Criteria:
- Theme: Does your film meet the rules, requirements, and constraints of the category?
- Impact: Does your film tell a "story" that resonates on an emotional level, provides a lasting impression, or communicates an important takeaway?
- Originality: Were your characters, storylines, visual motifs, and/or music unique, not just a remix of what's already out there? Are you innovating on the ways AI filmmaking tools are being implemented?
- Execution: Does your film have good production value (i.e. editing, pacing, sound design, audio mixing, color correction, text and titles, etc.)?
Process & Timeline:
1. You can make a submission at any point between December 16th, 2024 and January 16th at 11:59PM PST.
2. Once your film is submitted, it will enter into a Preliminary Round review queue. Within 72 hours, our Preliminary Judges (trusted AI filmmakers who have expertise/domain knowledge in that category) will approve or reject (if it doesn't follow the rules) the film and assign it rating of PG/PG-13/R (films of higher ratings will not be eligible).
3. After all films in each category have been provided a preliminary score, the Top 25 films in each category will be announced on Social Media and will move onto the finals.
4. The full judging panel will then watch all of the films in the finals and assign a score. Scores will be averaged, resulting in the 1/2/3 place placements in each category. For the Title and Gold Sponsor Awards, the judging representative from that sponsor will make the sole determination for the films that best represent their company/community.
5. On or around February 10th (date TBD depending on judging progress), we will host a livestream announcing the winning films.
Considerations:
- If you submit right at the final deadline of January 16th, it may take longer for your film to be reviewed since there will be a lot of films in the queue.
- While we'd love to have all the judges watch all the films, that is logistically impossible. Based on the metrics from the Season 1, we will be reviewing thousands of films totaling well over 120 hours. If each of our volunteer judges were to do this, it would be a massive time commitment, so we wouldn't be able to A) Get high profile judges to sign up or B) Complete the judging in 2-3 weeks rather than over many months.
- All scores will be averaged across all judges and if there is a tie, a re-vote between the tied options will occur.
- All scores will be monitored for impartiality (i.e. giving full points to all the films made with your tool and 0s to all the tools made by your tool competitor). If vote manipulation occurs, that judge and any scores will be disqualified.
- We made the decision to remove the community vote as this season we will have a much higher volume of films which will be harder to moderate especially when it comes to public voting. Similarly, we've removed the Beginner Award as it will be difficult to determine who is a first time AI filmmaker.