Today marks the end of the Musicbed Film Initiative for 2016. We began with the heart of a filmmaker in mind, and today we’re ending on the same note. Through music licensing, our goal is always to equip filmmakers, in order to make great films. Our Film Initiative was realized to take the process a step further, and give a select few filmmakers the resources they need to make their passion project a reality. It’s been a long, arduous, rewarding, difficult, and exhilarating process.
Before we get to our winners, let’s talk about how we got here.
More so than any other initiative we’ve undertaken, our team dove into the selection process headfirst from the beginning. Submissions started coming in from the get-go, and every single one (yep, all of them) were reviewed individually by a human on our team. It all started with story, and we narrowed down the pool to just 78 finalists from a total of nearly 7,500.
That’s when the real fun began. We locked ourselves in a room — with plenty of coffee and breakfast tacos — and reviewed the finalist submissions once again. We talked about them, voted on them, passionately defended our favorites and after more than 200 hours of reviewing, arrived at our final three.
Now that all is said and done, here’s a look at the stats:
- 7,463 Submissions
- 78 Finalists
- 200+ Hours of Review
- 360 Cups of Coffee (conservatively)
The winning selections were made with painstaking consideration. They pitched incredible stories, with complete mood boards and oftentimes beautiful supplemental material. At the end of the process, the team felt the following submissions embodied the heart of the Film Initiative, had damn good ideas and, plainly, we want to see these films come to life.
The official selection will receive more than $40,000 in cash and gear to bring their film to life, and the two runner-up selections will each receive a $5,000 gear package. To see the full prize package list, check out our original blog post.
Without further ado, here are the official selections of the Musicbed Film Initiative:
TOP SELECTION:
• Embers & Dust, submitted by NYC filmmaker Patrick Biesemans
Embers & Dust focuses on the perspective of young farm boy and his family, and how the night of Orson Welles’ dramatic broadcast of War of The Worlds unfolded for them. It highlights the power and influence of mass media, and how this moment in broadcast history shaped how we ingest information to this day.
RUNNER-UP SELECTIONS:
• Skip It, submitted by Little Wonderful (Jonathan Cohen and Lorne Hiltser)
• Skinny, submitted by Los Angeles filmmaker Luke Randall
A huge congratulations to our winners for this year’s Film Initiative. Their ideas were a pleasure, and we can’t wait to see them in film form. And of course, we’d like to thank our incredible sponsors for making the Musicbed Film Initiative (and these films) a reality:
