I find this very discouraging, as by so doing you are unfairly weighting yourThere's probably good counsel in your post, Dan.
vote. I will struggle on choosing a correct distribution of points,
but by tossing around 20's, you thus make my votes, in which contestants
differ by a few points, of trivial relative significance.
In the Stills, I usually give 20-20-20's to my favorite, and probably >16-16-16 to six or eight of my other favorites. And I do differentiate, especially among the top 12 or so, between excellent scores in the different categories: one might be 20-15-14 and another 14-15-20. In that Animations round, I think I gave Pool Shark close to 20-20-20, but I don't feel that I "stuffed the ballot box." I'm sure I gave >16-16-16 to two or three others, notably Rusty's Late.I've never done the math, but I suspect that I give out a uniform distribution of rankings, from near 0-0-0 to near 20-20-20. I'm wondering if from your post, you typically give out a normal distribution centered around 10-10-10, with just one or two 20-20-20's per year.
I quote Dan again:
Votes need to justify themselves. If A scores higher than B in categoryWell, for example, there was once an entry that looked just like a photograph of a group of people in bearksin working on building a temple. The problem is that these humans were all bald, pale, hairless, and identical septuplets. That problem wrecked the image for me, both in its artistic appeal, its attention to technical detail, and its theme. I did not rate it highly in any category. I felt guilty about my vote, as I was sure some voters would be swept away by its "looking just like a photograph."
C, it is because A is better than B in C, not because one had
a generally good feeling for A overall. Was Pool Shark an all-time
ground-breaking masterpiece in all three areas?
Perhaps one solution to "rogue voters" is for the IRTC staff to put more "experts" in the voting list for Animations, especially if we're only getting 10-15 entries.