Thanks for the question!

So the team limit rule (3 for ani, 5 for film) is how many "Team Members" (ie., people) you may have, not "roles" - one person could do any number of roles. Going over the team limit (for example, six people work on the project) disqualifies your team from the competition... but if there's three people on their team and they do twenty things each, that's still only three members and you're fine.

There are two exceptions:
1) A person who is *ONLY* an actor (being filmed, voice actors, or motion capture if your school has a rig) and has NO other part on the project doesn't count towards your total team members (So, for example, one of the films last year had 5 team members and like 60 actors). IF the actor has other roles on the team they're counted as Team Members like normal.

2) If you have a friend work on sound effects or music, and they have NO other role on the team, they also don't count (although they would be disqualified from winning awards because they're not part of the team). Essentially, that's "sourcing" audio (which is allowed), you're just sourcing custom audio instead of getting free audio from the web.

Technically speaking, a friend working on sound/music AND acting would still not count against your team member count (assuming those were the only things they did), because they're doing two "not counted" jobs - but again that person wouldn't qualify for awards because they weren't part of your team.

Inversely, if there is a person on your team that you *DO* count, that only does those things (acting and/or sound) is still a team member if you choose to count them, and would then qualify for awards because they were counted as part of your team.

Intent: The INTENT of this rule is for film (but the other categories have similar rationale) where the focus of the competition is writing/direction/editing/etc - but some ideas (like "The Perfect School" last year) would be functionally impossible if you couldn't have more than 5 people on your project (they needed "extras" to make the school feel real) - but those people aren't really "working on the project" with you for 8 weeks, they show up and do their thing and then go. That's not a "team member" in our sense of the word. But if the director of the film was actually in it (which is very common), they're BOTH "part of the team" and "just an actor", so they're counted as a Team Member.

It'll get posted on http://ames.team - I think they're still getting things set up there, but that's where it'll be :)