Audio-Visual News: by Trish McAuslan AV-AAPS FAPS APSNZ EFIAP Coordinator of Audio-Visuals for PSNZ
Tauranga AV Salon Entries close on 10 June, so there is not a lot of time left to enter an AV. Because of the Covid-19 situation we have decided that judging will be done remotely, with the judges using video conferencing to make their final decisions. Information for this year’s Tauranga Salon is on their website: https:// taurangaphoto.nz/. Look under the heading Audio-Visual Salon.
321 AV Competition This is a ‘fun’ international competition for short audio-visuals which are less that 3 minutes 21 seconds long. This year there were 82 entries, including four from New Zealand. Other entries came from AV workers in Italy, Germany, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Ireland, Australia, France, Colombia, Austria and South Africa. Judging for this competition is unusual, with interested groups requesting the opportunity to judge the AVs. This year there were nine judging teams from Germany, Ireland, Italy, UK, Australia and New Zealand. We had planned to meet in April to judge but the Covid-19 lockdown meant a change to remote judging, which is what the other judging teams also had to do. The organisers sorted the AVs into 12 packets, each under 2GB for downloading by individuals. In the end 17 members of our group watched and judged all or some of the AVs.
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We came up with some problems. Not everyone had access to a Windows computer, so three of our members were only able to judge half of the entries; they had been entered as mp4s. Depending on how an AV was saved, and the security settings on some computers, some AVs could not be opened by an individual judge. We overcame these problems by averaging the scores from all the judges. Because so many people were judging, this process of averaging at the end worked well. We have sent our results to the organisers who are in Germany; they will collate the results from the other teams to make the overall placings. We enjoyed the experience and learnt or confirmed a few things along the way. Of most importance was being able to get your AV’s story across to the viewers. The narrations for some AVs were in a foreign language, and although we had a brief description of what the AV was about, sometimes that wasn’t enough for us to really understand the story. Some authors provided a translation of the script which was written on the slides. By reading the text we understood the story, but we didn’t have time to watch the images so the AV felt incomplete. Another interesting observation came from the judging results. The judges were asked to score 10 for the AVs that they thought were the best. Twenty-five AVs scored at least one
