HBO, Westworld and Spitfire Audio decided to have a scoring competition. I decided to enter and didnt expect to win. The odds are pretty slim. You know theres gonna be thousands of submissions and theres gonna be assistants making shortlists. The jurors simply can not go through the droves of entries. Fair enough. I was intending to enjoy it and learn whatever I could from it.
The jury in this case was the writers of the show Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy with Executive Producer JJ Abrams and Spitfire Audio as a sponsor partner. All in all there were 11.000 entries so Im guessing all those assistants had there hands full. Im presuming they were based in the US but as I checked my Youtube view statistics! None of them were from the US. Ah well. There you go.
I checked some of the other entries and most of them were really, really good. So I was quite surpriced when the winner was announced and I found it a bit lacking… And it seems I wasnt alone. You can read the comment section and check the videos discussing the competition. Anyways… I had a fun doing it and it was a great learning experience.
I dont get why they hold competitions like this. Theres a very palpable level of disingenuity here. What are they hoping to achieve? Find a yet undiscovered genius musical scorer? Up the view count on the Westworld Series? Sell more sample libraries? Well it smells like marketing (because it is) but Im not so sure it worked as they had intended. Sorry… scratch that. Im pretty sure it didnt work as intended. In fact it backfired by quite a bit wich is a shame. They could have done the math. 11 000 entries is roughly 2 900 hours of material to go through. Even if there had been a tenth of that, its still an unmanagable task. And they could have been a bit more honest about the process.
PS: The clip Ive posted here is a remastered version of my original entry. So the stats for it are off. DS
