Sync Success - Film Sync Awards Winner Lands Apple TV Sync
Most sync placements start with a track. This one started with a relationship, the kind that begins long before anyone knows which project it will serve.
For British composer Benson Herbert, an Apple TV+ credit on Drops of God began with the 2024 edition of the Bridge.audio Film Sync Awards, where he was named one of the winners. On the jury that year, listening closely, was Paris-based music supervisor Thibault Deboaisne, founder of the agency Sound Division and a member of that year’s Jury of Music Supervisors. Months later, Thibault would pick up the phone looking for a composer. Benson would pick up.
What are the Film Sync Awards?
The Film Sync Awards is Bridge.audio’s annual international sync contest. Each year, a jury of music supervisors listens to sync pitches from composers around the world, using an existing film scene as the brief. There’s a celebration for the winners, but the real prize is having direct visibility with the exact professionals who hire composers for film, television, and advertising.
That was the setup in 2024, when Thibault Deboaisne joined the Jury of Music Supervisors and first encountered Benson’s work.
About Thibault Deboaisne
Thibault’s seat on that jury in 2024 was no accident. Before specialising in supervision, he built a foundation inside the record business at Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music France. That label apprenticeship gave him something many supervisors spend years acquiring the hard way: a working knowledge of catalogues, rights, and the economics of how music actually moves.
He then founded Sound Division, his own independent agency dedicated to music for the screen, and became a founding member of France’s Association des Superviseurs Musicaux, helping give the profession its structure and recognition. Across more than a hundred projects (features, series, fashion shows, and audiovisual programming), he has become one of the voices trusted with placing music in some of contemporary French cinema’s most talked-about works, including the Palme d’Or-winning Anatomie d’une chute, Dominik Moll’s La Nuit du 12, and Scott Frank’s mini-series Monsieur Spade.
In other words, submissions to the program are heard by someone with deep experience in how music finds its way to the screen.
Benson’s winning pitch for the 2024 Film Sync Awards
For the 2024 edition, Benson chose an unusually demanding source scene to reinterpret: a passage from Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. His version was one of the entries the jury singled out as a winner.
“It was a great experience,” Benson says of the Film Sync Awards, “and it led to me getting my first placement in an Apple TV series, which is amazing.”
That placement, though, didn’t happen on the day of the award. It came later, through a phone call.
The Apple TV Placement: A call, and a new project
After the awards, Benson put his tracks on Bridge Sync and Bridge Score. Later he got on a call with Thibault. As it happened, Thibault was in the middle of music-supervising Drops of God, the acclaimed Apple TV+ drama, and was still searching for the right cues for a handful of specific scenes. That’s when the sync placement came to be, with Benson’s track “Meet Up” placed in one of the episodes.
Inside the track in question, “Meet Up”
Writing to a dialogue-heavy scene is a particular craft. The music has to carry emotional weight without ever competing with the actors, a narrow corridor to work in.
“For ‘Meet Up’ I wanted to write something that had some energy to it, but at the same time wasn’t distracting from the scene, as there was a lot of dialogue,” Benson explains. “It needed to give the mood a sense of urgency and anticipation, while also giving a rise and fall to a number of different emotions.”
That last phrase is the heart of it. A score doesn’t just set a tone. It tracks the shifts in what a scene is doing, moment to moment. “Meet Up” sits under conversation while still lifting, pulling back, and leaning forward again. Precisely the kind of nuanced, scene-aware writing the jury had flagged the year before.
What the Apple TV Sync placement unlocked for Benson
Ask any composer what a first major-series credit actually does, and you tend to hear the same answer: it opens doors that the credit-less version of you could never knock on.
“I learnt a lot through the process,” Benson says, “and it has given me a great credit to approach other directors, supervisors and producers with, so it has been a real help.”
That is the quiet power of a well-aimed sync placement. The fee matters; the credit often matters more. The work becomes proof of what a composer can do on a real project, with a real deadline, for a real supervisor, and that proof compounds.
The takeaway
“Meet Up” is now part of Drops of God’s sonic identity on Apple TV+. Benson Herbert has his first major series credit. Thibault Deboaisne has added another composer to a roster he can reach for on the next project. And we’re grateful to have played a small part in the introduction.