Laurence Roper - Professional Practice - The Pitch

Laurence Roper – Professional Practice - Pitch

For this project we had Ryan Goodwyn-Smith come in to present the project and give us advice throughout. For this project we had to produce a 10 minute pitch for a 1 minute concept for the BBC Christmas advert, we were given a short premise explaining the characters and expectations for the story as well as character designs. Ryan set the brief to have realistic starting information and expectations to emulate the kind of brief a company’s art director would receive from a company looking to commission an animation.

This was a really interesting project that forced me to spend time working on pre-production work instead of jumping in to production immediately, as we didn’t actually have to produce the final animation. I spent a lot of the earlier weeks researching Christmas adverts and coming up with rough ideas for narratives. The main idea I decided upon was of Ben saving money to buy a laptop so he could spend the holidays with Molly despite their distance. 

I began to expand upon the idea and once I had a more consolidated idea of what I wanted from the story I went further and produced a script to ensure I understood how the story would play out and get a better idea of key moments and timing.

I then started to storyboard the story to begin to visualise how the shots might look. After a couple of pages of storyboarding I decided it would take up a large amount of the designated pitch time to show a full storyboard, it would also be an unengaging way to depict the story. I considered finishing it and converting it in to an animatic format that could show the story and set out a sense of the timing, but instead I decided to draw out story beats depicting key scenes. 

This method allowed me to put more time in to each scene and paint a better visualisation of what it might look like, how the colours would affect the mood of each scene, and what the most important factors were. I wasn’t certain if these illustrations would be acceptable as it wasn’t a method anyone had mentioned as a possibility but I felt they were a good way to depict the story. In the end they were very well received.

These paintings were really beneficial for the pitch, it gave me the opportunity to section out the story in a neat manner for the presentation which I think helped to coherently explain the story and consolidate the idea in the clients mind. 

It might have been a good idea to include an animatic as well, I hadn’t made an animatic as I didn’t think I would have time to include it in the pitch as well as the information I already had, but when it came down to it the pitch could easily have accommodated an animatic as well, I think this would have been a nice way to finish the presentation.

Setting up the presentation I designed it to emulate the appearance of the first presentation Ryan gave to us when explaining the brief. This is because Ryan briefly mentioned something about retaining aspects of a client’s files, presentations, etc. as it will be familiar and show the client you’re invested in the project. In this regard creating a subtle BBC stylisation for the presentation may have been more on-brand with the brief.

I kept the initial synopsis very short to give a broad overview of the story, this allowed me to move on to reference some key notes such as the proposed style and technique used for the animation, as well as reintroducing the characters to the client before moving in to explaining the story in more depth accompanied by the previously mentioned illustrations.

The spoken aspect of the pitch was a frightening aspect, I have very little experience with this kind of presentation and am generally quite reserved about this kind of open speech. I decided to avoid writing a script or rehearsing, this is because I couldn’t imagine a director of a real studio having the time or opportunity to rehearse their pitch. A written script for the pitch would have been too easy to fall back on and read off of which I feel would have given the pitch a ‘robotic’ feeling. I wanted to try and maintain a casual atmosphere for my pitch.

Overall I felt the actual pitching went surprisingly well. Getting in to the presentation I found that I knew what I wanted to say and didn’t have much trouble communicating my ideas. The visual references helped to keep my explanation streamlined and coherent getting in to the more detailed aspects of the story.

A big part I felt like I could have put more consideration in to is the dog Sammy, she was an important character from the eyes of the client but in my story she doesn’t exactly play a key role. This being something that resonates with the client I should have put more focus on it as it could have been a good selling point for my pitch.