amv nightmare

The mahou shounen gives us an insight into the problems that led to the rescheduling of the contest, and how the actual entries themselves were the final item on the heap of problems that plagued the Anime Expo 2002 anime music video contest.

The Anime Expo 2002 anime music video contest, second in attendance only to the masquerade, turned into a living nightmare for the attendees and staff alike. Proving that Finagle's Law does indeed work, everything that could have gone wrong in the contest did go wrong.

[ the beginnings of trouble ]

The first problem stemmed from the fact that the old manager of the music video contest resigned his post for personal reasons (from what I heard, he was simply burned out from all the work). The two new managers that were appointed for the music video contest in his place simply did not have anywhere near the same amount of skill or experience as the old manager did. Now, they were being asked to run the music video contest for the largest anime convention in the United States; a competition that sports one of the largest number of video entrants. However, I could see from the con gripe that the two new managers were nice guys who were really trying their best. I give them credit for trying everything in their power to try to make things right.

Having said that, the new contest managers created problems from the get go for this nightmare contest. It began with the fact that rules for the music video contest (which are crucial, since the rules had fluctuated so frequently in past years) were put out extremely late. The rules were placed out on Anime Expo's website in late April, with a deadline for submissions of June 21st. This meant that the time between the rules announcement and the deadline for entries was about two months, which is not a whole lot of time.

While the rules on submission using digital media formats were nice, the lateness of the rules dealing with the maximum length of the video hurt. Since people were unsure of what the cutoff length of the video would be before the rules were posted, people might have been hesitant in starting the videos too early. From personal experience, I know that knowing the maximum length that a music video may be is crucial.

[ the friday amv fiasco ]

The originally scheduled day of the music video contest turned into the major headache of the convention. The problem started with the large group of fans outside the doors of the Terrace Theater waiting to be let in by the staff. As far as I could tell, there were people waiting in line as early as 6:00 PM for this (despite the fact that this was unnecessary since seating was to begin at 7:00 PM and that seating was assigned through the ticket system).

Some of the fans were fearful of the clause that states that if you do not show up for seating within 15 minutes, that your ticket will be invalidated for the seat (what apparently was not mentioned was that the 15 minutes were in reference to the start time of the event - if you weren't seated by 15 minutes before the start of the event, your seat would be invalidated). Therefore, out of fear, people started lining up early.

The crowd waits until 7:00PM, when seating was scheduled to begin. No movement begins. The general feeling of the crowd is "Okay, so the seating is running a bit late, but that's normal for a con." So the crowd continues to wait. 7:30 PM passes by, but the doors don't open. The crowd starts to wonder what is going on. The crowd is starting to show signs of acting dumb (looking back, so was I). Everyone who was going to sit for the anime music video contest had no doubt arrived by this time, and all that anyone could see were staff inside, looking out from inside the theatre. It was at this point that the crowd started yelling, "Let us in! Let us in!" The crowd was just short of becoming a mob.

The dumbness kept spreading through the crowd through 8:00 PM. By that point, there had been many people waiting for at least an hour, and there were a number of people that had been waiting two hours, without any notice from the staff as to the reasons for the delay (which just fanned the flames). At 8:15PM or so, the staff finally decided to allow the crowd to come in and be seated. At this point, the crowd was happy just to be able to finally get in and take their seats.

So the crowd sits again for about 20 minutes. To kill time, the crowd continues acting dumb, and starts throwing paper airplanes around (something that had happened last year as well). One airplane unfortunately found its way and crashed smack into the screen of the theatre. One of the tech manager crew comes out and addressed the crowd (this was the first thing the crowd had heard from the staff so far). His spiel amounted to the fact that the crowd had just damaged a very expensive screen, so stop throwing paper airplanes. While his action to call for a stop to the paper airplanes was fair, I felt that the manner in which he had addressed the crowd was very rude. I, like much of the crowd, had been waiting around for a long time, waiting for something to happen. What right did he have to yell at the crowd for simply trying to pass time. I had trouble seeing how such a small airplane could cause any damage to the screen. In any case, knowing what had happened last year with the crowd throwing paper airplanes to kill time, why didn't they warn the crowd beforehand about the planes? He only yelled at the crowd after the fact.

The crowd did not take his little speech well. The angry mood that had pervaded the crowd in the hour before the doors had been opened had slowly returned. However, every one still sat and waited. It took until 9:00 PM to hear anything else from the staff. At that time, the staff informed the crowd that the AMV contest showing for the night was a serious no-go, and that the contest was going to be held the next morning.

Of course, for the people who had been waiting so long in line to get into the contest, this was, to say the least, very bad news. Many of the people who were at the music video contest had plans to wait for masquerade tickets the next morning, and others only had one-day passes to Anime Expo. The whole pile of problems, from the wait outside the door, to the rude tech manager, to the long wait without being kept informed about what was happening, finally broke the last straw. The crowd started to disintegrate into an angry mob. The shouting from the audience began as the staff tried to explain the reason behind the problems. It turns out that the staff had tried to re-encode all the videos in the contest. While the videos had come out okay during their original testing, they had neglected to test the actual videos on the equipment they were going to use to show the videos. As a result, the videos didn't work with the equipment in the theatre, and they had to go through the process of re-encoding the videos. One of the AMV managers was working frantically to try to get a proper encode done, but this was very difficult to do right before the contest was scheduled to start. By the time 9pm had rolled around, it had become clear to the manager that the videos would require hours to re-encode.

The compromise reached by the staff was that they would show the music videos twice at AX2002: once at 7:00 AM Saturday, and the other at 7:00 AM Sunday, with the Saturday showing being the actual contest. At that time, the staff put on a copy of Metropolis for the crowd to watch. The angry mob calmed down, and either left or sat around to watch the movie.

[ the actual contest, in all its squalor ]

I was in line for the music videos at 7:00 AM Saturday. Unlike the previous night, the seating went in good order. I took my seat, and sat down waiting to see some good music videos.

The competition at Anime Expo has always been fierce. Sometimes, there will be a category where the videos aren't as good as the other categories. However, every year, there's usually at least one category where there is a strong battle to be the best. I waited, therefore, with high hopes that there would be some truly great music videos waiting to be seen.

[ time for action ]

The first category to be shown was action, and my first reaction was that the entrants were just plain horrible. The skill level was lower than I had ever seen at Anime Expo, and many of the videos lacked any worthy substance to them. The videos were incredibly plain. By the time they had reached the "Dragon Bebop Z" video, I felt sick. The video was a complete and total rip-off of "Tainted Donuts", the video that had won at Anime Expo 2001.

The only video that had deserved any credit was Senta Miller's "Path of the Deus!" The video was done with care, good time, and a good sense of action. However, the video that won was "Chemicals" by Daniel Araujo, an Evangelion music video that wasn't bad, but was not up to the quality of many other Evangelion music videos, and was definitely not up to the quality of "Path of the Deus!"

[ let's hope for drama ]

The videos then moved on to the drama category. I thought to myself that probably, action was the bad seed of the contest this year, which is perfectly fine. The drama category was a bit better: there were 2 good videos instead of one: "Adagio for Fireflies" by Art Smoke and "Enigma" by Kamaran Ahmadi.

Unfortunately, the playback quality of "Adagio" was fairly poor (perhaps it was made using bad source). However, it was very clear to me that the video was still well done. The video basically is a summary of "Grave of the Fireflies". It's an idea that has been done before, but this video was executed particularly well. I really got caught up in the strong emotions of the music video.

Enigma was done to the OVA of Rurouni Kenshin, showing the relationship between Kenshin and Tomoe. The idea is that Kenshin being who he is and Tomoe being who she is are enigmas to each other. The timing of the video was good, and the source of the video looked unusually clear compared to the rest of the videos in the contest. The video's story and idea played themselves out well. In my mind, this was the only video entered this year that can even compare to the level of videos from the other years of the Anime Expo music video contest.

However, again, the video that won was second rate compared to the other videos submitted. "Silent Lucidity", a Card Captor Sakura music video done by Anthony Bennett, won for drama (and eventually, best of show). Sure, the video does have some point to it (though what that point is, I'm not sure). It also looked really good (however, it should be noted that I am a Card Captor Sakura fan, so I might just be biased over this point). However, overall, I thought it was just a bad music video.

[ please, at least give us some comedy ]

It was now on to the comedy category of videos. At this point, I was really hoping to see some good videos. The AX 2001 comedy competition was one of the best competitions I had ever seen. So, my hope was that this year's competition would be better. Well, it all turned out to be a total waste of 7 hours of my life. Only 2 of the videos made me laugh at all. One of them used essentially the same basic idea as last year's "Right Now", and the other video was funny because it fit what was the mood of the contest at that time.

"Everybody's Free (To Watch Anime)" by Richard Cole felt incredibly similar to "Right Now". Of course, I didn't describe this video as a complete and total rip, you notice. While the idea may have been the same, the execution was a bit different. At least the video was well done and not a complete rip-off.

The comedy winner this year, and the only video in the category that I thought had any right to win at all was "A Total Waste of 6 Minutes, 35 Seconds" by Troy Williams. The video used clips from "Serial Experiments Lain", yet had absolutely nothing to do with Lain. Instead, the videos pokes fun of all the things someone can do to make a bad anime music video. For reasons obvious, the video just seemed to fit the mood of the anime music video contest overall.

[ the just for fun category - just make it stop ]

After the comedy category this year came the "Just for Fun" category (the miscellaneous category, if you must). At this point, however, I just didn't care at all. I paid no attention to it. The winner was a video called "Shameless Rock Video", done by Ian Roberts. The music video was a good video in its own way. I didn't care for it, but it was well done and had a good idea behind it.

[ the best of show, and my closing thoughts ]

The time finally came to have to pick a best of show in this year's cruel joke that was the anime music video contest. Sadly enough, the video that won best of show was the one video of the set that I felt really did not deserve to win the contest: "Silent Lucidity". Oh, what a befitting end to the joke.

Next year's anime music video contest is bound to be better next year. There's simply no way that the contest could have gotten any worse this year. In every way, everything just went wrong.

The technical issues should have never been a factor. The staff had nearly 2 weeks to encode a final copy of the video to be shown. Could they not have thought to look into checking the final video on presentation equipment BEFORE the convention to make sure that the video was going to work right?

There was also the lack of communication between the staff and the waiting mob outside the doors of the problems. It would not have taken much to tell the people outside that there were issues and that the contest might not run on time. Having all those people waiting outside at least an hour without telling them anything was just plain wrong. It might have still caused an angry moan or 2, but it would have been better than just letting the audience mull around for 2 hours and finally telling them that the contest would have to be cancelled for the night.

The level of competition being so horrible can at least be partially attributed to the fact that the rules were posted so late. However, for the most part, my opinion is that this year, all the entrants just seemed to lack an artistic sense.

The fans are also not free of guilt in all of this. From the yelling outside of the theatre screaming to be let in, to the action of throwing the paper airplanes around, the fans were also guilty (though the fashion in which the staffers informed the fans about the paper airplane incident was rude).

In the end, I believe that the two new managers have learned something from all of this. Hopefully, next year, they will try very hard not to have the same technical problems that plagued them this year. I certainly hope that the competition next year returns to a level of skill that is deserved of a contest this size, and not to the same level of cheesy rip-offs and bad ideas. I also hope that the fans next year will act better as well.

This is all that I can hope for next year's music video contest.

—jeff