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Create a Year of Movies (CAYOM) - How to Play / CAYOM Archive

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We are rebooting the much beloved game that originated from Box Office Mojo's forums!

 

Founded by RySenarki, the goal was to let players run their own movie studios, creating movies every year in a somewhat simplified, yet exciting, spin on Hollywood with stories, ideas, and studios we create. Here's how it works: CAYOM takes place in through years, where we iterate through things like making movies, predicting and reviewing them, calculating actuals, and then holding our own Oscar ceremony! Here are the steps in more details:

Part I. Making Movies
Every year, there will be a week or two of time in which Part One is open. During this time period is when you turn in any film you may have written using the following format:

 

Movie Title: 
Director: (As well as screenwriters, producers, and composers, if you want)
Genre:
Date:
Cast:
Theater Count:
MPAA Rating:

Runtime:
Budget:
Previous Film Gross (if a sequel):

 

*FILM SUMMARY (PREFERABLY IN SPOILER TAGS)*

 

Where you post the film is in the Part I thread. In the opening post, you'll notice a schedule of dates. There will be movie names in some of those dates-that means those movies are to be released on that date. It will also list the page number of the movie. Chose a date, whether an empty one or one which already has competition in it. There is no real limit to how many films can be released on one date, but the unofficial limit is 4 films. Except for a couple of weekends, like the post-Thanksgiving weekend, every date needs to have a film before Part I is over.

Questions:

Is there a word limit, or a word minimum?

There is no official word limit, nor is there a word minimum. Your plot can be as short as a couple of sentences, to 10,000 words. Most films vying for serious awards consideration or box office strength tend to be around 2,000-3,000 words long. 

What is a filler?
A filler is a short, paragraph long film that is usually generic. These are meant to fill some dates that have no serious films, or to ensure that a lot of the dates have at least 2 films. You may also copy and paste a summary from Wikipedia if it is an adaptation. This practice is highly discouraged with major films, though.

Can I describe the musical score, and attach a composer?
Yes. Describe the score right under where you name the composer, which should be right above the plot. You can also write the song titles, along with a description of the song (or write the song if you feel it'll be better), and attach it to musicals along key areas of the plot. Some players have also integrated actual music into their film, telling you when to play the music as you read. Moreover, if you want to add songs for your movie, you may include song lyrics if you want.

Can I make a trailer/poster?
Sure. There's a whole separate thread to post a trailer or a poster. Posters are usually done on paint or photoshop. Trailers are usually written as scripts, though actual Youtube trailers are not unheard of (but extremely rare). The trailers/posters will have no impact on the box office, usually only meant to make the CAYOM universe fell more real.

Is there a limit on which actor/actress/directors I can use?
Sort of. If an actor/actress has too many films in one year, then you'll be asked to pick a different cast member. Also, directors can only make one film a year.

How is aging handled?
The actors are however old they are in real life, regardless of which CAYOM year it is. Consider it a magical world where aging has considerably slowed down.

Can I use my own made up actors/actresses and Directors?
Yes.

How much money do I have to make my film?
Unlimited money. The budget is how much money got put into the film. If a film fails to make it's budget, and it's part of a series, you lose no money yourself. For realism purposes, most flops don't really get sequels. The budget must also be realistic.

What is the FYC thread?
The FYC (For Your Consideration) thread is where you post your movies and which Oscars you want it considered for.

 

How can I get first dibs on a date for movies?

Every year, we have an advance schedule thread for the subsequent year. This allows users to secure a date for a blockbuster or major film they are planning while potentially setting the scene for a new CAYOM film. We ask that you be considerate of other players and not hog all the major holidays for your own films or scatter a great deal of films on the calendar. Also, using the Advance Schedule for films unlikely to be a box office smash is generally frowned upon.

 

How long is Part 1?

It generally varies - we try to keep it at 3 weeks to a month to make sure everyone has time to complete their films and fill the schedule, but we can often extend for users who need more time.

Part II. Predictions and Reviews

Now that all the films have been made, it's time to take a look at them! Predict how they'll fare at the box office, and how they can succeed at awards season!


Predictions
You can predict how each movie (or the big blockbuster ones only) will do at the box office! This is usually where the official Box Office of the year's numbers are based, though a film may totally surprise by flopping or being a hit. If a film always did as predicted, it would get boring. The only place to put predictions is on the official Part II thread. Some people go week by week (some even with write-ups!), other people month-by-month, and more by only predicting the big blockbuster films or the serious Oscar contenders.

Reviews
You'll also be able to state your opinion in your review thread! For every year, you can create ONE review thread, where you can post your reviews. Some people just do a top 25 lists, and other people go week-by-week (usually followed by a top 25). It's your choice on how to write reviews, and even consider doing something original if you want. Be as honest or as harsh as you want to be. Reviews will rarely affect a film's opening weekend (but they can), but they will affect a film's legs, and obviously their Oscar chances.


The Critical Consensus
Every review thread who ends up doing a top 25 gets put in the Critical Consensus, which is like our version of Rotten Tomatoes. Anyways, every film that is on a top 25 list will be on this list. Essentially, the films are ranked by points, where the #1 recieves 25 points from a list, #2 recieves 24, and so on. Based on the ranking of the film on all the lists will determine the spot of the critical consensus. It is rare for a film to get all number one rankings. The Critical Consensus can really help with legs, and may be served as a basis to predict who will actually be participating in the Oscars.

Part III. Box Office
This is the part where you simply sit back and relax, unless you're doing the official Box Office of the year (or as we call it, Actuals). Here, you will see weekend-by-weekend how every film in the top 10 has done domestically in the box office. These are the official numbers, and are rarely disputable. 

 

To do actuals in a given year, you would sign up in a "Who's Doing Actuals" thread that will be set up soon. When the time comes, you want to make sure that you give users ample time to make predictions, and write-ups for each weekend are highly encouraged. Especially when you give films totals substantially higher or lower than expected, give a reason for your divergence. You're welcome - if not encouraged - to shake things up from predictions; it would be boring otherwise! However, this is to make sure that the Box Office is done as realistically as possible.

 

After the Part is over, the person who did Actuals will also reveal Total Domestic gross and Overseas numbers. (For Overseas, you do not need to do every single country individually)

Part IV. The Oscars
The Oscars! The Big award! In this game, Best Picture is the ultimate award as it is in real life. But there's other Oscars to win.

Nomination Phase
First is the phase where every player gets to turn in nominations, in public. Five films per category (unless otherwise specified), the order you put them in doesn't matter. The films with the most nominations are officially nominated for an Oscar! There is a required of 2 nominations to be considered unless otherwise specified. Customarily, the categories have been as follows:

 

Best Picture

Best Animated Feature

Best Documentary Feature

Best Director

Best Ensemble

Best Actor

Best Actress

Best Supporting Actor

Best Supporting Actress

Best Voice Actor/Actress in a Leading Role

Best Voice Actor/Actress in a Suppojrting Role

Best Original Screenplay

Best Adapted Screenplay

Best Original Score

Best Original Song

Best Cinematography

Best Film Editing

Best Production Design

Best Costume Design

Best Makeup & Hairstyling

Best Sound Mixing

Best Sound Editing

Best Visual Effects

Best Use of Action


Tie-breaker
Every now, there's enough films who have gotten the same number of nominations, enough to be nominated, but not enough spots. If that's the case, there's a tie-breaker in which you rank the films to break the tie. Whichever one is overall better ranked wins the tie-breaker.

The Voting Phase
Now is the time to vote for Oscars. Unlike the first two phases, this phase is done by PM to whoever is doing the award ceremony. You send the person a ranking of each nomination, putting your preferable choice as number one and your least preferable choice as number five. Based on the ranking average, the vote is then tallied.

The Award Phase
The Award phase is where you see the Oscar ceremony! Much like the Actuals, users will take turns writing the Awards ceremony. This includes calculating the results of the awards, as well as picking a host and writing the actual ceremony itself. This is a super fun part of CAYOM! Good luck if your nominated! After the ceremony, there's a couple of days of waiting before it all begins again.

 

CAYOM Archive (See the steps above in action! - Thank you @rukaio101!!)

 

Spoiler

Considering the backlog CAYOM seems to have mustered so far, I thought it might be worth creating an index of links to make looking through it a lot easier.

 

Part 1

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

Year 4

Year 5

Year 6

Year 7

Year 8

Year 9

Year 10

 

Actuals

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

Year 4

Year 5

Year 6

Year 7

Year 8

Year 9

Year 10

 

Totals

Year 1 (Overseas)

Year 2

Year 3

Year 4 (Overseas)

Year 5

Year 6

Year 7

Year 8 (Overseas)

Year 9

 

Critical Consensus

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

Year 4

Year 5

Year 6

Year 7

Year 8

Year 9

 

Oscars

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

Year 4

Year 5

Year 6

Year 7

Year 8

Year 9

 

Other Useful Links

 

Franchise by Rights Thread

Oscar History Thread

Studio Plans

Oscar Signup Thread

Classic + Community Franchises

Studios

CAYOM Magazine

Trailers

Franchise List

All Time Chart

The Career Thread

Positivity Scale Thread

 

If anyone can think of any other useful threads that should be here, please mention.

 


Let us know if you have any questions! 

 

 

 

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19 minutes ago, Xillix said:

So, we going with the actual year idea? If so - 2017 or 2018?

 

2017 so you can include real-life grosses from 2016 holdovers (otherwise the early January weekends would be very empty).

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I would suggest you also establish basic ground rules beyond the How to Play FAQ here.

 

For example, how are you going to treat existing Real World Franchises? Will you place restrictions as to what franchises/characters are currently available? Will you essentially let it be a free-for-all with people claiming franchises left-and-right first come first serve? Will you designate certain franchises as "Community Franchises" in that someone gets to use the franchise for a period of time, and then it passes on to a new player (For example this is how we handled Bond. A player could make a few movies with a certain Bond, and then the franchise would move to a new player and reboot with a new Bond. Other franchises "belonged" to certain players, but were made available for other players to use in spinoffs and such. For example I controlled Pokemon, but I lent @rukaio101 the rights to it so he could make an animated spinoff about Pokemon Mystery Dungeon).

 

I think the reboot group should figure stuff like that out first before leaping into the new Year 1 Part 1.

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For the record, the rule changes I had proposed in the new forum were as follows:

-Numbered caps for talent roles per year; directors could do two movies a year, actors six (with leeway for cameos).

-No claiming franchise rights for any property that's had a theatrical movie in the past five years.

-Previously held franchise rights are reserved to those who had them in CAYOM v2 for the first in-game year of the new game, if not claimed by the end of the first year they become available.

-Franchise rights can be loaned out, shared, traded, etc. at the owners' discretion.

-Claiming franchise rights for a property with a future film scheduled (but none in the past five years) only allowed if you submit the finished version of your first movie in the franchise before the real one comes out.

 

As for community franchises - they tend to be stuff like Star Wars, James Bond, etc., both of which have had movies in the past five years and are essentially set to continue with frequent releases for the foreseeable future. I'd personally rather avoid those franchises in the game altogether. The whole point of having the rule against claiming franchises with recent releases (which existed in 2.0 already, in less specific form) was to avoid/minimize the influence of real-world franchise box office results. Plus there's something that feels off/unfair about someone lobbing a Star Wars in there with people's original stories and other, less-known franchises. It's almost guaranteed to get you in the top five of the year based solely on you happening to have the rights at that time, whether they're "community" rights or personal.

Edited by Xillix
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1 hour ago, Xillix said:

For the record, the rule changes I had proposed in the new forum were as follows:

-Numbered caps for talent roles per year; directors could do two movies a year, actors six (with leeway for cameos).

-No claiming franchise rights for any property that's had a theatrical movie in the past five years.

-Previously held franchise rights are reserved to those who had them in CAYOM v2 for the first in-game year of the new game, if not claimed by the end of the first year they become available.

-Franchise rights can be loaned out, shared, traded, etc. at the owners' discretion.

-Claiming franchise rights for a property with a future film scheduled (but none in the past five years) only allowed if you submit the finished version of your first movie in the franchise before the real one comes out.

 

As for community franchises - they tend to be stuff like Star Wars, James Bond, etc., both of which have had movies in the past five years and are essentially set to continue with frequent releases for the foreseeable future. I'd personally rather avoid those franchises in the game altogether. The whole point of having the rule against claiming franchises with recent releases (which existed in 2.0 already, in less specific form) was to avoid/minimize the influence of real-world franchise box office results. Plus there's something that feels off/unfair about someone lobbing a Star Wars in there with people's original stories and other, less-known franchises. It's almost guaranteed to get you in the top five of the year based solely on you happening to have the rights at that time, whether they're "community" rights or personal.

 

Generally sounds like you have a good setup going.

 

What I recommend, is that you, like with prior CAYOM iterations, set up a Master Franchise Tracking thread to help keep organized as to who has what. In fact it should probably go up sooner rather than later, as it would allow past CAYOM players who will not be taking part in the reboot, or who are substantially scaling back, to let the rebooters know what franchises they are relinquishing from the get-go, to help clear things up on that front.

 

 

The most important thing IMO is to have all of the key features laid out and established, so that when the Part 1 for the new Year 1 (aka 2017) starts, all of you can hit the ground running.

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6 hours ago, Xillix said:

-Claiming franchise rights for a property with a future film scheduled (but none in the past five years) only allowed if you submit the finished version of your first movie in the franchise before the real one comes out.

 

I would revise this rule to one year to the date before that movie comes out (not that you need your movie to be completed before then, but at least announce your intent in the part 1 thread before that date). That way we don't have people doing adaptations just to capitalize on an upcoming film (say someone does an IT remake because the IRL version has so much buzz).

 

Speaking of Stephen King properties I believe there was a rule in 2.0 that you can't claim an author's collected works without listing all the IPs that you want to claim separately. This should go both for individual creators and companies (Nintendo, Sony, Ubisoft etc.). I think this should be worked into the new rulebook.

 

Other than that all good suggestions.

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22 minutes ago, cookie said:

 

Speaking of Stephen King properties I believe there was a rule in 2.0 that you can't claim an author's collected works without listing all the IPs that you want to claim separately. This should go both for individual creators and companies (Nintendo, Sony, Ubisoft etc.). I think this should be worked in in the new rulebook.

 

 

This is correct. You can't just claim everything that belongs to an author, or everything that belongs to a company. Because those aren't franchises but content generators.

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I'd prefer if we didn't use franchises at all and tried to be more creative.

 

But I'd also like to relinquish any hold on Warcraft I ever had if we are doing franchises.

 

I'm sure someone else could give a much more thorough treatment because I never played Warcraft III or read a lot of extra lore.

 

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1 hour ago, Electric said:

I'd prefer if we didn't use franchises at all and tried to be more creative.

 

But I'd also like to relinquish any hold on Warcraft I ever had if we are doing franchises.

 

I'm sure someone else could give a much more thorough treatment because I never played Warcraft III or read a lot of extra lore.

 

 

I see your point but I wouldn't want to go that far... IMO part of the appeal of the game is a "what if" scenario where you can try your hand at reviving long-dead franchises or giving the movie treatment to something that's never been adapted. It's different if you're riding the bandwagon of a currently successful movie series.

 

As to the Warcraft thing, that's generous of you... but it wouldn't be available for four more years anyway :P

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