Well, I'm glad that the majority enjoied the competion. I don't intend on using this as an excuse but this was the very first competition that I've done and there were a lot of problems, but there are a lot of solutions.
Before I address specific issues, I do want to apologize for not appropriately crediting the MI video. I was going to try to get into detail about how it was a large collabration and a huge success, but the executive staff was already getting on my case about it being too long. I've referred any questions about the MI video to the a-m-v.org website.
The second large issue was that I only received a total of 46 entries, and only 34 of them didn't have (many) technical issues that barred them from playing properly. This is why the contest seemed to go the way that it did. This was not the way I intended it to go, I was prepared for over 70 entries.
Now for the specific issues:
Zerophite wrote:When you went into the contest room, you were seated, and on the seat was a tiny, 3x4 inch piece of paper that had four categories on it (which were Action, Drama, Comedy, Orginal Animation). So I sat next to Furry Curry, NME, and Wuwu (now known as "That kind of Asian Guy). We all wondered how we were suppose to actually vote, since we weren't supplied a pen or pencil.
On Thursday, this is exactly what I was worried about. The con staff told me in February that we had a couple boxes of golf pencils... but that they didn't make it to the convention. On Friday morning, I had the newsletter staff put a message in regarding getting tickets and reminding attendants to bring a pen or pencil.
Next year, I will be personally purchasing pens for usage during the contest (hopefully some nice limited edition Sakura-Con 2004 pens...).
Zerophite wrote:Supposidly it started out with Action, and some of those action videos should have been in Drama, unless action means "violence violence violence!!". There were no breaks between categories, so we all had no idea what was going on besides the fact that we were watching AMVs. In the end, he did a 10 second recap of each video, with a number which explained the balot.
Again, time restraints definitely affected this portion too. I am seriously concidering next year only allowing 8 videos per category to compete, and putting in breaker footage between sections.
Zerophite wrote:There were technical difficulties, which can be expected, and didn't bother me. What bothered me was the quality of the sound and video. Being that only VHS and DVD-R were accepted, and not everyone has the money to spend on a DVD burner, the quality of the video was shot from a 10 to a 4 instantly, and the sound seemed as if it were ran through a cardboard tube (which PA was selling in the dealer room for 3 bucks *L*).
You don't know about half of the technical problems. Though I did accept VCD, S-VCD, VHS, S-VHS, MiniDV, DV, DVCam, DVD-R(W), most of the entries actually didn't look very good because of how they were ORIGINALLY edited. There were a couple of VCD entries that were incredibly awesome and you could tell that time was taken to encode them, but I got others that looked horrible, and I looked at a frame by frame on them and found that the problem was actually the source footage, not MPEG compression...
I thought that the types of speakers and the setup wasn't appropriate for the type of event, if you were in the front row, you went deaf.
Zerophite wrote:The opening intro was Mission Improbable with the bumper and credits cut out. NME told me that wasn't even submitted or allowed. I don't know how to go about that, but he seemed really pissed off because Chris went and edited it without permission.
First, I consulted a few people on this and the majority agreed that I wouldn't be able to get all the creators of this project together to give permission to show this, but in past discussions on this forum the general feeling was that as long as someone else didn't try taking credit for it, that it would be fine to show at cons. As for the credits and such, my intent was to speak about the video prior to showing it, but due to time constraints it wasn't. But be sure to check out the final results list for the appropriate credit (currently open in another browser window...)
Zerophite wrote:As for the AMV social...well...that's a funny story.
Furry Curry, NME, Wuwu, BigShotSpike and I were waiting for Columbia B to open up. We expected to see Chris in there (becuase he was the leader of what should have been going on in there, so said the schedulers upfront, and the schedule itself), but he never showed up...So FC and I took our laptops upfront, and formed a quasi panel
that was memorable...
That's funny, because I never scheduled an AMV Social and didn't know that I needed to be there... Hmm, I'll have to talk with the panels coordinator...
TaranT wrote:Maybe Chris could enlighten us about the projection equipment. What it seemed like - and I don't know that this is the case - is when a marginal PC is trying to play back a DVD with DMA not activated for the drive.
Certainly! Well, I know that the projector they rented was about $5,000 for the weekend, they were using a professional Panasonic video switcher (I know that it retails for about $2,500), and the program tape was supposed to be the master S-VHS copy that I had, but on Thursday they asked if I had it on DV, I told them that I had the four master MiniDV tapes on me, but that I didn't have one long compliation DV tape. The technical staff insisted that they use the MiniDV tapes and I gave it to them.
I also gave them the S-VHS tape and it was a good thing, because even through it wasn't noticed, one of the DV tapes quit working right after a video, we were able to switch to the next DV tape right away, and then played a video, and then switched back to the S-VHS copy for the missing videos, then contined with the DV tapes. I always believe in a backup!
The framerate issues were because of the actual entries, not because of any equipment problems.
TaranT wrote:And I have no idea what happened to Tom the Fish's entry. It was the one that locked up a few times with color bars at the top of the screen. That was just weird.
Hmm, I just checked the master and I didn't see anything like that... It was probably because of the high "white" level in FLCL, it probably overdrove the projector. Unfortunitely I don't have a waveform monitor and vectorscope to find out for sure...
Weibelius wrote:1. Categories, catagories, catagories... a familiar contest gripe. Intuitively, the contest was shown category by category, with "Action" appearing first, "Drama" second, "Comedy" third, and "Original Animations" last. However, category designations were not identified until the 10 second recap portion of the contest. Therefore, one couldn't accurately tell when the "Action" category ended and the "Drama" category began during main part of the contest. This is especially confusing for spectators who aren't familiar with the categories (browsing through the literature, I could find neither category designations nor descriptions in either the con book or the pocket programming guide). Category designations during the main part of the contest, perhaps?
2. Videos were assigned numbers. Voting was based on these numbers. Elegant and intuitive. However, without writing utensils for everyone, it was difficult to remember which video corresponded to which number. I had to ask around to make sure I was voting for the video I wanted to vote for.
Thank you for the constructive criticism, number 1 was the largest issue this year. Though I am glad that I didn't end up labling the categories because of the major videotape issue because it actually broke up a category. Next year I plan on solving this by individually placing a lower third on each entry with the Studio, Title, Anime, Song, and Category with its entry number.
Regarding number 2, I've just put a couple of large stars next to my "Bring Pencils" entry on the "To-Do for 2004" list...
In summary, I just want to say that with all of the questions and comments that were asked and given in the last year I will be able to individually tackle each one to make the Sakura-Con 2004 contest one of the best AMV contests.
Probably one of the hardest things during the last year was getting input on how to operate the contest. Now that it is over and people have experienced it, I'm getting more comments than ever. I expect to be officially reappointed as the contest coordinator in May or early June, hopefully by then the official rules and entry information will be available. The largest change is that I am opening up entries to now include Digital Entries and that the submission process will be entirely online, don't worry through, hard medium formats will still be accepted through the mail.
Thanks again!
I know that much. The room was large, but not a true theater. I wouldn't be surprised if certain seating areas had poor sound. The muzak wasn't a problem either as far as I could tell, at least not when a video was playing. (The hotel's elevator music started playing through the room's built-in speakers about an hour into the contest.)
. The comedy entries were a bright spot. And the original animations were done well (I would have sworn that BigBigTruck did "Sally", but I guess it was done by someone else.)
. Probably not, but reviews from contest attendees should be taken lightly...as a rule. First impressions are useful - especially if you're trying for a particular emotional response - but they can be deceptive.