the logic behind most contest outcomes. If a video of mine didn't place as a finalist, I couldn't figure out why, because oftentimes I'd go to these contests and see AMVs that I thought were far crappier but that had managed to place where mine hadn't. Hell, even if I wasn't participating I'd be confused as hell why Video X won "Best Comedy" when it was nowhere near as funny to me as videos Y and Z, which had only gotten "finalist" status.

Back then, if someone'd actually offered to tell me why they didn't like my vids ("Your lipsync sucks", "You don't use any effects" etc), or even if there was anything about my AMVs they did like, ("Cool concept!", "Good timing on cuts", etc), I would've been able to improve more easily.

And I'm not the only one.

A lot of times after contests, there are people who'll pull me aside in the hallways and ask me what I genuinely thought of their videos. They're super pysched, and they love doing this stuff, but they don't really know what it is about their videos that makes them tend to rank kinda low. So I'll sit down with 'em for a few minutes at the hotel cafe or whenever, and I'll talk with 'em about stuff.

Granted, I know not everyone wants in-depth feedback, but for the people who want it, it's there.

[Pathos Prime]

You didn't answer the question at all. Why would you expect anyone to help out a system that's actively working against their own interests? Because it produces less entertaining contests?

This is why:



Know what that is? The number of videos submitted to the org, by year. The trend is pretty obvious.

The AMV community is drying up, despite the fact that barriers to entry are basically nonexistent now. I'm not going to say there aren't ANY newer editors. Through the League, we've gotten to see some amazing newer editors - folks like Shorisquared, TritioAFB, and Unlucky Artist - grow through the years into veterans of their own accord. But this is the exception now. And there are probably a lot of reasons for this. Anime just isn't as popular as it was 10 years ago. Music artists and Japanese producers cracking down on Youtube.

It's not that the interest isn't still there. We see this at every convention we go to. AMVs are a work of art like no other, and they are still a major draw, even though more and more cons see the AMV contest as relatively unimportant. People come up to us after every contest and start talking with us about how to get started making AMVs and do we have any tips.

It's that the new barrier to entry is the fact that contests are dominated by veterans. That every contest is the same. That unless you have been editing for years and years, you have no chance of having your video shown to the public. And people are never taking up the art or quitting immediately.

And while that might be great right now for the 30 or so of y'all who make all the top-tier videos, compare that to the thousands of cosplayers that participate in convention contests. Then imagine that Jessica Nigri and Yaya Han flew to every single convention in the country and won every single award. No one would even bother competing anymore. And you all see where the trend is going. Contests would eventually end completely.

Lesser known, lesser skilled, and lesser experienced editors need to be encouraged if AMVs as an art form are going to flourish.

Look at it this way: AMVs have already become unimportant enough to most conventions that about a dozen of them - some of them very large and prestigious - care so little that they're letting two relatively complete nobodies handle their entire lot of AMV programming. And if it WASN'T for these two complete nobodies, a lot of these cons wouldn't have contests at all.

We weren't kidding when we said one of our goals with AMV League was to make AMVs important again.

We can't do it by ourselves, and this isn't about us anyway.

[Pathos Prime]

Veteran or experienced doesn't necessarily mean anything. By anyone's measure I'm a veteran, and I have almost two decades of experience in editing. I also remain unpopular and obscure. By my experiences of most contests, as stated, I expect to lose. What would I learn from AMV League feedback? Is there any more likelihood I'd win in AMV League? What would I get out out of participation?

Here's an example of feedback we've provided to another editor:

The timing in this video was great, and the idea of including original audio from the anime was really creative and fun. Good use of zooms.

Pretty poor video quality – possibly webrip footage? This video would look a lot crisper and cleaner with DVD or BluRay rip footage.

It’s really hard to pull off a “random cool stuff happens” AMV – this really needs some sort of overarching theme that could tie all these different anime together to make this video seem less random (e.g. thriller anime, characters with ice powers, etc).

Overall, a very ambitious and creative video that just lacks some polish and planning.

Is there any more likelihood you'd win in AMV League? If you took our feedback to heart, and know just what we are looking for in a video, I don't see how it COULDN'T improve your chances.

And as for what you'd get out of participation, that's something that's kind of hard to answer until you actually participate. We've got Anime St. Louis and A-Kon coming up, btw.

[Kionon]

One of the many things that used to bother me as an editor was that I didn't really "get" the logic behind most contest outcomes. If a video of mine didn't place as a finalist, I couldn't figure out why, because oftentimes I'd go to these contests and see AMVs that I thought were far crappier but that had managed to place where mine hadn't. Hell, even if I wasn't participating I'd be confused as hell why Video X won "Best Comedy" when it was nowhere near as funny to me as videos Y and Z, which had only gotten "finalist" status.

Back then, if someone'd actually offered to tell me why they didn't like my vids ("Your lipsync sucks", "You don't use any effects" etc), or even if there was anything about my AMVs they did like, ("Cool concept!", "Good timing on cuts", etc), I would've been able to improve more easily.

No, see, I get that, but I also know that my style of video editing isn't popular, but that won't ever stop me from editing that way. My goal is, "if I rewatch this in ten years, will I still enjoy it?" The answer has mostly been yes.

There's technical issues, certainly, but those seem to me to be facts. You either followed some rule for filtering footage, or you didn't. You either had the correct aspect ratio, or you didn't. You either found a good compression, or you have compression artifacts. Those have nothing to do with the artistic nature of a video, and everything to do with mechanics. Some of my favorite videos have serious technical flaws. The editor did them "wrong." Factually. But they're still ones I enjoy because I just do. Lots of editors seem not to watch their own videos once they finish them, which I find odd, since I only got into editing to make the AMVs I wanted to watch.

Is there any more likelihood you'd win in AMV League? If you took our feedback to heart, and know just what we are looking for in a video, I don't see how it COULDN'T improve your chances.

I do. Unless you're telling me that your opinions drastically differ from the majority opinion.

I often feel like a still-life painter being judged by neo-impressionists, and advice from a neo-impressionist won't make any sense for a still-life. If someone tells me, "You don't use any effects," well, no, I don't, nor do I have any interest in doing so. It won't make my video "better," it'll make it more "not me." I know what audiences like, and I know what judges typically vote for, and it's rarely ever been anything I've ever made. So I'm trying to figure out what you have that's different.

Sell me on it. That is what you're here to do, right?

[BasharOfTheAges]

You didn't answer the question at all. Why would you expect anyone to help out a system that's actively working against their own interests? Because it produces less entertaining contests?

To me, a "less entertaining contest" is one where I have seen more than 25% of the videos before. A less entertaining contest is one where I sit there in the audience and think
"Wow...the Exhibition comedy entries were really really good, I wonder what kind of vid beat them out...Wait, hang on. Isn't this that vid I saw at ACen? ...And AWA? Holy crap, how many contests is this vid gonna be in? Oh well, at least there's the Best Action winner...JFC it's that goddamned Bleach vid that won three awards at BlahCon."

We need more variety in AMVs that're shown and in AMVs that win awards, because right now, there are a number of cons out there where the winners list is near identical, with The Big Six AMVs Of The Year taking up most of the top spots. A lot of the time, when I compare results from different cons, the only major difference is that rather than "Best Action", Video X is "Best Technical", or "Judge's Choice". The overall list of winners is often nigh-identical, and I think that is a serious problem.

When we were first putting this all together, preventing repeat submissions was one of the first regulations we came up with. The logic behind it is to prevent The Big Six AMVs Of The Year from crowding out the rest of the submissions and making things too homogeneous.

As a contest coordinator your JOB is to entertain the audience, not to get on your social equality high horse and dictate what should or shouldn't compete. 95+% of your audience does not attend more than 1 con a year they don't know and don't care about how any other contest went. Your responsibility is to them, not to editors, not to the hobby in general, to the audience. You aim to create objectively worse experiences for your audiences... Why do cons let you even run stuff? Are the execs not aware?

[Ileia]

Posting from my phone so please forgive any errors.


First, while it used to be, A-M-V.org is not indicative of the entire hobby so the graph is only giving a partial view. And even if it were and the hobby was dead, wouldn't that answer why you're not getting a lot of entries and invalidate even needing to ask why?


Secondly, it is frustrating to me when contest coordinators dismiss their audiences as being unable to identify "good" AMVs. I find the attitude off putting. It's just different perspectives of fans. Editors who are accused of "pandering" are often *gasp!* fans themselves. As an editor, what's my motivation to enter a contest that is just basically two dudes deciding? What makes them more qualified than an audience? What would be the incentive for entering that contest over another?


I agree that contests are sometimes identical lineups. It can be frustrating, but the most common way contests combat this is having a "freshness" date. Good videos take time and editors cannot always make enough to have a new one for every single contest. There are some contests that require exclusivity, but they are cons that have had years (in some cases, decades) to build up a reputation that makes editors anxious to submit. You mentioned that this is the third year running this circuit. That's relatively new and you may take a few more years to start gathering momentum. Rather than thinking that editors are snubbing your contests, it's possible that they just don't know about it.


You may be able to work yourself up to your picture of an ideal contest, but for the time being, I think your choices are a) relax the rules and include audience voting of some sort to draw more editors to want to enter or b) leave the rules as is and get less entries.


You may also want to contact some seasoned coordinators to get their opinions. Vlad, jingoro, VicBond, etc. They'll probably be the best resource on that front.