VF48Hours Lockdown Forum

This sort of thing happens from time to time because people think it will influence the judges, which it doesn't.

Anna directed SPACE PSUSY, which is why that film has no reviews. I'm gutted because I planned on going to that heat, if I had I would have given honest reviews to all the films. But yeah this happens, in my heat there have been heaps of reviews but most come from my team so my film has f all reviews where as some films have 7 because friends of the film makers reviewed just the one film.

It's all voluntary though so I don't expect this sort of thing to change any time soon. Fingers crossed when the films all get released more reviews will pop up.

Yea i just feel for the other teams in the heat. like why go to the trouble of making an account just to review your own film??? just a bit of a bit of a pain.

One team in Heat 12 was annoyed that they were accused of sexism so they've got 2 perfect reviews up for the sole purpose of responding to the critics.

We kind of had the opposite in heat 5. A couple of teams rolled super heavy so they took out the audience faves (which sucks, but what can you do) but none of those people posted reviews so the review site is mainly pretty honest (so far, anyway).

Yeah we had some school teams show up with way more than their allotted 10 seats, and then do a deal with each other to vote for audience favorite for each other, so they got 2/3 of the slots in our heat. Bit stink for the teams who showed up with the proper numbers that it can be swayed that easily. Suppose you've got to give them credit for playing the game though.

And then nobody here writes reviews, I reviewed every film in both heats and a couple of other folks did, and one of my team mates did our heat too, which means other films have 3-4 and ours has 1, lol.

Can't help but think there must be some way to tie in audience favorite to the review site, to encourage reviews and stop the audience fave cheating. Like by having a bunch of unique codes to hand out (the set number for how many seats teams had plus a set number of extras for others attending) and making people log on to write reviews. You could make it so that the numbers are tied to a team or something so people can't review their own films, and you just enter the code and it lets you give 3 ratings. Kind of like the wrap up password for team comment.

Some people would probably try to take down the films that were better than them, but I reckon something like this would be more robust. Leave the heat unlocked for 24 hours, and then lock it again to set the favorites, and then unlock it after regional finals for anyone to write reviews. Just a few thoughts.

It's a bit of a conflict because it's great to have lots of people in the heat, but then on the other hand it sucks that some of the teams that can make that happen (by bringing far more people along than they should) then mess up the voting by being dicks.

School teams definitely aren't the whole problem, but having them in their own school team only heats seems like a pretty simple idea - I'm not sure why the school teams that didn't belong (judging things alphabetically) in our heat were moved there but it seemed to be a special accommodation made for them by the organisers.

School teams are moved around to put them in the earlier heats each evening so they can get home at a reasonable hour. Out of town teams play on the weekend so they can travel if they want. Those represent 99% of non alphabetical changes in Auckland at least.

As for reviews if you get in touch with Nick Burridge he can police the review - check ip addresses and emails etc to see if they're cheating the system. They don't count for anything in the judging, neither do audience favourites really for that matter, but it helps if you want to take a look at the best or most popular of a region.

Having seen every film in Auckland I wish I was any good at writing reviews, and had time to do so. Bring back reviewer awards I say!

As I've mentioned previously, watching people write glowing reviews of their own films is one of my favourite things about the competition.

Well i don't really mind people reviewing their own films as a joke. (this happend with my team last year but has since been removed) but you should really be using that time to review the other teams hard work as well. There's a definite art to writing a good review so i'm super keen to seem them bring back a reviewer award in one form or another.

There is actually a button to be able to add a "team comment" now, so writing your own reviews there just lets the whole team down really.

I do think the team comment needs at least another 100 - 200 characters to the limit though.

in reply to CraigWB:

Oh for sure! As an Ultra 48 team a big chunk of our team comment was taken up by the link to the previous film. That along with how Metal Wizard tends to waffle on meant it had to be edited heavily just to fit.

That's a really good point. im not sure where the suggestion box is for this type of thing, but definitely upping the character limit would be great. also a place for team Bio's would be cool.

in reply to Scott Doar:

That's a really good point. im not sure where the suggestion box is for this type of thing, but definitely upping the character limit would be great. also a place for team Bio's would be cool.

Alright, it's doubled. 1000 characters. Is that enough?

in reply to Nick Burridge:

Niiiiiiiccccccceeeeee.

I just noticed a similar thing in Hamilton heat 3. 1 film has 10 glowing reviews whilst the other films have no reviews yet.

Do people actually think the judges take notice of the reviews?

I can only speak from my own experience of Hamilton judges, and they most certainly don't take notice of the reviews during the judging process. For exactly that reason.