JUDGING THE GCA: HOW IT WORKS

Well the first two days of judging is over. Time for another blog entry!

I might as well talk a little bit about the slightly daunting task the judging task is and how we're doing it. There are two basic steps judges have to take. The first step, of course, is to narrow each category down to 48 finalists (4 per category) and 12 winners.

This poses some complications of its own.

There are 315 individual nominations between 12 categories. Assuming an average of 20 minutes a video/nomination, that's 105 hours of raw episodic footage. More than 4 and a half straight days, or 5 hours a day for 21 days. That's not including any additional time spent on the evaluation process. Everyone involved is a volunteer, so this isn't exactly realistic.

So let's talk about the process.

As mentioned in the previous post, there are 7 judges, including Robert. I want you to break that down mentally as 6 and 1, as Robert's a special case.

Each of the 6 judges will be charged with 2 Primary categories each. In these, the judge will watch and evaluate every entry and narrow down to 4 finalists. In addition, each judge will be charged with 2 Secondary categories (which are another judge's Primaries). Again, 4 finalists each.

At this point, every category will have been reviewed separately by 2 separate judges. There will be somewhere between 4 and 8 finalists. At this point, these 2 judges will debate and narrow these down to 4. If an agreement can't be reached, (i.e. each judge had 4 entirely different finalists) then the finalists could be extended to a maximum of 6.

Now, Robert has decided to watch all 315 nominations himself and weigh in on the finalists as well. In this way, the effects of any one person's bias will be minimized.

The second step is voting. Most votes wins. Second most becomes the runner-up. Simple as that... Okay, so not quite so simple as each judge now has to watch any entries they hadn't already in order to make the vote, but that's how the cookie crumbles.

Do you have any questions about this process? I'm planning quite a few more of these, so hit me up! I'll do my best to answer any questions or criticisms you might have.