# Westworld Competition: Odds?



## Gavin Whelehan

Hey all! I’m new here and wanted to post to get people’s thoughts (perhaps even those from Spitfire?) on what is known about the Westworld Scoring Competition selection process. Basically I’m not very well known as a composer, and I notice some entries have tens of thousands of views while mine only has about 100. Will this hurt my chances in any way? There seem to be an astronomical amount of entries and I wonder if I’ll just get skipped over or lost in the fray? I’ve never entered a competition like this before so I guess I’m just nervous and hoping for a fair shake. Does anyone know any insider info on the process to put my mind at ease? For reference, here’s my submission:


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## purple

To be completely honest, they might not even see it. At least the "big" judges won't. With big competitions like this they often scrub the internet for a selection of those they want to do, and with top-billed judges like this they're not gonna be around for too many. So they often just pick those with the most views and call it a day. Maybe with all the resources of a big dev like spitfire there is the possibility of interns filtering out the thousands of entries or something like that, but that seems expensive and a lot of work even for them. Don't lose hope, though, it's hard to know what sort of a cutoff there is on view counts. For each person like you there are probably a dozen more with view counts under 50, and dozens for each of those under 10 and so on. And I might be wrong about this whole process anyways. Your best bet is to try and share it around as much as possible. Tell your friends to watch it a bunch of times for you and share it and tell them why it's important they actually "view" it. Good luck.


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## Cathbad

This competition has generated an enormous amount of publicity for Spitfire and for Westworld/HBO. Tbh, I think that was always the primary purpose of the contest. It's not a recruiting process for a new understudy for Ramin Djawadi. 

The video is a nice practice exercise whether you enter the competition or not. Personally, I'll get round to it at some point and do some type of spoof version.


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## Jeremy Spencer

Gavin Whelehan said:


> I notice some entries have tens of thousands of views while mine only has about 100. Will this hurt my chances in any way?



I personally doubt that, it has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the music. I've seen some highly viewed entries that aren't that great. Plus, what about the composers that submitted right near the end? That wouldn't be fair at all.


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## Loïc D

Plus they don’t need to spot YouTube based on ratings or whatever else since they already have a comprehensive list from all the persons who registered.

I’m sure they’ll listen to each entry completely and give ratings.

Honest & nerdy as Christian is, I’m sure they’ve already set a criteria list and team brief before they start evaluating.


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## jononotbono

Spitfire have said they will listen to every entry. It would be so silly to think they will listen to every entry in it’s entirety. But I believe they will listen to every one.

If it is judged on publicity then I will be deeply saddened.

“Hey I have 30k subscribers and just written something, check it out!”

“I have no subscribers and just written something, check it out”

No guesses needed who will win. And it ain’t measured on music. 😂

I have faith in Spitfire. Let’s leave them to it. They have thousands of mins to listen to


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## fish_hoof

jononotbono said:


> Spitfire have said they will listen to every entry. It would be so silly to think they will listen to every entry in it’s entirety. But I believe they will listen to every one.
> 
> If it is judged on publicity then I will be deeply saddened.
> 
> “Hey I have 30k subscribers and just written something, check it out!”
> 
> “I have no subscribers and just written something, check it out”
> 
> No guesses needed who will win. And it ain’t measured on music. 😂
> 
> I have faith in Spitfire.Let’s leave them to it. They have thousands of mins to listen to



Agreed... Just have to have faith in their process that it will be judged fairly.


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## musicalweather

I would be very curious to know how many total entries they got. I wonder if they will reveal that number.


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## Yogevs

musicalweather said:


> I would be very curious to know how many total entries they got. I wonder if they will reveal that number.



Probably not. I would love to know as well.


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## andrijatheloki

Hey! If you go to youtube, write #westworld..etc complete tag, scroll till the end you will find about 500 entries, remove the doubles, since sometimes tag is also in the description, you will find about 300-400, now, sometimes it doesnt appear, like mine for example, so it's probably about 400-500 entries, remove spoofs, so yeah , 400-500. 

Second, if they will watch it, they have to, why? If you check any composer contest online, you will find winners to have amazing music. Accident? Don't think so. Even if they go with publicity only, they still have yo choose something that is worth to be a winning score. So perhaps Ramin won't watch it all, but there will be people who will sort it out first, and go through.

My guess, that they will go straight to the scene, where the first genre changes. If you look top view videos have nothing there, no change just dramatic music, without story, and that is the main lets say , story-wise part of the scene. So just a guess, but it could happen that they do it that way. That would decrease the amount by 70% of videos. if not more. 

Last of all, if westworld doesn't look, spitfire audio will. They have such an amazing people working there, composers and musicians, i dont think they will just say , f it , give it to anyone we dont care. No way. So, good luck! Now we just have to wait.


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## Yogevs

I wonder if we can actually trust YouTube's search results though... I think it just stops after a number of results.

Their API search has a 500 results limit. I wonder if the impose the same limitation on their website.
To be honest - it looks like it.


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## gst98

Because they won't be able to watch all the way through every entry and they'll have to skip bits, I would have thought that a video with lots of likes might influence them and make it less likely for them to skip big chunks. I think it's only natural for people to see likes and views and have it influence them.

It not all good though, because when there were a few people who were posting within the first day or so, they were getting thoousands of views but acutally have 30% dislikes. there was nothing really wrong (other than being slightly generic action stuff) with their entries and I put it down to jealous people downvoting them. You never know how the people shortlisting will respond to dislikes.


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## Yogevs

I hope they won't be influenced by views or likes. I thought this competition is giving hobbyists a chance to tryout some new things.
No to see who has the biggest following.

I hatet popularity contests - I always lose


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## gst98

Yogevs said:


> I hope they won't be influenced by views or likes. I thought this competition is giving hobbyists a chance to tryout some new things.
> No to see who has the biggest following.
> 
> I hatet popularity contests - I always loose



I don't think it will be judged by views or likes, but in the shortlisting stage I think its really hard to see a video that has dislikes, and not be skeptical of why people downvoted. If its a really good score hopefully it will prove their inital sketicism wrong. Tbh we have no idea how long they'll listen to each entry for so its all guessing.


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## TGV

The organization doesn't have to be difficult: I suppose Spitfire are used to spread work over larger teams. I would get 20 people screen 20 entries each, and rate them, on a scale of 1 to 10. However, rating would be done after a common calibration session, so everyone gives out similar scores. Then, the best entries can get a discussion in e.g. 4 groups of 5 screeners, and their best are grouped and discussed, giving a list of 20 for the final jury. At least one week between each round, to avoid killing off everyone's ears and belief in humanity. There's no guarantee that the "best" will win, but I don't think there's any system that can do that in a reasonable amount of time.


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## Cathbad

Folks... c'mon... The music competition is incidental to the real purpose of the exercise.

Westworld, HBO and Spitfire are all over the search results, as several posters above have noted. And all without spending anything on SEO and advertising. Very clever.


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## David Kudell

I’d expect Spitfire to narrow down to the best 5-10 to present to the final jury.


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## Black Light Recordings

We've all been used. Just like the "Hosts" in the show. It's all part of a game!


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## toomanynotes

I would have preferred $1 for my effort, but if entries were 10k then that would cost them $10k for the promotion. So yes, they did well and they can do it again and again and again....good fun anyway!


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## Gingerbread

I would only create a submission for the experience of scoring to high-quality material. Great learning opportunity. The actual chances to win, even with a well-made submission? So low as to not bother concerning oneself with that aspect.


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## ElCampesino

I have about 70 views on my submission so far...  If exposure or numbers of subscribers are a factor in any way, I'm out of the game most definitely. But I like to believe that they will give every entry a fair shot and the Spitfire people are professional enough to judge every entry on its merit.

So if anyone cares to help me through the magic barrier of 100 views , here's my entry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHm-1DTfkiI


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## puffer3

I read on their website a few days before it closed that they got over 2500 entries.


Here is mine!. 

I hope its not based on views. I enjoyed it either way. Some of the high viewcount vids are a bit lacking IMO. Lots of other great ones out there tho


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## dzilizzi

Based on past scoring contests, I'm thinking I will watch the winning one, scratch my head and say "why?" They never look for what I would expect them to look for. 

And, obviously, I am not an expert at this. But I did it for the fun of it.


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## Yogevs

puffer3 said:


> I read on their website a few days before it closed that they got over 2500 entries.
> 
> 
> Here is mine!.
> I hope its not based on views. I enjoyed it either way. Some of the high viewcount vids are a bit lacking IMO. Lots of other great ones out there tho



Where did they say "over 2500"?


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## puffer3

I think it was a comment so its probably hearsay.


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## Jeremy Spencer

Yogevs said:


> Where did they say "over 2500"?



They didn't.


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## Mukkenerd

I think i am hallucinating, about 1-2 hours ago, in this post/thread, there were critical opinions to David Kudells 8Bit entry to the westworld competition and now they are all gone. Since i read the sh*tstorm on youtube to his entry and that some of them claimed that comments has been taken down on youtube too, i really starting to get conflicted here with the sincerity in this forum. Where are the posts i read? Seriously?


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## Mike Greene

Mukkenerd said:


> I think i am hallucinating, about 1-2 hours ago, in this post/thread, there were critical opinions to David Kudells 8Bit entry to the westworld competition and now they are all gone. Since i read the sh*tstorm on youtube to his entry and that some of them claimed that comments has been taken down on youtube too, i really starting to get conflicted here with the sincerity in this forum. Where are the posts i read? Seriously?


I don't recall any of the comments in this thread being critical (I think there were only four), but you're right that they are not here anymore. For the sake of not having four different threads discussing the same thing, I moved all comments to this thread:




__





Spitfire Westworld - Winner Announced!


Rather than have this discussed in three or four different threads, all of which are already on page 30 or 40, I'm creating this new thread. The winner is our very own @David Kudell! It's fun to look back to when he posted his entry here, and I gotta say, I'm happy he won. That post, and the...




vi-control.net





No comments, positive or negative, have been deleted. (Unless posters deleted their own comments.)


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