Sound & Screen AI Music Video Awards 2026 winners: After Eve takes 2 of 7 awards, including Best AI Music Video for Hollow

After Eve won Best AI Music Video for “Hollow” at the first Sound & Screen AI Music Video Awards, and picked up Best Technical Achievement for “Blah Blah Blah” on the same night. Nobody else won twice.

Samori Coles named the winners in all 7 categories live on TikTok on October 21, 2026, 3 days after the AI creator weekend he ran in Atlanta. He runs the awards out of Sound & Screen, his weekly AI music video review show, and the awards page bills them as the first awards built for AI music videos. Season One covered every video played on the show between September 9 and October 7, and 35 nominations went to 24 videos from 21 acts.

Full disclosure: I was one of the 4 judges, alongside Drake Murphy, Olivia B. Moore and Bruce Chamoff. So this piece sticks to the results and the published rules, and leaves my own verdicts out.

Every category below opens with the winning video, then lists all 5 nominees with a link to each video. Coles also published the results as a click-through winners deck, with one envelope per award.

Sound & Screen AI Music Video Awards 2026 winners: all 7 at a glance

• Best AI Music Video: “Hollow” by After Eve
• Best Storytelling: “Daddy Don’t” by Ravyn Mae
• Best Visual Style: “Time is a Limited Allowance” by Dream Relic
• Best Technical Achievement: “Blah Blah Blah” by After Eve
• Best Animation: “Take My Heart” by Waking Up Christopher
• Best Social Commentary: “Greenwood Stories” by Rayneedaye
• Viewers’ Choice: “Hand On The Wheel” by Fraize

After Eve also had the most nominations, 3, and each one was for a different video. Will & Bunny matched that with a single video, “Love is Crying”, nominated for Best Technical Achievement, Best Social Commentary and Best AI Music Video, and went home without a trophy.

The closest results were in Best Storytelling and Best Animation, where the deck gives the margin.

If you followed the SIQA nominations, 2 names will look familiar. Waking Up Christopher and Rebel Redeemed 316 (credited here as Rebel Redeemed) are both on the SIQA AI Music Awards 2026 nominee list as well, and those winners are named in Los Angeles on November 12 and 13.

Now, the categories, starting with the award Coles opened last.

Best AI Music Video 2026 at the Sound & Screen awards: Hollow by After Eve

Best AI Music Video is the headline award. The awards page describes the winner as the one video that did everything well, judged across all 6 criteria and with a point of view.

After Eve posted “Hollow” on YouTube on October 7, 2026, the same day as the last show that counted for Season One. The video description says it follows a character called Vesper and calls it “the beginning of HOLLOW”.

The 5 Best AI Music Video nominees:

• “Hollow” by After Eve (winner)
• “Love is Crying” by Will & Bunny
• “Break in the Sky” by The Wizave Project
• “Rest Of My Life” by Melvin Jamison
• “The Shawnie Show” by Post Modern Society

Each of the other 5 judged awards covers one part of the craft.

Sound & Screen AI Music Video Awards 2026 judged category winners

These 5 awards cover the idea, the look, the execution, the animation and the message. On each one, the judges’ scores carry 70% of the result and the public vote carries 30%.

Best Storytelling: Daddy Don’t by Ravyn Mae

Best Storytelling goes to a crafted narrative with a beginning and an end. The winners deck says this one was “decided by one vote”.

Ravyn Mae explains the video in her own words on YouTube. She stayed 10 years, and the last night was in a hotel room with her kids there. “My son was 6. He climbed over his daddy and said don’t.”

The 5 Best Storytelling nominees:

• “Mirage” by After Eve
• “Drink The Pain Away” by J. Frequency
• “Send Me” by Rebel Redeemed
• “The Jokes On You” by The Room2Breathe Project
• “Daddy Don’t” by Ravyn Mae (winner)

Best Visual Style: Time is a Limited Allowance by Dream Relic

Best Visual Style rewards art direction, judged against what the video is trying to be, whether that’s photoreal, Pixar-adjacent, art deco or hand-drawn. Coles’s Instagram post on the win says the award goes to the video with the strongest look, one you’d recognise from a single frame.

Dream Relic’s video is the most watched of the 7 winners on YouTube, with more than 316,000 views by November 2, 2026. It was also up for Viewers’ Choice.

The 5 Best Visual Style nominees:

• “Dance Through the Insanity” by Algorithm Of Chaos
• “Rest Of My Life” by Melvin Jamison
• “Break in the Sky” by The Wizave Project
• “Bees and Flowers” by Temptation Of The Priest
• “Time is a Limited Allowance” by Dream Relic (winner)

Best Technical Achievement: Blah Blah Blah by After Eve

Best Technical Achievement covers character consistency, clean execution and lip sync when it’s used. The awards page calls it “the category that could not exist at any other awards show”.

This is After Eve’s second trophy of the night, for a video posted on YouTube on September 5, 2026. If character consistency is the part you keep losing in your own videos, I walked through one way to hold it in my consistent characters tutorial.

The 5 Best Technical Achievement nominees:

• “Blah Blah Blah” by After Eve (winner)
• “Love is Crying” by Will & Bunny
• “Into The Ether” by Fractured Veil
• “The Shawnie Show” by Post Modern Society
• “Send Me” by Rebel Redeemed

Best Animation: Take My Heart by Waking Up Christopher

Best Animation goes to a world built from nothing, judged on movement, character design and whether the animation serves the song. According to the winners deck, 3 points separated first and second.

Waking Up Christopher describes the video as a breakup story that moves from a toxic chapter into a neon-lit life rebuilt from the ground up. The same act is up for AI Song of the Year at the SIQA AI Music Awards with “Let ‘Em”.

The 5 Best Animation nominees:

• “Into The Ether” by Fractured Veil
• “Awakened” by Namaste Warriors
• “Take My Heart” by Waking Up Christopher (winner)
• “Cosmic Zoo” by Robyn Nikole
• “Juggalo Jesus x One Piece Pt. 2” by Lord Spit

Best Social Commentary: Greenwood Stories by Rayneedaye

Best Social Commentary goes to a video that says something about the world, judged on whether the point lands, not on whether the judges agree with it.

“Greenwood Stories” is a hip-hop tribute to the people of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, the Black business district known as Black Wall Street that was destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Its YouTube description names Yung Zilla as the performer, and the awards credit the video to Rayneedaye, the label channel it was posted on.

The 5 Best Social Commentary nominees:

• “Love is Crying” by Will & Bunny
• “Cosmic Zoo” by Robyn Nikole
• “Would Have Never Imagined” by J. Frequency
• “Masquerade” by Paradigm
• “Greenwood Stories” by Rayneedaye (winner)

Sound & Screen AI Music Video Awards 2026 Viewers’ Choice: Hand On The Wheel by Fraize

Viewers’ Choice is the one award with no judges at all. 137 votes came in between October 14 and 20, and Coles says every vote was checked against its email address and IP.

Fraize won it with “Hand On The Wheel”, a road movie with a truck, a band, rain and desert light. The video description credits the concept, songwriting, creative direction and final cut to Fraize. It beat 2 videos that won judged awards, “Daddy Don’t” and “Time is a Limited Allowance”.

The 5 Viewers’ Choice nominees:

• “Masquerade” by Paradigm
• “Hand On The Wheel” by Fraize (winner)
• “Time is a Limited Allowance” by Dream Relic
• “Write A Letter” by Drai Producer
• “Daddy Don’t” by Ravyn Mae

Coles posted the night’s recap, with every creator tagged, in an Instagram reel the day after the show.

What makes a good AI music video: the 6 criteria behind the Sound & Screen awards

Coles’s pitch on the awards page is short:

“

No studio. No budget. No permission.

The 4 judges scored every nominee from 1 to 10 on each of these 6 criteria:

• Story: is there a crafted idea, or just a run of nice shots?
• Vision: did the creator go past the obvious version of the song?
• Cinematography: framing, lighting, camera movement and editing, held to industry standard within the video’s own style.
• Character and world consistency: the same face, the same wardrobe and the same world from the first frame to the last.
• Technical execution: clean shots, with no artifacts, no morphing and no transitions that fall apart.
• Song service: does the video make the track hit harder than it does on its own?

Lip sync was a deduction, not a category. Skipping it cost nothing, and using it badly cost up to 5 points. Every video was also judged against what it was trying to be, never against photorealism.

There was no entry form. Any video that played on the show between September 9 and October 7 was in, as long as it was the creator’s own work and AI was a meaningful part of how it was made. The awards page lists no cash prize: the winning work plays on air with the creator credited by name, and Coles’s recap counts 7 trophies.

Season Two of Sound & Screen starts on Wednesday, November 4 at 7 PM Eastern on TikTok. If you’re still picking the generator to build your entry with, my AI music video generator roundup is where I’d start.