Event E2/Proposal Peanutswench
While this entry did not make the shortlist, you are welcome to continue discussing & planning to run your event after the E2 event period. A new thread has been started for non-shortlist entry discussion.
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This is an entry for E2: The Event Event. |
| Peanutswench Bedtime Story for Piggy Ariadne |
A forum based event to create and illustrate a piratey children’s book to help Piggy Ariadne sleep at night.
| Player Profile | Timeline | ||
| Audience | Writers, artist, or children’s book lovers. | Elapsed time | Event will run the full three weeks (forum post on the 24th, submissions accepted after one week), the final two days will be reserved for judging. |
| Unit of Entry | Individual entrants on ALL oceans. | Participant Time | Time will depend on each entrant. I would guess the first stage would require around 1-2 hours. The second might take them a few hours a day depending on the individual. |
| Expected Participation | Unlimited participants, but one entry per forum account. Estimated participation less than that of Bia’s Halloween writing contest | Judging Time | Stage one judging will take one day. Stage 2 judging will take two days. |
| Platform | Forum with wiki support | ||
Contents
Details
Event Description
Late one night I was sailing with my dear mate Piggy Ariadne. My poor B-nav caused an unfortunate incident between my ship and some rocks. We made it to shore but she’s now afraid to sail with me again! She also has terrible nightmares of wrong turns, cannon balls smashing the hull, and being seasick from spinning around in whirlpools. The residents of Jorvik are upset with me for upsetting the poor pig, so I need your help. What I need is a nice piratey children’s book story with a happy ending. It’s the only thing that'll help the poor piggy sleep.(Small rough sample of the forum post)
Object: Contestants are to create an original illustrated children’s story. The story must include pirates and have a happy ending. All artwork must be either original works, cut and paste, in game images, or personally taken photographs. It must have the look and feel of a book for children around the age of 6.
Children’s books traditionally have a wide variety of mediums being used from collage to finger paints. For example, Dr Seuss’s illustrations are far different from the black and white sketches of Shel Silverstein. In this contest, an entrant can also use any medium to illustrate their story. Drawing something by hand has just as much validity as using screen caps from in game. The goal is to make the illustrations fit the story. So if someone excels at art and not in writing his or her entry will probably be a little more art heavy. If a great writer is like me and can’t draw a stick figure, they will enter a writing heavy entry with simpler yet complementing art. For those that aren’t fantastic at either one, they can still win the contest by putting together a good showing of the two elements. The end result is what will be judged. Effort and creativity will shine through.
Stage one: Contestants have almost one week to submit an original cover, title, and a brief (50 words or less) description of their story’s plot. The cover art must be what they would imagine their book would look like (between 350 and 500 pixels). I will create a separate entry thread where they will post their cover and the plot summery. The judges have the overnight after the deadline to weed the contestants down to the top 30.
Stage two: The top 30 entrants set out to actually write their story. Contestants will have almost two weeks to write a short story and illustrate it. To accomplish a book-like feel, each contestant will create images and then add portions of the story text to each image as with typical children’s books. They will use a slide presentation/website/online photo album to display the pages of their book. The full story (beginning, middle, and end) must be contained on the images. There’s a minimum of five images or “pages,” not including the cover image, for each story (stressing quality over quantity). Contestants can use PowerPoint, Flash, or single images uploaded to an album on photobucket or another hosting site, as long as judges have the ability to follow the story in a sequential, page-by-page manner.
No matter how they create the book, they are responsible for making sure their book is hosted online. This can be done with http://www.photobucket.com/ or a site like http://geocities.yahoo.com/. This way the judges can easily “flip through the pages” of each entry. Once they have found a host, they must email a link to the story to sleepingpigstory@gmail.com. I will verify that I received the email within a reasonable time limit. If a contestant is unable to find a host, they must contact me at least one day prior to the deadline. I will then host the story for them, though this is more of a “just in case” measure. I'll also be online for the last 2 hours of the contest in case of late entries. I’ll compile the entries and send them off to the judges.
During the event I'll make sure no questions go without an answer.
Judging
There will be 7 judges. Each must commit to being available during the judging window for each stage. This way the judging phase of the competition will take as little time as possible. At least one will come from each ocean and none from the same flag (volunteers). I’ll make an effort to find judges that can put personal feelings aside and have a positive reputation for honesty on the ocean they represent. Also, judges will not know who wrote what story for stage two because the links to the entries will come to them via an email from me.
Stage one scoring: They will judge the entries on a scale of zero to ten (zero being booched and ten being incredible). I’ll add all the scores for each entrant together for a total stage one score. The total score from all the judges will determine if they’re in the top 30 and move on to stage two. If there is a tie at 30th place (assuming they don’t have a score of zero), all those with that score will also move on to stage two.
Judges will be looking for the following: Creative cover art fitting the story, an interesting plot, correct spelling and grammar, effort, and overall feel of the entry.
Stage two scoring: It will consist of the judges ranking their top 15 choices. I will then assign a score to each judges ranking. The scores will go as follows: 1st: 100 points, 2nd: 80 points, 3rd: 65 points, 4th: 50 points, 5th: 40 points, 6th: 30 points, 7th: 25 points, 8th: 20 points, 9th: 15 points, 10th: 10 points, 11th: 8 points, 12th: 6 points, 13th: 4points, 14th: 2 points, and 15th: 1 point. I’ll take the sum of all the judges scoring for each entrant for a total stage two score.
Judges for this stage will be looking for the following: Adherence to the rules and format, creative art, an interesting plot, originality, correct spelling and grammar, effort, and overall children’s book feel. Contestants can make the “book” as fancy as they want, but the judges are looking for quality stories and illustrations, not bells and whistles. They are being judged on their artistic and creative skills not the abilities of the program they use. People have a much better shot at winning if a judge could say, “I would love to read this to my six year old daughter/son.” However they won’t do well if the judge thought, “Wow it’s so flashy and well done, but my daughter would be scared by a bunny back from the grave on a murderous rampage.” They don’t have to be the most skilled writer/artist in the world if they can effectively use both to come up with a creative story that’s a pleasure to read.
Final event scoring: Their score from stage one will be added to stage two’s score to create their final score and determine their final place. As you can see this means that Stage two is what the bulk of their final score will consist of, but a strong/weak performance in stage one could change what place they end up with.
The top 4 entrants will have their story viewed by three 6-9 year olds who love pirates and stories. The children will rank his/her favorites and a score based on that rank will be added to the final total. First gets 50 points, second 25 points, and third will get 5 points (based on who they liked best collectively). In the event of a tie, the children will determine the winner. This way, a member of the target audience (children) could influence the scores of the top 4 if they're close enough.
Prizes
I believe based on recent literary and artistic contests, that this one is capable of being a familiar event. In that case I would offer a Pink Octo (to match Piggy Ariadne) for first place and the following prizes would be for a place lower than what they are listed here with the last group being 9th-10th. In the event of a familiar not being awarded to the winner of this event, a possible list of prizes would be:
- 1st: Sleeping pig
- 2nd: Sleeping piglet
- 3rd: Renamed and painted sloop (Sleeping Pigfish)
- 4th: Renamed sloop (Sleeping Hogfish)
- 5th: Pink and white feather trinket
- 6th: Pink and white ribbon trinket
- 7th: Fancy book desk
- 8th - 10th: Paper and quill, table, and a plain chair.
All contestants that make it to stage two will receive one full bottle of whisking potion to help them find a quiet place on their ocean for a nap.
Help Required
Volunteer Assistance
Other than judges, no additional people need to volunteer.
OM Assistance
I would need OMs to sticky my thread and give me the special event prizes sometime during the two weeks of the event. I would be providing the furniture, whisks, ships, and yet to be added prizes.
Workshop Coaching
My goal during the workshop would be to look for potential problems and address some of my concerns so the contest runs as smoothly as possible. I want to make sure the time constraint wouldn't be too challenging for some contestants. Should I adjust the due date for the first stage to allow more time for the second? In past competitions only one of these elements was being judged, here we have both. Should I also offer a small prize for individual stage scores (something like a single piece of furniture or a small trinket)? I’d want to work with the mentors to see if the number of people moving to stage two needed to be adjusted. A run through of the final draft post that would hit the forums would be important. Meaning I'd ask for the workshop mentors to help look for loopholes I didn’t close within the rules, and make sure the directions are clear and easy to follow.
History
Previous Similar Events
I don't know of any. The closest thing to this event would probably be caption contests (Avatar Art contest), where a single image and a small amount of text is merged based on the theme of the event. Some contests allowed for cut-and-past art, or for personal pictures. This one would be open to all mediums. There have also been several story competitions such as Bia’s Halloween event. I’m not aware of one that required illustration and story writing to be merged.
Qualifications
Previous event experience includes: I organized and ran an ocean wide pirate slave auction that netted over 1 million poe to be used for the Nu Casino Day of Events. Along with a partner, I created the concept for the Nu events, and helped run its 5 non-tournament contests. These events included two forum based contests (ship rename and song). While in Epic I ran a flag forum based event with a similar point style of judging for screenshots with the theme of “what not to wear”. (Screenshots of an entrants own pirate looking hideous on the docks of Alpha). I also get bored and can be found running/helping smaller flag/crew based events determined to keep me in the poor house. :-p
