I already briefly said my piece about premiers in the thread proper, but this definitely provides food for thought. I’ll post my thoughts about everything addressed.
Timing: Summer is generally a more convenient time for projects, as students would be on their summer holidays and would have more time to work, since there wouldn’t be the pressures of school and study. Older FEE3s were earlier in the year as well.
Premiers:
The timing for me was pretty good since at 5pm GMT I was out of school and at home. However, I still feel like I’m missing out on something if I don’t watch the video live, which disincentives going back and watching the video later. Traditional videos can be watched whenever, and while premiers can also be watched whenever, the psychological feeling of missing out does affect things. Chatting with people while watching the video is nice, but maybe I’m just an old bore at the end of the day.
Project quantity:
Ever since FEBuilder came on to the scene, the amount of projects skyrocketed. They all have to be accommodated in some way or another. I’d be wary of extending the event too much: logistical burnout and viewer fatigue may kick in. I’d probably set the limit at around 14 days, two weeks: if the event lasted a whole month it would just feel dragged out by the end. Video length is also a part of this, as well.
Avenir is an extreme case, but many videos broke the hour mark. The most popular videos were short and snappy, such as Nuramon’s animation showcase. A large amount of the videos were also just unedited Twitch streams, with one incident coming to mind was a random Twitch bit scheme being advertised in the Olethian Princess video on Youtube. That is completely irrelevant to the video and should have been edited out. This all adds up to large videos that aren’t really reviewed for quality. Banning streams of submissions and forcing prerecorded videos would be extreme and alienate some contributors. Perhaps a team of video editors can be gathered to review Twitch streams so the actual video can be trimmed and polished, while the original content creator can still get their exposure with a livestream. This still leads to disjointed chat references that can’t be seen, though.
Communications: This is vital for running a good event. My own submission this year nearly had the wrong chapters recorded due to a memo not being sent with the project, and last year an outdated patch without documentation was sent instead of the correct one. Of Pandan’s three proposed solutions, I like idea #1, but expanded so everyone who has submitted a project get into a “backstage chat”, so to say. I typically just let Arch select an LPer himself because I don’t really know any personally. With an organisation chat, I could discuss details of a project with any LPer interested in LPing it without relying on a middleman who might forget to send something in by mistake. As for 2, FEE3 has always been traditionally dogged with delays, and unforeseen circumstances might force delays. FEE3 2017 got severely delayed due to a bad hurricane, for instance. I wouldn’t support 3 outside of special circumstances: having two videos for the same project showing largely the same content would be somewhat pointless. Being upstaged is bad, but improved co-ordination should mitigate upstaging.
Bringing in FE Youtubers: I wouldn’t be too enthused by this. They’d have to do it for the sake of the event and not just for a paycheque. Their own interests would lie elsewhere. We could reach out to them, yes, but we’ve done it before and their records have been spotty. I’d also be against having the videos scattered around the internet, since it would make things harder to find.
Advertising elsewhere: The community as a whole is a lot larger outside of FEU. FEE3 was officially supported by Serenes in 2016, but they don’t seem to have considered it worth their time and have since deleted the sub-forum the event was organised in. Still, I would support trying to advertise it elsewhere to get more attention. Restoring submissions from Serenes would be a good start, but that would require more middlemen in order to get the submissions back to Arch.
Foreign community participation: Language barrier. The event is run in English, and communication breakdown would be even more likely and severe if the prospective entrant did not know how to speak English. Entries from East Asia, Latin America, and anywhere else in the world should of course be welcome, but I’d say actively recruiting someone to facilitate entries from their respective communities would be difficult. They’d need to be competent at both English and Japanese/Chinese/Spanish/whatever, and I’d say it would be a logistical nightmare that wouldn’t be worth the effort. The videos should be exclusively in English, as that is the language of FEU. Non-English videos would severely turn off people from watching them. As a consequence, the creators wouldn’t be able to understand their project being played and so would not get any feedback. It’s awkward, and I wouldn’t consider it worth the trouble.
And that’s all of Pandan’s points. I want FEE3 to be successful. Next year will be the tenth annual FEE3. We should do something special, and make it an FEE3 to be remembered.