The theme for July was Chocobos with any interpretation allowed. The winner for July by a landslide was Alastor Izunia with this shot of a tender moment of a sleeping chocobo next to its owner.
Congratulations!
Alastor Izunia
The website may look a little different today – WordPress has been upgraded to the latest version, and we’re reverting back to our original theme of WP 2017. No other theme has quite looked as good or suited our needs as well, and it’s been upgraded to be compatible with WP 6.3 so I threw it back onto the site skin.
Only about…. two weeks late. My apologies, but I had a family emergency, a planned vacation, and then we were wrapping up CC14, so I failed to send out my image reminders as planned and had to extend the entry period.
But thanks to the extended entry period, we now have five images to share! The theme was simply Chocobos and it was, as always, fully open ended with no restrictions. Please look at each of the images below and then vote for your favorite using the Google poll below.
Voting will be open until Friday, August 11th at 11:59 PM Eastern Time.
I’m also experimenting with an auto post sharing feature. If this works as advertised, we’ll ideally have auto posts made to our Tumblr account going forward, and may expand to further platforms for our next full cycle. Social media is hard enough without having to manually cross post, so the more we can automate, the better!
Email addresses are not recorded, but sign in is required to prevent ballot stuffing. If you are having trouble using the voting form embedded above, click this link to open it in a new tab instead: https://forms.gle/YbvULDEJCBZ4jknD6
Six week contests are just long enough, we’ve found over the years, through trial and error. Long enough to give our models enough of a challenge and inspire learning and growth, but not so long that the models and judges get burnt out and have the contest stop being fun.
We started with 8 models this cycle, and finished with 6 (IRL always comes first.) And while we had some incredibly close rounds, we have a clear top three now that we’re at the end of the cycle.
I want to thank all the models who stuck with us throughout the contest. Without models, our contests wouldn’t exist. Through nine years of ENTM, we have helped coach hundreds of models, but each contest starts with you guys taking a risk and putting yourselves out there, sometimes having never done a screenshot contest before. Even if you didn’t win, I hope you learned something from the feedback, and are inspired to keep taking more screenshots (and if you want, please send me a screenshot of chocobos for the monthly contest ASAP.)
I also want to thank the judges for contributing their wit and wisdom each week. Judges like Ona and Elessia are the backbone of our contests. Outside community members like Judge Blix bring in a crucial, fresh perspective (because we can sometimes get a little bit too cliquish in ENTM without a new pair of eyes.) And Judge Escher provided valuable back up services to our primary judges, prepared to step in at any moment should something go awry for our main three. Thank you guys, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
And now, it’s time to announce some winners!
In third place…. Gadriel Nephilim!
In a sea of Au Ra and female characters, Gadriel’s unique Elezen male definitely stood out week after week. Gadriel won second place multiple weeks, and consistently scored well from our judges. Congratulations!
Gadriel Nephilim
In second place and also our Community Winner, Damian Montclair!
Community votes are an important part of ENTM. They act as tiebreakers when the judges are divided (and that definitely happened a few times this cycle) and also allow our models a chance to share their work with their friends and followers on social media. Damien is an ENTM veteran and brought that fierceness week after week.
Congratulations!
Damien Montclair
And now, the end of six weeks of screenshot torture, drunk ramblings from Judge Ona, a new perspective from Judge Blix, and quietly kind recommendations from Judge Elessia, we have a new S-Rank model in the ENTM family.
The winner of Classic Cycle 14 is Val Viscera!
Val came in as a newcomer to ENTM and knocked it out of the park on the first try. Throughout the cycle, Val was neck and neck with Damien, but at the end of the scoring, had enough of a boost from judges votes to claim the crown. Judges praised the careful attention to composition, color, and light in each shot from Val. Some of the submissions were right up against the deadline as Val worked hard to make them as polished as possible.
The stars were bright at night last week (even though I don’t think any of us live deep in the heart of Texas.) But after all the votes were in, the winner for the final round of Classic Cycle 14 was Damien Montclair!
Damien Montclair
I have to crunch some numbers in my spreadsheet this afternoon, but with this final week under wraps, there’s only one thing left to do – declare the S-rank model for this cycle of ENTM.
Thank you to everyone who participated in this cycle, and thank you to our judges for taking time out of their summer to provide us with their insights. The only way to get better at anything is to keep practicing, and feedback is a crucial part of that process.
