Declining videos isn’t very fun

It’s going to happen. Videos don’t make the cut. I tend to judge them on guidelines that I’ve never actually listed out, so it’s easy to understand why people submit these kinds of videos.

But anyways, just because a video doesn’t make the cut doesn’t mean the person didn’t spend a lot of time on their video. Newbies are pretty much guaranteed to not get in even if they spend 4 hours on their video because their moves aren’t up to polish. Mind you a newbie could get in if they spent a long time on their video if every other aspect of their video was way up there.

When I first started Decknique, I sent a brief message with every video I declined to let them know why I declined the video and what they could do to improve. But doing this to everybody, people get frustrated and angry at me for not liking a video they put to much work into.

Maybe I wasn’t tactful enough. But I can’t write page-long essays for every video that gets submitted.

So I stopped letting people know. If it was something small/simple that I thought they could easily change I might tell them still, but I soon stopped letting anybody know. Unless they ended up submitting their video again in a couple weeks (even though the submission guide clearly says to not do it). Then I might tell them why it wasn’t accepted it the first time around.

You could also just ask and I’ll give you my honest opinion. But I can be a pretty harsh critic, so be ready for it haha.

It would be a great idea to list submission guidelines before they submit their video so common mistakes aren’t always submitted.

Also when going through all these cardistry submissions, it gets easy to be frustrated about repetitive aspects — for instance when the same song is used in so many videos (many of which get declined — for other reasons), repetitive moves, not having any distinguishing feature in a video…

Theory11 has a very hidden feature that you can actually see which of your submissions are in the queue. This was for the theory11 trilogy contest because people kept on asking if we received their submission.

But seriously.. IF THE SUBMIT FORM GIVES THE GREEN LIGHT AND SAYS “SUCCESS”, WE GOT YOUR VIDEO. Yeesh.

But then this queue listing isn’t a good long-term feature. You see, when we accept your video, it’s not listed in the submission queue. It’s now in the content database, just without a post date. Hmm… I guess it’d be a good idea to tweak the queue listing to show your accepted content that hasn’t been listed yet.

Also it might be possible to show which of your submissions have been declined. And maybe also adding that “dreaded note.” 

Well writing a blog seems to be useful after all - easy feature that will help things out.