If you run a contest, whether you're judging it yourself or "hiring" judges, it needs to be done correctly.
You do not ever pick a graphic or piece of writing based solely on the fact that you liked it. That isn't how judging works.
A judge must have guidelines to follow to both judge and critique the pieces in the contest. First and foremost the contestants must follow the prompt for the round and the judges must understand what was asked for as far as the prompt goes.
If you pick a round winner who didn't follow the prompt, no matter how epic their graphic/writing is, it makes the other contestants feel as if they wasted their time following the prompt and why bother?
Be up front with what you expect and how the point system works. If contestants don't know what's expected of them they don't know what exactly to do and will feel slighted if the system is suddenly thrown at them and they were following directions for a round but didn't do what was expected points-wise.
I know a couple of friends who are currently entered in a contest and so far the person running it has awarded more points to people who's graphics didn't follow the prompt or were badly executed. And her reasoning for it and points system are wacky.
Round 2's prompt was this ( screen shot from the contest book):
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These are promotional posters/banners:
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What I saw in that contest made me scratch my head. Things thrown on a banner and just a show title. Not enough info to form any opinion of the show. No time, day or a channel. Yet, the ones who did something similar to the above posters scored lower than the crapfest I saw.
And the winner used black and white images for the characters and the rest of the banner was startlingly orange. Not to mention, the images of the people were squished and fuzzy. Yet the judge LOVED the graphic and gushed about how fabulous the design was.
I don't think the person running the contest has any idea what a monologue is either, having your character essentially introduce themselves is not a monologue. A monologue is a long speech given by a character in a movie or tv show. Not introducing themselves to people, it's them giving a speech about something. (Watch Hamlet, his 'to be or not to be' speech is a monologue)
So in conclusion, if you're going to run a contest of any kind know what you're doing. This contest is a joke. (and no I'm not going to name it cause that just isn't fair)
