BBC Step Up Session -- Pitch Your Story!

It's a very interesting session I attended last Wednesday afternoon, Hazel, a broadcaster from BBC Scotland gives us a fantastic pitch session. I love the way she guides us into the session, particularly her opening film.

What makes a bad pitch?

I found out the film is so attractive, because normally people will talking about what makes a good pitch. However, instead of talking about what makes a good pitch she started to talk to us what makes a bad pitch.

1. No confidence, a man appearing on the scream with pale face and looks so nervous
2. Ridiculous concept, the idea should be reasonable, otherwise commissioning officer won't appreciate the ideas.
3. Poor appearance, when go to pitch your idea, of course you need to be careful with your dress, should be formal and serious about your story.
4. No head for figures. You have to understand that how much you're going to spend to make your story, and how much profits you will gain from the story making, keep economic concept in your mind.
5. No exclusivity
6. Props that let you down. This is a most funny thing, more mean technique stuffs, so always check before pitching with commissioning officer, otherwise could turn out that you can't show your work because technical reason.

What else Hazel talked about pitching a story?

We need to be very passionate about our story, confident of our ideas, and make sure we know what we're going to ask, who we're going to ask for during the story making.

Hook is a kind of question, the main thing we have to be very much clear what's the idea, mostly utilise one or two sentences to describe the idea, this I learnt from David.

We need to estimate that do people care? why should people care? then we know how many people will watch it.

Aa a story maker, we also need to understand that the commissioning officers are willing to know what they will watch from the screen, what they will hear from the radio, so the question will through to us how am I going to make the story?

Other thing such as be clear of the idea which has already been mentioned above, what's the big idea? what's the purpose?How will it works? what's in it for audience? close -- should be a very strong statement, and reflect something, because story maker need to convince audience what they're thinking about exactly.

The ending from Hezel's session is wonderful, she says a good pitch tells an engaging story with a beginning, a middle and an end.