August 2009 Meeting - Pitching Contest: Screenwriters

[Jon Bonnell]

August 3, 2009 will be our next monthly meeting. The best way to learn is by participating and watching others so, to that end we will be having a contest.

Come out and pitch a story to the camera. Yes, we will have a camera setup and we want you to pitch to the camera. Then we'll turn the camera off and give feedback.

Each pitch will then be uploaded online and we'll let the membership vote. The top pitches will then be judged by our panel and prizes (to still be named) will be given out to the winners.

To keep everyone on an even keel and keep people for being judged about their story we are providing the following loglines to projects that everyone should be familiar with:

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
Logline: Charlie Brown is finally invited to a Halloween party; Snoopy engages the Red Baron in a dogfight; and Linus waits patiently in the pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin.

The Wizard of Oz
Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.

Raiders of the Lost Ark
Log line: Just before the outbreak of World War II, an adventuring archaeologist named Indiana Jones races around the globe to single-handedly prevent the Nazis from turning the greatest archaeological relic of all time into a weapon of world conquest.

The Terminator
A young woman is stalked by a killing machine sent from the future and learns she is marked for death because she will bear a child who saves mankind from extermination.

So pick one of the above and be ready to pitch your story. You'll have two minutes to sell your story!

[Carol]

Sounds cool! But I'm a bit confused. What do you mean by "pick one of the above"? Are we supposed to come up with another storyline for Wiz, Raiders, Terminator, etc.? Or pitch our own? I'd rather do the latter!

[Jon Bonnell]

Pitch one of the stories above in your own way. This is about the process of pitching and we want to keep it as far away from being about the story as possible which is why we picked already successful projects that everyone will be familiar with.

Feel free to rewrite the logline if you wish, but it has to be one of the stories listed above.

Thanks!

[Carol]

aha! Okay. Sounds intriguing.