Now that the first awards show for the International Academy of Web Television has come and gone I wanted to take some time to reflect on how things went. I’ve been a member of the organization for a little over a year, and it’s been great to see the awards show go from an idea to reality.  I was not directly involved with the planning of the awards so this is more just my perspective as an IAWTV member and as someone who submitted their show for the awards.

If you’re considering submitting in the future, hopefully this will give you more information about the whole process.  I’ve tried to include some advice as well at the end that hopefully some of you will find useful. So jump to the bottom if you’re not interested in hearing about everything else.

Submissions

The call for submissions went out in early October and lasted the entire month.  For our first awards we allowed series from the past two years.  The reason for this is that the IAWTV voted on the Streamys and after the split between the two groups there was a year without an awards show voted on by the organization.  The idea of including shows from that year was put to a vote, and it was close but more people were in favor of being inclusive of the extra year.  So the first year is a little odd in that we have two years’ worth of submissions.

Anything was considered a series that was two or more videos within the given January 1, 2010 to October 31, 2011 time frame.  It’s a very liberal interpretation, so just about anything out there could be considered.  This does mean that films distributed online or one-off videos could not be considered.  Maybe in the future we will add a category to address videos that are not part of a series, but for now they aren’t covered under the umbrella of our current awards.

The cost for submission was $45 for IAWTV members and $95 for non-members.  This included entry into 5 of our 33 categories with extra categories costing $10 each.  While this could add up to be a decent chunk of change for the indie series creator, I felt it was fair and still far less than the Webby awards submission price.  The money was needed to put on the show, help pay for the awards, and with it being our first show, we were unsure of what sponsors we would end up with. Perhaps in the future with more sponsorship we can reduce the price.

The process was all done online – no mailing screeners or uploading to servers.  Since these are awards for online videos you just needed to submit embed code or direct links to your videos.  You can save your progress along the way; the whole process was quite simple in my experience.  We had a great web team working on the process throughout and they really knocked it out of the park.

Geo-blocked Shows

This is kind of a sticky situation for some shows that may not be viewable in other countries.  Our membership is international, so if a show can only be seen in a limited number of countries then voters will not be able to accurately judge your content. My personal opinion is that I’d rather shows not be restricted to certain countries, but I support any method that helps content get produced, and sometimes that means restricting access to your shows.  If your show fits into this group then by all means make sure to upload a screener copy of your episode to a private server, or use a password protected service like Vimeo so that all the members have a shot at viewing your show, otherwise you are at a huge disadvantage.

Nominations

After the submissions period ended it was time for the first round of voting.  Active members of the IAWTV are the only people allowed to vote, so if you’re not a member yet this is one of the most direct benefits of joining. You get to have a say in the awards.  That’s all I’ll say about joining for now but it’s good to note that in many film groups the entire organization does not get to vote, and sometimes not in all categories either.

First Round Voting

Voting was all done online with private logins for each member.  This is another area where I think the web team did an amazing job.  In order to ensure that each submission gets equal consideration you were only shown five random submissions at a time.  You couldn’t go through and just vote for the shows you liked and be done; you had to vote on random groups of five before you could see more submissions. There was a throttling process in place as well to make sure that each show was seen equally by voters.  If you’re a smaller indie creator this means your show gets seen and voted on just as much as The Guild or any of the other more well-known shows. It’s one of the fairest systems I’ve seen for voting.  If you want more info there is even a video up on the IAWTV page that shows how the process was handled.

We got to answer the question “Is this consideration worth of nomination?” with  a vote either Yes, No or Ineligible.  I can’t speak for how everyone voted, but my voting philosophy was to vote yes for any show that I think showed excellence in its category, whether it be Best Drama, Best Cinematography or Best Costume Design. This meant saying yes to a lot more shows than we had nomination for.

There were a lot of submissions to go through.  It was well over 1000 if you wanted to vote on every entry in every category.  This means most people would not watch all the submissions, but through the throttling system it did mean that all the submissions got seen and voted on the same number of times.

During this time I saw lots of “For Your Consideration” images, videos and posts urging me to vote for a specific show.  I ignored every single one of them.  I had so many entries to watch that it seemed like a waste to watch an extra video for a show I may not even get to see since the order is selected for me randomly.  Now it’s true there were a lot of shows I was already familiar with, and I could decide much faster on those.  The best piece of advice I have is to make sure I know about your show before voting has even begun, because I probably won’t have time to check out new shows elsewhere online while I’m bogged down with the voting process.  Each member is going to be different though; these are just my thoughts on the topic of FYC promotion.

Tie-Breakers

After the first round the yes votes were tallied and the five shows with the most were going to be nominated.  We actually did have some tie-breakers so we voted in a few categories with a run-off style voting process where we ranked the tie-breakers in order.  It was our first hint as to who might have a nomination so it was exciting for the people who knew they were close.  Everyone else just got to wonder.

Nominees

The nominations were announced during a live broadcast with Shira Lazar at the What’s Trending studio.  It seemed to be quite well covered and for a while we even had #IAWTVAwards hashtag trending on Twitter.  A lot of familiar shows were there as well as several unexpected ones. If you were picked it was certainly quite an honor as you were selected from not one but two years’ worth of submissions.  Sorely missing were shows from outside the US.  Hopefully in the future the international presence of the group will get larger, but for the first year  the shows were mostly all from within the US.

Final Voting

Shortly after the nominations were announced we were sent the ballots to pick the one show out of the five we thought was the best.  I would have preferred to keep the run-off style voting, especially since we now had a different style of voting for each of the three rounds, but this style did force you to be more absolute about your vote.  For the final round in voting I did go back and watch as many of the shows episodes as I could to get a complete picture of the body of work.  There were lots of hard decisions to make, which I think is good; it meant that we really have lots of shows that were deserving of an award.

The Awards Show

There was a lot of thought put into the awards show itself.  We had some amazing people like Jenni Powell and Amber J. Lawson working on the show as well as many others.  We partnered up with CES, which was a great fit.  It’s a three year deal, so the next two shows will be in Vegas like the one this year.  Make sure to mark it on your calendar.

I was not able to attend the show this year, but we had an amazing set of panels setup for those in attendance, which aside from the show itself was the only presence we had at CES; hopefully that will improve in the future.  I heard they were not as well attended as they could have been, but luckily we were able to film the panels so that they’re available for everyone to see.  You can find them at the IAWTV YouTube page at http://www.youtube.com/user/Iawtvorg.  You can also see the entire awards show as well if you are interested.

The show itself was live-streamed on YouTube, and was so well attended online that the chat was almost unusable since text was flying by faster than I could read it.  The same couldn’t be said for the actual event, where the crowd shots looked a little sparse.  It’s important to remember that it wasn’t really open to the public, so it was only open to members, nominees and sponsors, but hopefully we can fill out the seats better next year.

The show was nicely paced and they covered all the categories in just two hours.  Watching it live, the biggest disappointment was the sound, which was inconsistent at best and took away from the awesome presenters we had.  It’s something I think we can easily fix.  There were quite a few jokes that fell flat, but I can’t think of many awards shows where that doesn’t happen.  It’s tough to balance being fun, being professional, and being respectful. I enjoyed the presenters that were being sincere as opposed to playing a character and the winners’ speeches were some of the high points of the show.

Closing Thoughts

It’s a lot of work to put on an awards show, especially when most of the people are volunteering their time.  This group used to only vote on the awards so it was a huge step to go from that to putting on an entire show as well as all the other events the group has done throughout the year.

Now that everyone has had time to unwind a little, I hope we’ll take the time to improve upon last year’s success.  I believe things can only get better from here on, and I think the biggest thing we can do is to grow our international presence.  That means more members and getting more submissions from around the globe.  There were several great shows that I know did not submit and I hope they will this year.

I’d also like to see a few more categories; ensemble cast was noticeably missing, and breaking apart a few of the other awards would be nice too. Best cinematography, for example, pitted dramas and comedies up against documentaries and news shows. It’s harder to give out more awards, I know, but we cover such a large range of videos out there I think it makes sense not to limit ourselves too much.

Advice To Creators

If you plan on submitting and want the best chance of getting your show fairly evaluated I have a few suggestions.  Other members may not feel the same way I do, these are just a few of the things I saw.

• Make sure your show can be seen – Several shows did not have embed code or links that worked.  Try and double check all your links work, and if your show is blocked by certain countries, make sure there is a place set up so that those people can still watch your show and evaluate it from anyplace on the globe.
• Promoting your show during the nominations process is too late – If we’ve already seen a few episodes of your show before voting, you’re at an advantage over ones we haven’t.  I wish I knew the best way to go about doing that, but it’s something to consider.
• Pick your best episode – As with the last point.  With hundreds of videos to watch we’ll probably just have time to watch the one episode submitted for that category. Even when I found shows I wanted to see more of, I wrote the names down for later and moved on to the next submission.
• Pick your categories carefully – There were some submissions in categories that didn’t make a lot of sense.  Extra categories past five cost money so make sure you pick the ones that are best suited for your show.

Location:
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Description: Time-traveling robot Synthia tries to convince the roommates of the gravity of her mission and Jeff’s role in saving the future. Meanwhile, rumors of A-list film star Roy Jones’ untimely death may be greatly exaggerated.

It’s amazing to see something I worked on listed with The Guild and The Legend of Neil, as well as many shows that I’ve made friends with over the year.  Although we’ve struggled keeping a reliable release date for our show, it’s good to know that it was still worth doing.  Also, with any luck our third episode we’ll be online before the new year hits.

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