Synoptic Project – Pitch

Recently, myself and the rest of the class pitched our ideas for our upcoming Synoptic Project. In this blog post I’m going to be going through the pitch, the idea I was trying to get across, my personal opinion on my performance and my tutors feedback from the pitch.

So, what was my idea I hear you ask? Well if you read my previous Synoptic project post, then you may recall me talking about my idea briefly (link to previous Synoptic Project Post).In short my idea is a short film, lasting 5 minutes or 10 minutes max, that tells a story of a man who is cursed by a mysterious figure, leaving him to fight his inner demons and to uncover the truth about himself throughout the story. This idea is basically a live action interpretation of our Global Game Jam game Remember. Anyway on to the pitch.

For starters, I introduced myself, the pitch and what I was going to talk about with the opening slide…On the next slide I talked about the actual Idea I had, which I explained previously in the post. I didn’t want to bombard the audience with too much information at once, so I decided to have a minimum amount of info on the slide so that it was easier to take in. I also mentioned how the project related to the themes we had to choose from, this one relating to the fictional character theme…Next I briefly talked about the inspiration I had for the idea. The main inspiration of course being the game jam game, however the other inspirations include stranger things, because of the dark and dreary presentation of the upside down: Jekyll and Hyde, because of the split personality and general horror elements and tropes, such as the greater evil is the one we don’t see, which leaves the audience to wonder and imagine what lies in store for the remainder of the film…I then went on to discuss character design.For the concept, I basically took the game jam concept art and made it more true to life, I did this so that everyone could get a good idea of what costumes the character would wear throughout the short film. I also did this because the other idea I had (the Lambton worm), had costumes that would make the short no feasible due to the costumes having to look accurate and etc. So me producing more true to life concepts would give the crew working on this project a better understanding of a character wardrobe and so on…Then I talked about the storyboard I had produced…The storyboard I made was set around about the 2nd act in the short film where the main character would come in from work, throw down his keys and put on some music. Then he would walk upstairs to look at himself in the mirror and think about life, however unknown to him a figure is watching him from his bathroom, calmly but like a hawk…Overall I’m really happy with how the storyboard came out.

Then on the next slide I discussed the different job roles that people could take on if they wished to join in, this was so that everyone would have plenty to do as well as building up their portfolio’s.Then I talked about the feasibility…So was the Idea feasible? Yes, definitely! However, whoever decided to work on the project would have to do there part in keeping the project afloat. This then led me on to talk about pacing and what kind of work flow we would be working at. So with this in mind I talked about how we would be working alongside the VFX pipeline throughout the project.This final slide finished off the pitch.

Honestly, I think that my performance in the pitch was very poor and I wasn’t too clear about my idea and the visual effects I wanted to create for the project. I had missed out a tonne of things I had wanted to pitch to the class and only when the Q&A came around did I realise this. For instance when we were pitching individually, I pitched a scene to my class mate Cate where the character gets grabbed by himself through a mirror, much like in the Ang Lee Hulk movie… However I missed this out in the actual pitch and to be fair this really annoyed me afterwards. I just wish the pitch had gone better if I’m honest.

The feedback that my tutors gave me was that they thought my pitch was well organised and looked quite good, but the execution was very sloppy and could definitely be improved, the execution being actually talking about my idea and explaining the concepts I had prepared for the pitch in depth. As well as this, they said that I must be more clear about my ideas as, again I admittedly missed out a lot of ideas that I wanted to pitch for the project.

Overall, the pitch could’ve gone a lot smoother and to make sure my future pitches go better in the future I’m going to make sure that I prepare much more, like for instance rehearsing what I’m going to say before I go into the pitch as I didn’t rehearse too much for the pitch in the first place if I’m honest. So to improve I’m definitely going to rehearse more and cover all of the content I wish to pitch, i do believe that this will help me I’m the future and I’m definitely going to apply my tutors feedback to pitches I do in the future so that I can produce the best pitches I can possibly do.