New Award and Rule Change for New Series

We have two more changes to announce that we think everyone will be happy with. We have added a new award and made a slight rule change for the New Series category. 

BEST SUBTITLED MACHINIMA

Honestly, I don’t  know why we didn’t think to add Best Subtitled Machinima to SimsFilmFest prior to now. There has been a misconception for a number of years that SimsFilmFest is only for projects that have voice actors. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, Fadhil Yudhawanto of Bahariawans Studio made Masters in 2010 with a subtitled entry called Tonight With. He entered a number of subtitled projects since then, the last two being in 2015, Shinohana (TS4) and Shura (TS3). Hopefully this dispells the myth that subtitled machinima directors will never make Masters.

There are a lot of well made subtitled machinima projects out there, and it takes a certain kind of skill and patience to work with all the subtitles where they match up with the machinima where they are supposed to. Just because someone doesn’t have voice actors doesn’t mean that they didn’t work as hard on a project as someone with voice actors. It’s long past time that we acknowledge the work that goes into these projects.

Just as we offer an award for Best Foreign Machinima, for those films not in English, when there are enough entries, we are going to start recognizing the Best Subtitled Machinima. Hopefully this will encourage the community to share more of these projects as well as watch them.

BEST NEW SERIES RULE CHANGE

The way that Best New Series has always worked is that it has to be a brand new machinima, and it has to be the first episode. That worked well when we were doing things twice a year. Moving to a once a year format has complicated that a bit.

Since we are now taking entries that are made throughout the year between festivals, defining “New Series” has become a bit clouded. With SimsFilmFest going to one season a year, it would mean that people would have to create a new series that specifically debuts at SimsFilmFest. No other category is required to debut their series at the festival so some allowances need to be made for Best New Series. We really want things to be more “festival” and less “school work” if that makes sense.

In order for a series to qualify as a New Series it must meet 2 criteria:

• It must have no more than 5 episodes
• No episodes of the series have been submitted to SimsFilmFest prior.

If anyone takes a look at the Series page of the playlist you will notice that we have full playlists up for the New Series and each episode has been added to the YouTube Playlist. Each episode does NOT count as a separate entry. The series as a whole counts as the entry.

How is this going to affect voting? There are two options. 

• Watch and vote for the first episode as before
• Watch all episodes in the playlist and base your vote upon the series as a whole. We really hope everyone chooses this option.

Again, we hope this opens the door a little wider for people to participate. Questions, comments, and concerns are always welcome.