NFTS Sound Design Wins MPSE Golden Reel Award For Ninth Successive Year

The Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE) Golden Reel Awards were held on Sunday 3 March and the National Film and Television School (NFTS) is proud to announce that Sound Design MA graduate Simon Panayi has been awarded the Verna Fields Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing Student Award for the ninth consecutive year.

Simon Panayi at the MPSE Golden Reel Awards in LA

Five NFTS graduation films were nominated for the award, with the NFTS being the only UK film school in the category. Etienne Kompis (From The Top), Itzel Gonzalez Estrada (Gossip), Marios Themistocleous (The Tornado Outside) and Siim Skepast (Tree of Many Faces) were among those recognised for their work in the list of nominations, a brilliant achievement in itself, but it was fellow graduate Simon Panayi who took home the award at the ceremony in LA for his outstanding work on 2023 graduation fiction Dive, an environmental thriller set onboard an offshore oil rig out in the North Sea.

Simon said of the win; "It was wonderful to attend the awards and to be amongst so many of the sound professionals that I admire. And to win was a pretty cool bonus! I’d also like to shout out to my NFTS classmates to whom I owe them a great deal of learning and friendship.”

NFTS Sound Design graduates L-R Etienne Kompis, Simon Panayi, Itzel Gonzalez-Estrada, Siim Skepast and Marios Themistocleous

NFTSA Golden Reel Award is recognised as one of the most prized accolades in the sound editing world and the annual recognition the NFTS Sound Design MA receives through its graduates consecutive wins is testament to the standard the course trains its students to.

Congratulations to them all!

Applications are open for the NFTS Sound Design MA. Find out how you could follow in these incredible footsteps at nfts.co.uk/sound-design-film-and-television