Thanks musicstudent for the commiserations .WOW what a controvesy.
I didnt check Reaper yet so I must do now but what I see is summed up like this
1 11000 entries were meant to have been judged in a max of 24 days not possible and then they said we had a series of trained judges after the fact
2 The winner maybe either worked with or for a Judge
3 The winning entry clearly broke the rules by changing the audio
4Its hard to know is the Super Mario effect copyrighted and thus is a rule breaker,it def inst original
5 The announcement itself was a huge damp squid with no explanations etc
To add to this many comments felt the winning score had nothing to do with the actual scene and was cartoonish but if their were no other issues I would say that thsts the judges choice to pick that.Some of the score I actually liked and if it hadnt super mario I would have liked it alot more.
As for me I learned a couple of things 1 I loved my piece of music 2 Scoring although time consuming is so easy compares to writing a song with lyrics and vocals etc So much easier . Overall Spitfire HBO snatched defeat out of the Jaws of victory in a big way .I have to say Im surprized how badly they got it wrong but WOW what a fiery debate One last thing the judges didnt seem to understand their own scene at all which is a bit of a shocker and I hope that it doesnt discourage other companies from holding competitions with good prizes