People are rather angry when their shots are not accepted. Rather than giving advices, I will give a few reasons why I reject some shots. Some of these reasons are common to all moderators, while some are more specific to me. Of course, if I reject your shot, he may still be accepted; I'm only one of the moderators and some of them have different criterias.
DISCLAIMER: MODERATORS HAVE DIFFERENT REASONS TO REJECT/ACCEPT MOVIES. THESE ARE MINE AND MINE ONLY.
When we reject a movie, we have to choose from a list of reasons. Here are the reasons and how myself understand them.
- "your image quality did not match our standards". Self-explanatory. This usually happens when someone posts a shot from a divx rather than from a dvd/blueray. The image is blurry, with some pixels distortions, etc. Of course it is impossible to find a good quality for some underground classics. I do not even know if there is a version of Manos the Hands of Fate who doesn't look blurry or grainy. I rarely use this reason myself.
- "your shot featured unsuitable content (e.g. violence)" Self-explanatory. We don't need gore. And gore is usually quite boring. You can find much better shots in your favorite horror film than the gory ones.
- "A similar shot was already posted on whatthemovie, or you tried to repost a movie". Usually means that you have no luck and that someone (maybe you) posted a screenshot of the same movie recently. We do not want the same movie to appear too many times in the same, let's say, week. You might in this case consider to reupload this shot later. If you post multiple shots of the same movie, chances are that the first one will be accepted, and all other rejected with this reason.
- "the shot was from a tv-version of the film, from a trailer or the film is not yet available on DVD". Three different explanations: 1. The aspect ratio is wrong. 2. The movie is actually a TV movie, or a direct-to-video (e.g. the three Futurama specials, Starship Troopers 2&3, High School Musical 1&2, etc) 3. The movie is not available on DVD. Then how did you obtain the screenshot ? It is usually forbidden in movie theatres to bring a digital camera...
- "Your shot had black or white bars and/or did not fill the screen, or it was distorted" Usually self-explanatory. Black bars on the left&right side are ok if the movie is 1.333:1 (4/3), bars on the top&bottom are ok if the movie is 1.85:1 or 2.35:1, but black bars on ALL sides ? Please...
- "you did not make the snapshot yourself" Self-explanatory. I suspect something if the quality of the screenshot is flawless. Not so many people have blueray, so I usually suspect this is a promo shot taken from Google Images. In this case, I do a quick search on google, and if the image appears, then the movie is rejected.
- "the shot was not interesting enough or it was too hard to recognize" The first explanation is "boooring". This is imho the most subjective reason so I will not make any attempt to explain it further. "it was too hard to recognize" is something that I myself use frequently. An important thing to me is that the movie must be known. What does this mean ? If very few people have even seen the movie, then even fewer will recognize the shots. How do I know if a movie is known ? Well it must satisfy one of these criterias : 1. If the movie has more than 2000 votes on imdb 2. If it is from a very well known director and/or writer
The second criterion is really for classic movies. As an exemple, Life of Oharu, considered one of the greatest films of all times by movie critics, has only 985 votes. If someone posts a shot from this movie, or similar classics, be sure that it will not be rejected (or at least not for being too difficult to recognize)
If a movie fails these two criterias, then chances are I will reject it, except on some occasions: if the shot contains a well-known actor (it is not sufficient for the movie to have a well-known actor, he must be in the shot), or if I considered it a great shot.
This may be considered too harsh a criterion, but I think it is important. This is to prevent movies like 10967, that nobody solved (this movie has 72 votes, is from a underground director that has done nothing else, with no known actor)
Thank you, Nimmy, for stating your criteria so clearly and comprehensibly!
It leaves me with only one question/remark concerning "it was to hard to recognize" where you state a movie should have more than 2000 imdb votes: For a long time I didn't even have an imdb account and still, now I opened one a few months ago, I haven't voted for all the movies I've seen, especially films that aren't shown in cinema at the moment or aren't "classic" classics but still well known because they get regular re-runs on TV (christmas, anyone? :-) ). Plus I've noticed that foreign movies, particularly older ones, sometimes don't have many votes, either, although they are fairly well known, too (in contrast to the names of their directors, writers or actors probably). Which means: Of course, the number of votes enables you to judge whether a film is widely known or not but it doesn't necessarily reflect the total number of people who have seen the movie and might recognize it – some of them might be on wtm, who knows? ;-) I don't remember who posted this a few days ago but I fully agree with them that sometimes you are quite happy to solve a "rare" movie especially when you are not able to recognize snapshots with >1000 solvers. Even more, in these former cases I'm always happy that there are some allies out there who liked the film, above all the one that bothered to buy the dvd! So I think "2000" might be a bit to strict (although I understand that you have to draw a line for yourself when judging so many stills)- and: sometimes real movie gems are made by unknown directors - so please, when a snapshot fails your iron rules but is very nice/funny/poignant/inspiring … (like mine :p), nevertheless: Have mercy!
My 2000 rule is, as you may have guessed, not strict. 2000 is a limit where I admit that a movie is widely known, even if I haven't heard of it. If a movie has less than 2000 votes, then I look deeper. Being french myself, many movies I have seen in my youth have less than 2000 votes on imdb. When you find a difficult movie in wtm, you're happy. If you try very hard to find a movie, with no success, and then learns that virtually nobody had any chance to find it cause it is too obscure, then it is frustrating. To make wtm great is to find the right balance. Foreign (as in not english) movies are a problem. Some french movies (e.g. Amelie) are widely known. But there are a lot of movies that almost everyone in France has seen but that are completely unknown to the rest of the planet (I usually look at the DVD details to know what category a movie is on. If it was only released in one country, then I consider that it will be unknown to all others). I don't know whether I must accept or reject such movies, cause it is quite clear that only french people (and those with great imdb/google skills) will find them. Usually, I accept foreign movies with very few votes. Most of the movies I reject are B-movies from the US that, according to the 500 users from the IMDB which voted for them, are not good.
Why would you ever argue with "considering this one was accepted" ??? Do you really think moderators look back at the thousands of previously accepted images and say "I would reject that one, but look we accepted #1234 and #4352 so clearly it would be unfair to reject it"... Like we have time to spend hours deciding for every shot.
Yours was rejected, it could probably have been accepted. Get over it. Once again, there are way too many uploads so we have to reject plenty. And in some cases the process is arbitrary. This has already been stated about ten times. It's still true.
If it hurts you so bad then I guess the only solution is that you stop uploading entirely. I guess it wouldn't be a good thing for us since you tend to post good ones but if it makes you bitter for a whole week whenever one of your carefully and lovingly chosen picture gets rejected then it's probably the best thing to do (obviously an even better thing to do would be to take it more moderately but that's apparently not possible).
It's only fair te insist on a 10 page report explaining why the still was rejected, giving insight in the voting process. Checking 10000 stills is the least you can do for those 5 minutes of work it took to capture the still and submit it.
Right LordMyst, 62 of my picture were rejected and I'm still alive and kicking. :D Muten ... your picture is boring, mine isn't. :P ... Just kidding! Bap2008 ... I like that picture, looks even good in a 200% zoom. :-/
To all who get (a little) annoyed ... let go of your ego and live on. :P
thx for the detailed info Nimmy. I just started uploading 3 days ago and tryed to remember your guidelines. first shot was accepted :) second one is in queue. its not as good as the first but im prepared for the disappointment i think ;)
I submitted a few stills, some of them were approved, some were not. Most of the time, I got no problem with that, for example if you think the still is boring, it's your opinion and you explained very well how difficult it is to judge what is boring and what is not!
But, among my submissions, some were rejected because the image quality didn't match your standards. My problem is: these stills were made from the original DVD! So, I need some help, what can I do to improve the quality? Am I doing something wrong? I use VLC, I remove the black bars...
Any answer would be appreciated, I'd like to contribute more to this site and maybe I need to improve my contribution!
@ Shayah: you remove the black bars using a picture editing software? maybe when you save them with this programm you reduce the quality. try to change the settings when saving. just a guess...
as we say in germany: wer lesen kann, ist klar im vorteil: "Black bars on the left&right side are ok if the movie is 1.333:1 (4/3), bars on the top&bottom are ok if the movie is 1.85:1 or 2.35:1, but black bars on ALL sides ? Please..."
@joma: The black bars on the pictures you linked to are insignificant. They do not reduce the size of the real image when displayed on whatthemovie so it's not really a problem. The real problem is when a picture doesn't fill a whole dimension of the frame (and by "a whole dimension" I mean "almost a whole dimension"... which the examples given do).
Why are these two shots rejected? It were my first three uploads so I was disappointed to see that only one was approved. I would really like to get a reason why.
I understand when shots with a 5 stars or lower ranking get deleted, but both shots got reasonable good ratings. The first won got a 6,66 (love the score) and the second one got a 5,93. And both shots can't be rejected for the given reasons. It were shots from a dvd that I took myself, there is no unsuitable content, no similar shots, I think I got the bars right (the one that was approved had the same size and bars). They aren't hard to recognize and weren't immediatly obvious. In the first one the lead actor is very recognizable (even in the reflection), this combined with the shot of the city made it pretty recognizable. The second shot would only been known by people who have seen the movie, this is shocking ending. It weren't obscure titles either.
So I really would like to know why they were rejected so I can adjust it or take it into account for future shots.
Sneaker, this is a 10 month old thread :) When Nimmy listed those reasons, there was no such thing as New Submissions, etc..
The reasons he has listed are for when the images were just submitted to a "jury" of moderators, and they, and only they, decided whether or not the images were submitted to the site.
Now, its completely different. You are up against everyone else in new submissions, and your shots wont make it if there are other higher-scoring shots there. Simple as that.
There is the chance that a moderator may still put your shot through manually though if they find it interesting, but this is his/her choice, for reasons they dont have to explain :)
@Sneaker : Post above yours are about WTM1, the approval system was completely different back then. Moderators were the only ones to decide whether a shot should be accepted or rejected. Now with WTM2, (almost) everyone can vote in the New Submissions section. But when you upload a shot, don't expect it to reach the Feature Films just because its average rating was above 5. This is not how it works. Each day, only the top 30 (or so) shots are automatically promoted to Feature Films. This means your shot can have a 7.5 average and still not make it... just because that day the 30 top shots were all higher than 7.7...
The explanations in the topic are old. Really old. The system was completely different back then, so you can't really take reference to that. WhatTheMovie 2 started a while later and shots are now approved either automatically by high ratings (about 7.5+, but that depends) or if one of us mods just think it should go to FF. And the reasons for that are now mostly based on the aesthetics of the shot, or how we like to call it, the "awesomeness".
So much for the explaination. In fact you don't have to worry about that stuff. Just upload good shots and hope they make it, like all the others do. We all have lots of rejected shots and we all learn from that.
I didn't realise there this was only for the older WTM. There was only three threads I could find with the word rejected in it and this one sounded the best for my question. My apoligies.
So for a shot to get approved in WTM2, it has to get a rating as high as possible so it gets into the top 30. So it has nothing to do with the shot itself. Just bad timing and try again with the same shot a couple of weeks later and hope for higher votes?
Well it does have something to do with the shot itself, because the better the shot, the higher the rating should be. Doesnt always work like that in practice, but its the way it should be. Even lower scoring shots have a good chance of getting through if the shot is interesting / high quality etc.
Dont worry about the scores etc. so much and just concentrating on submitting the best images you can. And like Deviant says, accept that some shots might not make it, even if you love the shot. We all have rejected shots that we were sure would make it, its the nature of the beast :)
i'm almost at 50% ups/rejected.. as a matter of fact i'm making it my goal to reach 50%, think my last 2 shots have a good chance of making it to the ff's ;)
yeah ... i also have this goal but it seems to be a long way for me ... i have to get 22 accepted and no rejected :D ... but it is very hard when shots with ratings over 7 got rejected ... but still trying to reach this goal :)