Westworld Scoring Competition - Win every Spitfire Audio library

[Bloma]

I did this a few days after the comp was announced. It was amusing.

Some awesome lead sounds in there Benedict. The original movie is a bit of a classic. It falls down when it goes into the other themed parks, but the concept is brilliant and at times is the greatest movie ever. Season 1 of the series is absolutely brilliant, genius, perfection. I highly recommend it. Season 2, at least from the amount I watched before I couldn't withstand anymore, undid everything great about the show and devolved into mindless trash. I honestly doubt Season 3 is any different, but I haven't watched it so I could be wrong.

[aeox]

I like what I'm hearing

[Przemyslaw]

And this is my entry. It was fantastic musical adventure to work with that movie scene.
I wonder what the number of all entries will be.

[DaveyG]

I entered it. I've never seen Westworld and based on that clip I never want to. What a pile of shite! Is it meant to be a comedy? That guy looks like he is filling his nappy when he "changes genre".

But doing the music was fun. It will be funny if I win. What the heck am I going to do with all those gigabytes of orchestral sample libraries???

Most of my decent stuff is just demo level for other people to record properly and the rest rarely features strings, and, if it does feature strings, the naffest pop strings will do nicely.

The world is divided into two types of musician:
1. Those who care about the difference between Staccato and Spiccato
2. Those who don't
3. Those who can't count.

[Timmy Crowne]

Got my entry in 5 minutes before the cutoff. This was fun.

Lots of great work in this thread. Good job, everybody.

[joeyluck]

Lots of great stuff here! Thanks to everybody for sharing and good luck! I unfortunately had a new work project spring up (which is good news) but it left me with no time for this.

[aeox]

My first score Was a lot of fun and I think I learned a lot from the experience.

VidPlayVST was great, no issues at all in Reason.

[dandandaaan]

This was my entry! Recorded in Logic but features quite a few Reason synths. What a great opportunity - it's really hard to find movie excerpts with no music but dialogue and SFX left intact so a great chance to practise, I hope some other companies follow suit in the future.

[Benedict]

This was my entry! Recorded in Logic but features quite a few Reason synths. What a great opportunity - it's really hard to find movie excerpts with no music but dialogue and SFX left intact so a great chance to practise, I hope some other companies follow suit in the future.

I like it. I prefer scores built on melody than just more blam, blam arpeggios so this gets my tick, esp for the nice little old school flourishes.

I wonder at the mix tho as it seems very spacey/hard-panned to me in my studio. Was that deliberate?

[Frankdw]

I also had a go at the competition... that was real fun to do... Hope someone in the reasoncamp wins... Good luck to you all!

[Benedict]

Thanks for the feedback on Vidplay VST as I got it and used it on my "Deadaluus In Danger" score (in the music section) and it was solid in every session. Exports were perfect too. Money well spent.

[saravakos]

Some really interesting interpretations from everyone here. Really enjoyable to hear everyones angle.
Here is my angle – using mostly modular synths and a tiny bit of samples.

[DaveyG]

You won't believe how bad the winning entry is!

[bxbrkrz]

You won't believe how bad the winning entry is!

It's even worse. He already worked with one of the judges, Jar Jar Abrams. The Nintendo game theme is killing the vibe. I though my monitors were picking up a random pirate radio station when it started.

The dialog and the sounds attached to the cars were also "remixed". Strange, maybe it was OK, and part of the rules?

[dandandaaan]

You won't believe how bad the winning entry is!

Without wanting to come across too "sour-grapes," I agree and feel a little disappointed in Spitfire (who I usually like and respect) for this. I get that taste is subjective and they were looking for something that stood out from the crowd but I can't really imagine a director ever hearing that and not raising an eyebrow. Then to discover that the winner, out of 11,000 entries, is a professional audio engineer with a history of working with JJ Abrams... At the very least, it's bad optics. Just to clarify I never had any expectation of winning at all, but I did hope the winning entry would be a little more... Accomplished? Inspiring? Anyway whatever. It was still a super educational process and a nice potential showcase for other work.

I like it. I prefer scores built on melody than just more blam, blam arpeggios so this gets my tick, esp for the nice little old school flourishes.

I wonder at the mix tho as it seems very spacey/hard-panned to me in my studio. Was that deliberate?

Thank you so much for the feedback! Glad you enjoyed it. I do like wider/spacey mixes but mixing isn't my strongpoint so it's very possible I overdid it. Noted!

[bxbrkrz]

[Benedict]

That was indeed an odd choice. The idea is clever, esp seeing the scene is little better than a bad arcade game but for the win? It just seems too inelegant. Esp seeing I heard several entries that were more elegant.

I am left with the feeling that either it was a win for one of the 5 out of 1,100 entries they looked at (like a lottery which another recent comp did openly) or just that Abrams etc were taking the piss at their scrappy show (based on that clip how good could it be) which is understandable. Doing it at the expense of people who took the opportunity seriously was not nice or professional though.

Still, this is the nature of most comps, where the rules of entry and the rules of winning are not the same. I now enter comps only when the experience suits me. A win would be nice but I know the win will go to a cliche entry or even a shoddy one almost every time.

[Bloma]

From David Kudell's Twitter:

'Hello all, thanks for all the feedback! And to be clear, JJ Abrams has no idea who I am. I worked as an assistant sound editor 15 years ago, just one of hundreds of crew members behind the scenes. Assistant sound editors don't work with directors.'

[Benedict]

From David Kudell's Twitter:

'Hello all, thanks for all the feedback! And to be clear, JJ Abrams has no idea who I am. I worked as an assistant sound editor 15 years ago, just one of hundreds of crew members behind the scenes. Assistant sound editors don't work with directors.'

I do feel a bit for David as while he has his win, he also has to deal with a lot of ire over it. The pain will probably outweigh the pleasure in this case.
Thanks for posting that it is not fair to claim it is nepotism if this is the case.

It is still a very odd choice and would be nice to understand how they got there???

[joeyluck]

They did say they were looking for creativity.

[DaveyG]

Super Mario meets Eurovision.

I truly thought it was a joke and that they were going to cut to the real thing after 30 seconds or so!
I guess if you have 11,000 entries to wade through you're going to remember the weird ones.

[1reasonable]

I can’t imagine that HBO were happy with the choice. It obviously does disrespect the show. The only thing missing was a laughter track. Damn....I should have kept that idea to myself for the next Spitfire competition.The more “serious” parts of the score were impressive, but then this is an assistant sound engineer - how could enthusiastic amateurs who’ve never done this sort of thing before be judged against professionals? Spitfire should have shown more thought imo. Anyone worth their salt in the film/tv music sound industry would come out on top. I had presumed this competition was intended for all amateurs. Alternatively, why did they not run a pro/am competition with a winner for each category? Obviously open to abuse, and would have depended on the honesty of the individual entrants, but I think overall it would have been much fairer, and not attracted the understandable criticism from many here. I worked on a serious entry just for fun, as I’d never done anything like this before, but didn’t finish it in time. I had thought about a “comedy” version, as probably had a fair few potential entrants, but I thought it would have gone down as well as Ricky Gervais getting an invite to a Foreign Press Association dinner. There’s a time and a place for irreverence - this wasn’t it.

[aeox]

My video wasn't even watched

[NDKay]

*word*

I can’t imagine that HBO were happy with the choice. It obviously does disrespect the show. The only thing missing was a laughter track. Damn....I should have kept that idea to myself for the next Spitfire competition.The more “serious” parts of the score were impressive, but then this is an assistant sound engineer - how could enthusiastic amateurs who’ve never done this sort of thing before be judged against professionals? Spitfire should have shown more thought imo. Anyone worth their salt in the film/tv music sound industry would come out on top. I had presumed this competition was intended for all amateurs. Alternatively, why did they not run a pro/am competition with a winner for each category? Obviously open to abuse, and would have depended on the honesty of the individual entrants, but I think overall it would have been much fairer, and not attracted the understandable criticism from many here. I worked on a serious entry just for fun, as I’d never done anything like this before, but didn’t finish it in time. I had thought about a “comedy” version, as probably had a fair few potential entrants, but I thought it would have gone down as well as Ricky Gervais getting an invite to a Foreign Press Association dinner. There’s a time and a place for irreverence - this wasn’t it.

When you troll, it is harder for others to troll you !


____

We can say many things, but it is creative! ....not Original, but creative.
I found the part when the genre changes the best, the sound FX for "his reaction" were great. Also the Sounds after the "achievements".
But the main Track.....mhh.. it does not get anything near the "feeling" of the show ( or better the plot) and i dont mean the 8bit style itself, more the chord progression used for it. It sounded kinda too "happy" for me imho.

And who´s to blame ? Taste !

[DaveyG]

The only thing missing was a laughter track.

Actually the best comment I saw in the (now deleted) responses on YouTube said "The only thing missing is some fart noises".