Music composition category added to 2023 trailer competitionÂ
The Camp Kuleshov trailer competition for emerging creative artists has unveiled its Grand Prize winners for Editing, Sound Design and Graphics as it ramps up for its 2023 contest.
Taking home The Lev–Camp K’s top prize, named for Russian film guru Lev Kuleshov–were Caralyn Moore of Optimus for Editing; Emmalyn Meyers of Vaudeville Sound Group for Sound Design; and April Faison of Mr. Wonderful–Northern Lights for Graphics. Their entries were judged against other category winners from Camp K competitions held in AICP chapters across the country.
Moore won for her taut, suspenseful recasting of the 1967 Mel Brooks comedy “The Producers” into a Neo-noir genre. Meyers took home the prize for her hilarious, video game-inspired sound design of an epic car chase in the 1998 caper film “Ronin”; and Faison was honored for her evocative title sequence for the 2004 noirish thriller “Collateral.” These Lev winners, along with all of the 2022 Camp K winners, can be found here. Each Lev winner receives $1,000, provided by Camp K sponsor Musicbed + Filmsupply. An AICP Supporting Partner, Musicbed also made selections from its production music library available to Camp K entrants free of charge.
Designed to give emerging talent a chance to heighten their creative and craft problem-solving skills while also gaining access to invaluable mentorship opportunities, Camp K challenges entrants to take existing films and re-imagine trailers for them as something new and different. A full listing of this year’s source films for each category, as well as competition rules and objectives, can be found on the Camp K website. Deadline for entries is Sept. 22, 2023, at 11.59 pm ET. All Camp K winners will be announced during events held in participating chapters later this fall.
New to the competition this year is a category for music composition, which joins the Sound Design category as the second audio-focused challenge for entrants. The music brief is to score a 90-second passage from one of two films that has no music score at all. This year’s selections are “The Birds,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 horror film, and “No Country For Old Men,” the 2007 crime thriller from Joel and Ethan Coen.
According to Chris Franklin, owner and editor at Big Sky Edit in New York , the addition of a music category to complement Editing, Sound Design and Graphics was meant to “broaden the pool of young creatives that we’re bringing into the competition, and better reflect not just our AICP membership, but the post production community as a whole.”
Franklin noted that young creatives at music companies have been taking part in Camp K for some time, most often submitting for its Sound Design category, but now they have a chance to test out their talent for original composition. ”And the music winner could come from any discipline, since anyone eligible for entering Camp K can enter any category, he adds: “So it could be an editor, an effects artist or an audio mixer–anyone with music chops can do it.”
As always, the roster of source films for each Camp K category ranges from the obscure to the mainstream. In Editorial, it includes “A Star is Born” (all four Hollywood versions), 1990’s hip hop comedy “House Party,” “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” and 2018’s Marvel superhero flick “Venom.” In Sound Design, it includes 1974’s crime thriller “The Conversation” and the 2014 supernatural suspense film “Unfriended.” And in Graphic Design, it ranges from 1979’s “Apocalypse Now” to the 2021 remake of “Dune.”
Further, added Franklin, “we’ve tightened up the descriptions of the genres that the entrants can shoot for when reimagining these films across the categories. We feel that will help them zero in on the tone of what they’re trying to do with their entries. It should make the competition a bit more challenging, and a bit more strategic, which is one of the goals of Camp K in the first place–to sharpen their strategic thinking and apply those lessons to the client work they’re doing every day.”
Participation in the Camp K competition is open to junior-level creatives, as well as admin and entry-level employees at AICP member postproduction and production companies. Students and interns sponsored by a member company could also enter Camp K, as well as junior-level employees at music, sound and audio post companies that are members of the Association of Music Producers (AMP).
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More