Karla Henwood’s Cannes Diary #1

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Karla Henwood’s Cannes Diary #1

Karla Henwood (pictured), executive creative producer at Nylon Studios is representing Australia on the Cannes Entertainment Lions for Music. Henwood, along with most of the other Australian and NZ jurors writes exclusively for CB.

 

Music is extremely subjective – or is it?
The daily struggle of a music producer is to navigating the client, director and creatives individual tastes in music to engage an audience and creatively deliver a brand’s message. Easy. But what may feel uplifting and inspiring to one person could seem sad and depressing to another, so I’m keen to see in a room of 10 leading music producers just how subjective award winning music really is.

After breakfast we were collected from the Hotel Martinez, teased with a stroll along the Promenade de la Croisette and escorted straight into a dark padded room (cell) with no windows to commence the jury process. OK it wasn’t so bad, there were snacks.

Chairman Philip Thomas and Paulette Long our jury president run a tight ship. We went through the rules, codes of conduct, then were told about some very complex voting algorithms (that totally went over my head) but essentially they assured us the system knows when we’re even thinking about cheating or exercising any agency or region bias.
No phones – there is even a phone ‘sin bin’ labelled with our names should we be caught texting, looking at facebook or whatever.
No swearing (Paulette’s requests) – this is clearly going to be the rule hardest for our group to stick to.

The objective of today was to shortlist the entries into 14 music categories for review and discussion tomorrow. There’s sure to be plenty of debate in the coming days, but for day one, according to all the officials in the room, it went very smoothly.

Music did feel a little less subjective, so far. However you do get a strong sense of the particular entries that will fuel passionate conversations in the coming days.

Let the great music debate beginning!

Karla Henwood’s Cannes Diary #1