Wednesday 13 October 2010

Pitch Training

We've just spend the last week in pitch training at the Central School of Speech & Drama. There are a few tricks we learnt - mainly we did a lot of breathing exercises. The teachers made a good point when they said that most of our communication is non-verbal: tone and voice and body and eyes speak more loudly than we'd sometimes like.


Turns out communication (like so many things) is all about breathing.


Anyway, on the topic of pitching movies, here's one hilarious way (not) to do it:


Tuesday 12 October 2010

Transmedia Storytelling

In the process of thinking about how best to market House Rules (the movie), we have obviously been thinking about ways to create audience engagement online.


The Blair Witch Project is a traditional example of a film that started telling its story online long before the movie hit cinema screens. A massive audience was created and the film was a box office success despite its low production budget.


It's silly to try and reproduce such success, but there's definitely something to be said about taking your story beyond the four walls of a feature film. What about live performance, print, digital and social media? There is a growing movement that believes stories should be told across media to transcend one medium and become transmedia stories.


Here in London, an organisation called Power to the Pixel has been exploring all things cross-media for a couple of years and today they are hosting a forum to discuss ways of financing and distributing stories. I'm certainly listening.