Doddle to Sponsor New Award in Collaboration with ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop
Apr 20, 2011

By Kevin Lau

Doddle, a new production guide app that lives on your smartphone, will be awarding $2,000 to a winning director and composer from this year's ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop.

The 2011 ASCAP/Columbia University Film Scoring Workshop, with support from the ASCAP Foundation, Film Musicians Secondary Market Fund, Local 802 AFM, RMA, and Avatar Studios, selected four MFA filmmakers to participate in this esteemed yearly workshop.

This year's fellows are: Simão Cayatte for his film THE TRIP, Ana Lazarevic for her film THE RUNNER, Olivia Newman for her film FIRST MATCH, and Satsuki Okawa for her film TIDY UP. The CUFF trailer, directed by Robin Pattinson, was also included in the workshop. All films will be premiering at this year's festival.

ASCAP, The American Society of Composer, Authors and Publishers is a membership association of more than 400,000 U.S. composers, songwriters, lyricists, and music publishers of every kind of music. ASCAP curates an online spotlight of thirty film composers from which the selected filmmakers each hire a composer to score their entire film. Alex Steyermark (Columbia University faculty; director, One Last Thing, Prey For Rock & Roll; music supervisor for directors Ang Lee, Spike Lee, etc.) guides the filmmakers through the process of finding the right composer, then supports the filmmaker-composer teams through spotting the film, presentations and critiques of the score-in-progress, and preparations for the scoring and mixing sessions.

"I felt like I was too spoiled," said Okawa, director of TIDY UP. "My guys, Chris Maxwell and Philip Fernandez, a.k.a. Elegant Too, are very established composers with amazing profile. I had no idea how the professional film score gets done and it is lucky to find someone showing a little interest in your film."

"Working with Agatha Kasprzyk was an incredible and truly collaborative experience," commented Cayatte, director of THE TRIP. "We met regularly for the whole period of the workshop and worked on the soundtrack for weeks. Agatha gave her all to the project. I am thankful to have worked with such a dedicated professional."

The scoring sessions are held at Avatar Studios and are comprised of fifteen professional musicians. "The highlight of the process was definitely hearing the music performed live with incredible musicians from the Met opera," said Newman, director of FIRST MATCH. "It brought the film to life in a completely different way. When you spend months in the editing room, weeks designing the sound, you probably watch your film hundreds of times. But when I heard the music performed live under the film, I was able to watch it again with fresh eyes and be drawn to the characters again for the first time in a LONG time."

The Doddle Award for Collaborative Achievement in the ASCAP/Columbia University Film Scoring Workshop will be presented at Faculty Selects night on May 6. In addition to the $2,000 prize to be shared by the winning directing-composing team, Doddle will also be awarding year-long subscriptions of Doddle Pro to all directors, writers and producers with films in CUFF. The new app, available on multiple mobile platforms, promises to transform production professionals' lives by giving the unique power to plan, communicate with, and manage workforces from a smartphone during the creative process. Doodle is designed to inspire the production industry, letting professionals spend less time chained to a desk and more time in the field.

"ASCAP provided the opportunity of picking a composer from a pool of amazingly talented professionals," said Cayatte. "They also met with us weekly and we worked together on our scores, sometimes even staying after hours. Honestly, the simple way to look at it is that without this workshop we would never have had the chance to get this kind of advice and collaboration, culminating in a recording at one of the best studios in New York with amazing players and mixing professionals. So in short, the support was tremendous."

For more information on Doddle, please visit www.doddleme.com. For more information on the ASCAP/Columbia Film Scoring Workshop, please visit www.ascap.com.