Pitch: Take One!

Hi All,

This week I delivered my first film pitch which was scary and very exciting. We are creating Energy saving videos targeted at Senior Citizens as part of a project called 'See Green' http://www.see-green.eu/seegreensite/en/ .

I am team leader which is a new experience for me as I rarely take charge in most projects, preferring to be a researcher or simply a member of a team. This meant I had to organize my team and communicate with various members of the public and industrial people (this is an on-going project). As someone who hates talking over the phone this is a new challenge for me, however I am up to attempting this task, whether it will actually be successful or not.

My team consist of two researchers, Rob and Hazel, and our fourth team member, Megan. I instantly found that splitting the research between us was beneficial with Rob and Hazel taking the bulk of the information and reporting back every other day. Therefore we have met as a team at least three times a week. Once we had a brief outline of the possible topics on Energy Saving we began to look more deeply into areas of interest. We also wanted to try and pick an area that (one of the other groups also doing this task) was unique or at least a unique take on the subject. 

For our pitch we created a simple Powerpoint to use as a guide for what we wanted to say throughout the actual presentation. This included a brief outline of what we had learned, communications we had sort, possible interview questions we would propose to use, a review of the previous student project, a list of campaigns already attempted, our film proposal and a brief scheduled on when and how we hoped to create our film. 

We aren't a very confident group when it comes to audience presentations so this pitch worried us and we continued to script what we would say and who would say what, trying to make it as even as possible. I would, as the team leader, take the lead throughout the pitch.

The pitch took place on 23rd October 2012 in one of the University Lab rooms. We were to watch and present in front of at least half our peers. Some people were very confident and had amazing ideas, while others were like us, very nervous and would prefer not to be doing this. We were also presenting in front of a select few industry people who would ask us questions and give us advice.

Our pitch took place at 5pm and the nerves had had time to set in. Feeling jittery we approached the front, presented our hand outs to Jon (University leader of the project), set up our Powerpoint and began our pitch. We successfully managed to help each other out when one person became nervous or forgot what was next, this made the presentation flow better and show our team skills. One member of our team was particularly nervous as they began to add more unnecessary information into our project, which we were remarked on at the end but as a first pitch goes I believe it was successful and there were many things we can learn from it.

We were given some very helpful tips and ideas from both our peers and the industry people present and assigned someone to help us with the project.

There was a lot of pressure to do this pitch in the time given and properly and I feel we did that as well as finding things we can develop later, such as how we present and other areas to look at.

It was also very helpful seeing our class mates presentations which were just as good if not better and seeing where there research took them and the ideas they have for the project.

We will continue this project and have it finished by December which is exciting as well as daunting but we are up for the challenge. Keep you posted Emma.