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First Entry
2002-02-21 15:49:59
Carpooled down to Baltimore, MD with a bunch of friends to do Katsucon 8 last weekend. Spent most of the rest of my time helping out my friends at their T-Shirt table, but still managed to catch the AMV Contest, both screenings of the fan parody "This Is Otakudom" made by Scott & the whole Princeton gang, and make it to the AMV.org creators get together. Missed nearly all of the AMV Panel because it was rescheduled several hours earlier than pocket program said.
Since this is animemusicvideos.org, I'm going to talk about Katsucon 8's AMV Contest. The AMV contest was a mixed experience for me. I didn't submit anything to show but I've worked on the AMV Contest at another con for the last several years, so I have opinions about this sort of stuff.
On the one hand there's good stuff to say: they showed a lot of fan-made anime music videos at Katsucon (about 2.5 hours), they allowed the members of Katsucon to vote for their favorite AMVs, the top 3 favorites were declared the winners, and the winning creators got to come up on stage to receive prizes to take home with them. The music video contest was shown two times before balloting closed, both times in Katsucon's biggest room on a big rear-projection screen with a powerful sound system.
On the other hand, there were a lot of smaller aspects of the contest that could have been better handled:
1. The AMVs were digitized and burned onto a DVD for the screenings, which is okay except that whoever digitized the AMVs captured them with all the VCR messages displayed on the screen: numerous instances of "PLAY>" appearing up in the corner of the screen, and "Video Calibration" flashing right in the center of the screen at the beginning of most of the videos. These messages can be disabled in the VCR's menu, and should have been.
2. Heard complaints from creators that some AMVs had the first couple seconds of their beginnings clipped off, while others had meaningless countdowns left intact, although I didn't hear any complaints that endings were clipped.
3. Unless the AMV creator made their own title slates, the audience had no idea who made which AMV or what it was officially called. Even simple, ugly title slates from Katsucon for the AMVs that were lacking them would have helped the audience understand what was going on.
4. Volume levels were not consistent from one AMV to the next. The convention video techies had to adjust the volume every time a new AMV started, which must have been a pain for them. Since the AMVs were digitized and put on a DVD, there must have been some point where they could have all been normalized to a uniform peak volume by the computer.
5. The voting ballot was not ready for the first showing of the AMV Contest on Friday. It wasn't ready until Saturday morning for the sparsely-attended second showing at 8:30 AM. Votes had to be in by lunchtime. I wonder how many people from the first screening ever voted for their favorites.
6. The voting ballot was full of errors. Spelling errors ("Linkin Park" spelled as "Linking in the Park"), missing information (one video had only the creator's name and "N/A - N/A" listed for it), missing AMVs (the "Harvey the Wonder Hamster" video and others), and two lines printed on the back where they'd be easily missed ("D.J. Fritz" who also had a single line for two videos with no other information listed for either of them). The ballot also said to vote for one entry, while a staffer at the screening said to vote for three. I never heard the announcement, so I ended up voting for only one AMV.
7. Word at the convention was that AMV submissions not making it into the contest (hearsay suggests 50%) would be screened in a smaller video room late at night in an "overflow" screening. They weren't. When the time came, the con staffers present said they had no tape/disc of overflow AMVs to show, so they just showed the contest for a third time. Disappointing for AMV creators to say the least.
8. General notes on viewings in main room: Sound system had too much bass, making midrange musical elements like vocals and melody tough to discern much of the time. Video images on screen seemed washed out and too bright, but that might have been because I was sitting in 2nd row, close to the screen.
I heard that Katsucon's con chair handled this year's AMV Contest because they had nobody else to do it. Don't know if that's true or not, but either way the AMV Contest should be handled by someone who can devote their undivided attention to it. The con chair at any convention has enough work to do solving problems every five minutes without having to also run specialized and highly technical activities like an AMV Contest.
JOURNAL: Cybermat (Matt Pyson)
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