AIM 2021 begins! Submission thread: https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1468445
The Art-Inspired Music Contest is happening this year on Friday April 16, 2021. In this compo, you create a piece of music inspired by art from the Newgrounds Art Portal. More details and the rules will follow in the official submission thread (to be posted on the start of the compo), but they're probably going to be the same as the previous years' rules, so check out last year's submission thread here for an example of what to expect!
You can start searching for art, but you cannot start creating your entry before the submissions thread is posted on April 16, 2021. For now, there are a few matters that need to be addressed now:
Considerations
There's a couple of things I want to touch on for this year's compo - judging and voting for the fan favourite.
Fan Favourite
I do love the idea of having a fan favourite vote, but it doesn't seem like not a lot of people actually vote. Thankfully, we've managed to get a Fan Favourite winner by default when all other contenders were actual winners, but it would be nice to have a system that was a little more fan controlled. I remember touching on this last year, but I'm thinking of making it so that people can vote on more than one entry simultaneously. The question is whether it should be a ranked voting (eg. award 1, 2 or 3 points to three of the entries) or equally weighted votes (eg. you can vote for 3 but all votes are worth 1 point). I might lean more towards the ranking system as I think it might allow for a clearer winner. What are your thoughts?
Judging
Judging in previous years was usually pretty lax. Here's my previous post about how we judged the entries for 2020's compo. While the current system does allow for a quicker selection of winners, it doesn't really allow for all participants to easily get feedback for their entries. It's something I do think about a lot in regards to the competition. Feedback is great, but giving decent feedback can be extremely time consuming and if rushed, then it just becomes about the first impressions of an entry, which I don't know if that makes for a necessarily good merit of judgement. Either way, I've previously been super iffy about implementing a straight-up points rating system. Judges on AIM could use their own points system in the past, but it was never put in place across the entire panel. Maybe it would be good to have a standard on that front.
Judges
As per usual, AIM requires three other judges to evaluate all the entries. UPDATE: We now have a full judging panel, thanks! @Troisnyx has stepped forward to be a judge again this year, so we just need two more judges to fill the panel.
Promo Art
This year, Troisnyx has also offered to do the promo art, so thank you!
Prizes
So far, prizes have not been super clear this year, but generally more stuff gets offered during the submission period, so that may be the case once more. As per usual, winners get to be on the AIM compilation album, but aside from that, there's not a lot that has been confirmed yet. If you have some ideas for prizes or want to donate prizes for this contest, please let me know in the comments.
I hope to see you all participating, in one way or another. Remember, don't start your entry until the submission thread is posted!!!
Anonymous-Frog
Are they any rules involving picking your own art?
Random-storykeeper
In the past, no, but the part of the essence of the compo is to highlight works of art created by other artists in the Art Portal. It is still allowed (provided the art is from the Newgrounds art portal and satisfies all other requirements), but discouraged.