Preparation: Short Documentary Analysis:
Watching short documentaries gave us the opportunity to find out how people produce them and what makes them intriguing. One example of how documentaries - specifically portrait documentaries move people is by the elements within the short films themselves, as they contain background music along with the emotional background story of one person. Yes - portrait documentaries are mainly about a person's identity/story that is entirely connected to them and the fact that it means a lot to them - to the point where they are willing to share their story through a documentary.
What have we been told to do?(brief):
For this unit of our course, we have been told to pitch for a documentary about a place or a person - this is more known as a portrait documentary. As you have read from above, we have analysed multiple documentaries and we have noticed that we need to make sure that we capture someone's identity and we would want our speaker to tell their story. Pitching is going to be one of the most difficult parts of this unit as we would have to individually find someone or a place to document and have them willing to share their story about them or a place. It's quite difficult to actually find people willing to do this as they might not want to be on camera or they aren't confident on speaking about their particular subject/topic. In terms of my confidence in pitching, i feel that it's going to be the most challenging project of this course - especially since we are all going individual for this project. Subsequently meaning: We will have to get someone to who is willing to be documented, research all our own information, manage our client and even manage all of the budgeting and investing on our own.
Also, we must produce documentation evidencing preparation workflow, as well as the presentation itself for a visual aid in the actual pitch. Basically meaning that we can get stock footage/archive footage, or even mood-board resemblance to keep us going in the pitch.
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When it eventually comes along to the pitch, it would be managing of the idea I will be presenting and all the requirements of information that will test my skills in keeping things in context - in the way that I would want them to go to link in theme. Additionally, I think that on the day of pitching, it will be a walk in the park as we have all pitched in our lives and we have shown that we can easily gather information about a particular idea, so I think that I can pitch a well thought out presentation covering my idea, which is linked to a theme and that each slide is in context with my idea.
Pitching:
Pitching involves communicating with someone that you want for an idea/production. In this case, we have to produce a documentary of someone or a place, so we would need to find anyone that has a good background story and if this is the case, we would need to explain: what we need the person for, why we need the person, how this person will make an impact and what difference the person will make to a niche audience. When I mention a niche audience, i mean that this target audience would be people that are interested in documentaries about particular topics - for my idea on what my documentary will be based upon, i think that I would like to document possibly my Dad's career.
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There are different people that watch different types of things. For example, some people like to watch horror films, whereas most people prefer not to watch horror films, but instead watch comedies. This applies to documentaries and it's all dependant on the topic in which the documentary is based on, so if i documented someone who was in the War, some people might not want to watch it as they possibly don't like War related subjects, but on the other hand, there are War enthusiasts out there who wouldn't mind watching the documentary to hear about other people's stories.
The Elevator Pitch
For an elevator pitch, you have 3 minutes to describe what your ideas are, how you are going to document it and why you need investors for the project. When I was doing my elevator pitch, I conveyed that my 2 ideas were filming someone who was in the War and filming my brother's work. However, when the pitch finished, those ideas weren't that confident with me as I felt that the ideas weren't going to work that well or they wouldn't be interesting enough for a documentary. So, that is where the actual pitch comes in as I had made my mind up of what to document by then.
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My Pitch Idea(10 min pitch):
For my final idea, I want to go and document my Dad as he is a spray painter, in which he does metal spraying. This is a great idea for my pitch, due to the availability of B-roll shots, which work really well in a documentary portrait. For example, I could easily get some shots of my Dad spraying different things and combining those shots together, so when editing the footage: I have lots of spraying shots, interview footage etc. When it comes to the interview part of the documentary, I will film him at home, rather than him at work as it's noisy and you wouldn't be able to hear him. However, filming the b-roll shots at work wouldn't be a problem and they aren't that difficult to film.
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Mood-board
Legal and Ethical:
My Pitching Presentation:
The 10 Minute pitch:
For the 10 minute pitch, I have the presentation above to use, so i can explain: What my idea is and why it is effective, budget for my kit list, shooting script, who my idea will appeal to, why you should invest etc. Rather than the mini pitch before, this time we are only talking about one idea, which is our final idea, so we need to explain all of the key reasons for creating a portrait documentary about our chosen idea. For example, my idea is all about the background story of my Dad and how he became a spray painter and for this, I would talk about who the niche audience would be, the cost and why his background story is interesting.
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To add to the pitch, socioeconomic factors include a person's status, so someone who lies between the middle socioeconomic status, meaning that they have a moderate income and still work. Going into further details, the contributing factors for this status, would include: income level, occupation , wealth and access to education. All of these contributing factors definitely match the pitching idea of a spray painter as typically, these fall into this category of work. Finally, psychometric factors also contribute, so someone's cognitive abilities are part of the reason for what job they have, so a spray painter would be someone with a creative mindset as it sort of links to art.
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Spray painters would also be linked to people in the C-B tier from the demographic status, as they are people who have been in manual work or generally just people that have the same sort of status as a spray painter would. Yet again, this group type would consist of those that watch anything related to creativity or people would read 'The Sun' newspapers. The psychographic audience would typically include people that are aspirers or reformers as they are people that grow their business on their own and follow the self employment route.
Evaluation:
After pitching my final idea to my teacher, I felt that I had done a great job at delivering my message of my idea, in which it should inspire the target audience of my dedicated psychographics and demographics. Most positives of my pitch would definitely go towards how clear my presentation was and how it is easy to understand. For example, on one of the slides, I talked about who the target audience are for my portrait documentary and I clearly talked about the fact that they are people who are in the same position of my Dad - if setting up a new business is worth the risk. I knew that I effectively delivered the target audience as Simon confirmed with me that my dedicated audience are that of which I chose. Additionally, my presentation included information that others didn't talk about in their pitch, such as: Legal/Ethical, Psychographics/ Demographics, Mood-board, shooting script and production schedule. In terms of negatives, there aren't any except 1 as my feedback that you can see above shows that I have pitched my idea with just 1 problem and everything i had stated was correct and in context with the theme of my idea. That 1 problem was actually to do with socioeconomic data, which is basically someone's income, education or place of residence.
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My pitch lasted 18 minutes+, but it was meant to be about 10 minutes. I don't think this is an issue and it's better than anything as it shows that I have talked about lots of different topics associated with my idea and the fact that they are all relevant and in context. Aside from this, sound was not good quality at some points as people were talking and other things were going on, so I used adobe audio enhancer, so you can hear the video in a crisper format. In comparison to my elevator pitch, I feel that i have improved by a lot as I was much more confident in explaining what my idea was and every aspect in correlation with it, as in the elevator pitch I explained 2 ideas, but they weren't as well presented because I wasn't confident with those ideas, due to issues associated with them.
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Simon mentioned in the feedback that my idea is very feasible as my subject is on my Dad and his growth in career/ his background story, but it may not have been feasible if I had went on using the idea of my brother's work place as it might not be interesting to viewers and there wouldn't be a message to really spread. So, I feel that I have thought thoroughly about what my idea should be and it has worked out well as it is an interesting idea that will inspire the target audience. In addition, making the pitching slide actually went quite well, due to the confidence in my idea. Basically, I managed to pull together information that was all in context with my idea, such as: Stock images for mood-board, information about what the psychographics and demographics would be, target audience data(who would watch this) and budget data from a source, in which mine was 'Films @ 59'. We needed all of this data/information, so that we would get marked well for our research and I managed to present it all clearly.
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In terms of what I have learned in selling this idea to a potential investor, I found out the hard way that people wouldn't be interested in things that have already been documented and the fact that one of my ideas was about someone in the war, this has already been seen multiple times already. That's why my other idea of my Dad being a spray painter was much better, as this idea is unique and has never really been showed at all on a documentary. This unique selling idea got me where I am now, where I am reflecting the fact that I had a completely different idea than many others. Next time, I would definitely make sure to use more resources to help guide my pitch, such as more examples of other spray painters and how they cope working in that industry. In addition to this, I would also make sure to present more of the socioeconomic factors that link to demographics. I needed to be more specific in this description, so I would need to factor in points, especially psychometric that fit into my documentary.