Being that the Website award is essentially the same style (a pre-judged competition), could the Autodesk awards be done the same?
My understanding of the Website Award is that each regional recruits volunteers (presumably technical mentors who perhaps know something about websites) to do the evaluation ahead of time. The evaluators have a criteria sheet that they judge each site against and each site gets a certain number of points.
Could the Animation award be done the same?
The Peer review is a bit nice in that everyone that wants to gets to see all of the entries, however, as stated, it can be a bit of a "recruiting teams to judge" type thing. I agree that ultimately the deserving teams tend to win anyway, but I can see the merits of having a slightly more subjective judging process.
I thought a couple of years back (maybe 5 or 6 now...) they had a voting kiosk at the regional.. possibly at champs? Though I kind of left that up to the lead animation student & mentor, so I don't recall the details or if it was just a display of all of the animations. Having it judged by peers at the regional *might* be a little more even as it is a more direct "VOTE HERE" type of thing, and could even be done like inspections where they have a board checking off the teams that have already voted. We actually do peer voting for the Off Season Ruckus event (though the committee breaks ties & distributes the awards), and its a fun way for teams to help decide who they think deserves the awards, while taking off some of the stress of having to recruit/employ judges. We give every team one sheet, and our pit admin makes sure every team turns in their vote.
Though I think its very cool that Autodesk is listening... even here on CD!
*crossing my fingers that NYS teams can compete next year*