Pitching Your Movie

We used to talk of the "Elevator Pitch," where you have 3 minutes to share your vision with an important decision maker, with such levels of professionalism, expertise, passion & conviction, that they are totally swayed. Then people spoke of getting that pitch down to 1 minute, & this works for feature films as well as business deals.

Essentially, we're seeing similar pitches with crowdfunding, kickstarter, indiegogo, etc, although the net has also developed a new model, whereby you make a short film that is so engaging it spawns a following, or a series, eventually leading to something bigger.

I've yet to see a legitimate feature materialize that way, though it might one day happen. So far there have been a couple of animated sci-fi shorts that have been picked up for development into longer pieces, but as far as I know, there hasn't been any major distribution deals. Tonight on Shark Tank we saw 2 guys pitch a feature, asking for 5 million dollars for a 34% stake. It was far & away the worst pitch I've ever seen & fizzled so badly it should be required watching by every film student. Their nonexistent movie is called Track Days, & I promise it will never be made. However, as a cautionary tale, I highly recommend you track down a copy of tonight's Shark Tank to observe how many things can go horribly wrong during a movie pitch.

:ohmy:

Just a technical note. My late father was a regional sales manager for Motorola's emergency services division, and was required to take and give hundreds of sales trainings. Used to drive me nuts growing up with all that crap. Anyway, it was a Dale Carnagie thing from way back. The correct original term was "Escalator Speech" and it stated you only had 20 seconds. The time it took to ride an escalator on floor, then when you reached the top, your captive audience was free to escape. He said it was a powerful sales technique, I said it was a form of inhuman torture. I never was good at sales...

Wish I'd heard that before these guys went to print . Could have saved them all the embarrassment.



Whatever you call it or what the duration is, the moral of the story is; when an opportunity arises to pitch someone very important, the time is extremely valuable, so make the most of it.

The 2 guys before the billionaires on Shark Tank, crashed & burned pathetically. Whether you're good at sales or not, if your idea is a gem, you need to be able to effectively communicate that vision to others.

Those opportunities are very rare, so be ready.

Yes, common mistakes about an old, old, old method. I'm honored enough to have actually spoken to master Dale himself, who created it.

Point is, rehears that escalator speech.
Memorize it.
Know it.
Been there, know that, from longer ago than most of you can remember, can attest it works 100 percent of the time when you do it RIGHT.

Very similar technique taught by many of my colleges teaching directors in higher education. Sum up the film in 3 or less sentences, then each scene as such, then each shot as such, on paper, before you ever even storyboard.

Not only will you know your whole film before touching a camera, but when something goes wrong, and you need to cut a scene, you can do it in a few minutes, rather than hours discussing it with the crew. And if you're and editor who does this, the edit is completed before you ever see the first media import.

Been there, done that.