Re: THAC 6 results!
Prisac, sorry we didn't list your name, I've added it now.
For an animation competition I was not very impressed by some of the animation in the high scoring entries and the sound on many was bordering on pathetic. The voice acting was however very good so maybe that had more to do with the final outcomes.
I think the balance of Presentation and Story/Theme was, for once, about right in this competition. I wouldn't mind the presentation category being divided into smaller categories in the future, but part of the motivation behind this simplification was that VN wanted to get results quickly, we knew what aspects were supposed to be considered part of presentation over all, and a more complex ballot would have slowed the process down quite a bit. (I didn't really have time to do all this, but I made time and pulled an all-nighter to prepare for a test the next morning.) Animation and sound are a couple of areas that tend to suffer in a THAC contest given the very tight time limit, but I do think that the films with the highest "presentation" scores generally had a better balance of good technically quality throughout the film than those with lower scores in this category. That having been said, I was only 1/4 of the panel and if it were up to me, "Caravan" and "Jim and Bob's New Car" would have placed quite a bit higher.
I watched all the top 20 again and what is disapointing to see is that one of the high ranked entries had 6 scenes and 3 of them had no mod element. Hello judges!
I assumed that any problems of this nature had already been weeded out by Stevie Collins, at any rate a couple frames of an obscured mod element isn't enough for disqualification anymore. Regarding "whole scenes," my guess is that you may not have been looking hard enough, or considering the same things as Stevie did for mod elements, as he did make a lot of allowances for the "letter" mod, particularly if you're referring to Night Owl's entry.
A very big congratulations to the top 20, except the one that cheated.
Who are you referring to here? There's no need to 'pull punches,' it just makes you look like you're not willing to open yourself up to being proven wrong or criticized...
-Sméagol