Paris Film Composer Challenge

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Our biggest (and probably best) challenge yet. Rescoring a beautiful piece of documentary content from our esteemed team. We have a wonderful brief for you and an opportunity to cut your teeth, gain experience and that all-important intuition. We’re here to help you build up your chops with no risk to your future clients or indeed career. Join us live, bring your notepads and your Gauloises!

Aims:

The aim of this challenge (and what you’ll be judged on) is threefold:

  1. Instead of simply putting different “bits” of music over the show try instead to write something first that is engaging, has some changes, some light and dark, possibly even a modulation of key or instrumentation. Instead of restarting this every time you bring the music in try exploding it across the timeline. Instead of starting and stopping the music you’re starting, pausing and resuming. This will help with the narrative and cohesiveness of the piece.

  2. Unlike a previous challenge (‘Facent’) we’re not expecting you to do a full mix of dialogue sound effects and music. Instead we’re hoping you can present the music back to us as you would a client. Namely being incredibly mindful of dialogue. This can be by automating volume levels relative to dialogue. But an even more sophisticated way of achieving this is to adjust compositional and arrangement elements of your music so it doesn’t interfere.

  3. HIT THE BRIEF. Whilst a client may forgive you crashing some dialogue or using the same piece of music in a couple of locations what they want to hear is that you’re on the same artistic wavelength. The music can add so much stylistic energy to any show but also help to drive home the director’s central thesis that he wants the viewer to take away with them. Hitting brief is one of the hardest parts of becoming a successful media composer as you first have to translate how people use language to express a vision of how you’re to express something in a non-linguistic form!

Full details and T&Cs here.

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I am really excited about this one!

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Me too eleri !
I’m slowly getting there with reaper :grinning_face:

I’m very much in two minds as to whether to post this, as I’m not completely sure I have the submission format right, and I don’t want to mislead anybody else.

I submitted a version of the video with my score (and no other sounds), but at a much higher volume than I would expect it to be used when mixed in with the dialogue in the edit - perhaps 12dB louder.

It might be useful to others to know that I had to down-scale the video to 720p (1280x720) to get the file size under the limit on the challenge submission form.

The score is built on the idea of reflection - both in the audio/visual sense and the sense of meditation, driven by my best effort to imitate a Gnossienne, which is then reflected/echoed/mangled in various ways as the documentary progresses.

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