Some days the road of yellow brick no’s feels more like a swamp. Over a month ago I submitted a pitch for La Roquette yesterday, I received the feedback. At first I was devastated….
As the writer, and series creator, I have been finding it difficult to boil down to only the poignant details. The project, our project! is so complex: the idea(s), the world, characters’, plot, story arch. It’s a lot to try and fit in a two page document.
After AFM and the sessions I had attended, I had employed the learnings and I thought that I had finally managed to craft a pitch the drew a nice picture of what the series is.
A 0 for Clarity of Pitch! 😫😬😣
What I didn’t notice, but my partner did, was that I had received a 5 in Originality of Concept and in Strength of Voice. This means that the perceived similarity to “a man in a High Castle” that had plagued the previous pitch has finally been dispelled.
Upon further contemplation of the written feedback, it became clear that most of the readers’ lack of clarity was as a result of my decision to include the Game Narrative. I had intended to demonstrate that the narrative concept had been planned out to three seasons and even integrated with a compendium game.
This unfortunately, only served to confuse the matter, intimating that the game was a compulsory component to the production.
So now the job will be to find a way to explain how the game acts as an augmented reality experience, a compendium to the series that viewers can either op in or out of, and like difficulty levels of video games. The immersiveness is scaleable, depending on how involved you want to be in the narrative experience.
Likely, however the game will be dropped from pitches entirely, currently the industry looks at associated games as a marketing budget item. Until that changes or a case proves otherwise, it looks as though we will have to continue to treat Game and Series. separate, and thus pitch them separate.
but… perhaps that’s for the best.