Pitching ideas is never an entirely linear process. Ideas are thrown around, dismantled, augmented, and readjusted before settling into ambiguity again.

While not an entirely new process, this week’s Thursday seminar presented several new ideas on pitching, as both an academic and industry based activity, and as a time in which to critically engage and re-evaluate ideas. Mainly though, I want to discuss the ideas presented by my group and the resulting feedback we received from our class mates.

Firstly, for our found footage film, Daniel, Haylee and I outlined our concept for a short documentary about the pervasiveness of portable personal technology, namely,  mobile phones. In this film, we’d collate a range of archived video clips of people’s milestones (births, celebrations, marriage, proposal, etc) and interweave this with Steve Job’s voice over on the merits of the iPhone. The main idea underpinning the contrasting use of these specific visuals / soundscapes would be to highlight the tension between the supposed / promised / hypothesised societal merits of technology, and the resulting reality: a life in which moments are repeatedly fragmented by intrusive notifications, dependency and fixations on screens. Finally, we wanted to afford the audience a sense of comedy and flippancy throughout the documentary; an emotional tone perhaps deriving from a visually punchy formal structure of sharp cuts and juxtaposing glib advertising imagery of ‘life’.

The feedback we received on this idea was quite helpful, and enabled our group to refine our conceptual structure. For example, Liam’s suggestion to employ archetypes of pivotal life moments from films led to the idea of actually employing popular cultural moments in film (famous scenes from classical Hollywood, blockbusters, well loved franchises, etc) and auditorially disrupt the ‘punch lines’