The 2024 Indie Film Music Contest
The Indie Film Music Contest has just announced its winners for the Winter 2023 season. Focused on celebrating beginner and intermediate composers within the independent music niche, the contest helps composers gain real-life experience in the industry. Falken Media is a group consisting of both composers and filmmakers who independently organized the contest. This is the media group’s first major project as a company, and they are taking this opportunity very seriously. Falken Media feel adamantly about their judging guidelines, and are proud in their assertion that they, “won’t judge by criteria like mixing and mastering or the quality of the sound. (They) focus only on the creative ideas you use to tell the story of this film with your music.”
The grand prize is a total of 18,000 Euros, available to all applicants who submit the entry fee, ranging from $35 to $135, and submit their scores. As the contest is independently run, sponsors fund the prize money offered to competitors. For this reason, there are a multitude of fees included in the purchase of entry to the competition including the base fee, entry fee and feedback fee, which is contingent on participants’ desire for lengthy feedback on their submitted score.
In order to submit to the contest, composers must create three individual scores for three clips provided to them by the contest orchestrators. Participants have the option of choosing animated or live action clips, and are able to retain full ownership over their submissions, allowing them to share the piece post submission. Everyone receives a participation certificate and statistics so participants can compare their results to other competitors.
The winners of the 2023 Winter competition were announced March 22nd of this year and are divided into categories based on experience, and the clip they chose to compose their score to match. For the animated “Unabducted” scene, in first place for the young composers section is Andreas Meienberg. In second place is Arthur Chanson. For the “Slice of Adventure” animated clip, in the standard level of experience category, Timothy Forrester took first, while Paul Ching won second place. For the young composers section, the live action “Love is a Gift” clip, Carlos Magana Bru won first prize, while Justin Villaflores held second. Standard experience competitors also composed for the “Love is a Gift” clip, and Thomas Bennett was awarded first place, while Brendan Vincent was awarded second place. The popularity contest, awarded to whichever contestant receives the most views on YouTube of their submission, was Dallas Long with over 9,000 views. The judges panel chose to recognize a few honorary mentions including Janis Krajewski for her “cinematic storytelling,” Jiahan Zhang, for their “harmonic sophistication and originality” and finally Alejandro Rodrigo for his “extra suspenseful writing.”
This is an excellent opportunity for all beginner and intermediate composers looking for an entry into the world of scoring films. The opportunity presented here is one that has led previous winners to great successes and enables the push for a new type of growth within an individual’s skill sets with the benefits of feedback guaranteed. The planning for the Summer 2024 Indie Music Competition is already underway and you can count on an announcement of the next submission dates on their website soon.