2010 Vocaloidism Awards – Part 4

moar Bunnychan :3

The 5-act play that is our Vocaloidism Awards is nearing its conclusion.  We have another round of awards to announce that you all voted upon.  Not only that, the blog team gets to have a little fun, and I get to write serious highbrow prose.

All that happens below the cut, but first, don’t forget to vote on our Big 3.  The polls close on January 30.

Vocaloidism Technical Awards

These are awards that we were not able to put to a public vote, either because there wasn’t enough space or the category was much too silly.  Instead, the blogger that proposes the award gets to name its recipient.  Here are some of your Technical Award Winners.

Congratulations to all of our winners.  We may have more in our finale if time permits.  Now, before we mention our Lifetime Achievement recipient, let’s finish our old business and name our second batch of poll results.  Another 1,500 votes were cast.  Add that to Part 1’s result, and the ongoing polls for Week 3, we have over 5,000 total votes.  That is an awesome number.  Anyway, your winners are

That 2.06% difference comes out to 6 votes, which is the third-closest margin of victory in our Series’ short history.  All 5 of our nominees did very well, and if any of them do as well as 2009’s nominees are doing, 2011 is going to kick all kinds of butt.

Our #1 album gets upset, albeit barely, but that’s another award for DECO*27.

And that’s three for DECO*27, who currently has more awards than anyone else.  I honestly thought Chaining Intention would do better.  Oh well.

While the announcement of the Appends is the technical winner, having English-language Miku is also a very big deal.  These two stories give us a glimpse as to what Crypton’s business strategy is going to be moving forward.  No matter the result, it’s going to be exciting.

So we had four close races in Part 2, but Part 3 is shaping up to be something special.  As this is posted, Song of the Year has 3 viable candidates separated by a total of less than 10 votes.  The lead has changed hands regularly, and it’s shaping up to be the closest race ever.  You have until January 30 to change the balance.

Lifetime Achievement Award

And now we come to the one award that honors not just successes of a year, but a career of success in the realm of Vocaloid culture. It’s strange to say “career” since the software is still only 7 years old, but for this year’s honoree, there’s been more than enough success for 10 careers.

Yu Higuchi is not a songwriter or a Producer, at least not by “trade”.  By trade, Yu Higuchi is a computer programmer, and has quite possibly revolutionized not only Vocaloid culture, but the realm of animation itself.

Higuchi is responsible for programming MikuMikuDance for the Vocaloid Promotional Video Project in 2008.  This, without the Vocaloid context, is already something to behold.  We’re talking about a free 3D animation program that requires very little knowledge about animation or computers and very little artistic skill.  Yes, you only had  stock characters to work from, but as an entry-level program, and at no cost, you can’t do much better. Throw in the connection to Vocaloids and Nico Nico Douga, and you have the quintessential tool for PV creation.

In less than 3 years, MMD has evolved and so have the videos.  We’ve now come to the point where you can’t tell it’s MMD without someone tagging it as such.  When I said two weeks ago that the field for PV of the Year could have easily have been doubled, that may have been an understatement, and it is due in large part to Higuchi’s creation.

Amazing stuff, right?  Those are just the basic applications.  There has been uses with Augmented Reality, mods from 3D Custom Girl, and now there have been commercial software releases, too. And then, 2010 happened.

Three major advances in MMD technology occurred last year.  MMDAgent put a Vocaloid spin on the future of the digital personal assistant.  It still has a bit to go before it becomes a necessity, but it’ll slowly get there.  The big ones were the ability to hook up to Kinect and compatibility with NVIDIA’s goggles.  Now, not only could you theoretically create and act out your own movies without ever leaving your living room, you could view and interact with the world of that film.  Think about that and what it does for the media of film and animation.  And that’s likely just the beginning.

No matter what the future will bring, MikuMikuDance has proved that it has and will continue to meet that future head on, and that is the reason why Yu Higuchi is the proud recipient of Vocaloidism’s Lifetime Achievement Award for 2010.

Next week, we conclude our venture by announcing our final set of results.  Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

About: Joe Mello


9 thoughts on “2010 Vocaloidism Awards – Part 4”

      1. Since Yu(u) is a feminine name, and I really don’t want to offend anybody, I tried to make the piece gender-neutral. This is very hard when using the English language (and no, “their” is not a singular pronoun).

        And I apologize to Buns for using her in my horrible puns D:

  1. yay part 4!!! so for all of them, i voted correctly, except the PV, voted for corruption garden… i really wanted kenno to win but… oh well second is good too. these MMD PVs will revolutionize new PV's into stuff only as far as humanly possible, and that's pretty far.
    Can't wait for the next part… I'm like sooo exicted 😛

  2. Great to see all the Deco*27 love, so happy that SmileR and Amai Elegy won (not cause a nominated them or anything…baka).

    Omg Miku SWEET DEVIL PV! HOW COME NO ONE TOLD ME, WHY!!! Its amazing. MIKUUUUU!

    Also people were thoroughly impressed with the MMD motion capture/Kinect video when I showed the demo at Ohayocon. Got lots of ooohs and ahhhs. Hope I inspired some budding new MMD vid makers.

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