The Camp Kuleshov trailer competition for emerging creative artists has announced 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 at www.campkuleshov.org. 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 notes 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, adds 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 post production 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).
