Our New Model For Pitch Workshops And Competitions

Saturday, May 21 at the Northwest Screenwriter’s Guild, Bill and I offered a workshop on powerful pitching, followed by a unique brand of pitch critique for participants in a pitch competition. In both the training and the judging, we tag-teamed as a writer/director to cover both the story being pitched, and you as the presenter of the pitch. We spent a substantial section of the training focused on what maximizes presence, specifically what zaps people of their presence under pressure, and then what brings them back to confidence.

This approach mirrors what we do in other industries that pitch under pressure, but we didn’t know for sure how it would land with this audience. We were pleased that it was a big success and seemed very highly regarded. Key to the process was a appreciation technique we use that points your attention off of yourself, followed by a story process that structures your pitch using the same basic mechanisms that a writer would use to structure a story.

The judging was really exciting, because each person who pitched in the contest received feedback from both their story pitch and their performance of pitching it. We worked hard to encourage realistically, which meant giving them truthful responses, yet providing a key activity that can help them improve. The feedback we got was that it was unlike any other pitch judging these screenwriters had received. They said the hybrid approach of performance and story together readied them for the job at hand of promoting their projects far better than anything they’d received in a pitch critique before. We were glad to help and appreciated the confirmation that a writer/director team made sense in fostering growth, which is exactly what we care about most, and what motivated us to sign up for something like this in the first place. We expect to be taking this process to other pitch competitions in the future.