From Pitch to Production
What can I say?
Your thoughts, prayers, and crossed fingers have helped - for my script 'A Good One' goes into PRODUCTION!
After half a day of lections, we spend the afternoon of our day waiting to deliver our pitches to a panel of about four members. While all where members of teaching staff at CCAD and thus well-known to us, most of our group were excited about the set-up and the seriousness of this endeavour.
As I already have a lot of experience in delivering presentations and pitching projects (I only need say DAAD), I was not really nervous about pitching my short film idea. Plus, we had already trained on how to pitch our ideas during the previous lesson, and thus I was confident that I would be able to at least deliver a decent pitch - regardless of the outcome. At some point, practice and routine are just taking over.
Apart from that, I would not have been devastated if my idea had not been picked, because we had many interesting ideas in our group already. Furthermore, my main goal for this module was to get more hands-on experience and practice on working as a cinematographer and improving my craft (and all the deities out there know that I have to, too)!
So when it was my turn to pitch, I felt that it went really well. I was able to explain my idea to the panel and to explain what I wanted to attempt within the restrictions I had.
I started off with the title and followed suit with the logline that I carried around in my mind for what feels like ages now:
'On your last day on earth, the person you are meets the person you could have become.'
After that, I quickly described the story in only about five lines while simultaneously projecting the storyboard onto the screen. Then, I quickly proceeded to the treatment part of my pitch, which was describing how I envisioned my main characters to be like, what colour palettes I intended to use, and how I envisioned the camera work.
After I finished my pitch, a relaxed discussion developed around more detailed elements and corner-stones of my plot and I was asked by our sound design lecturer as to how I imagined the sound schemes to play out. While this was not a scenario I had planned for as much as the other elements of my pitch, his questions did not throw me off, as I felt that I was very much in tune with my idea and could reproduce my vision without much of a delay. I was with the panel for about ten minutes before I left the room with a calm feeling.
And this is the pitch that won me a production!
So: YAY! Whoop whoop! And: 'Oh, shit!'
For the real work only starts now. We have a lot to plan and organise, as our production is too shoot on the first three working days after the Easter break and that does not really leave us a lot of contact hours to get the pre-production over and done with.
So we have to act immediately, if we want to get things done, and efficiently so. For there is much to plan and the devil is in the detail. Always.