This week we had our work in progress pitches.

I wasn’t surprised with a lot of the feedback we received, it was similar to how I felt for the majority of it (and we put more focus into our script than our presentation, so I can see why that may have been a bit more confusing than the script).

But it highlighted some interesting post-discussion within my group.

I think, reading around the room, some of my group members were a bit demotivated about some of the feedback. I wasn’t sure why until we came into class to discuss it all on the Wednesday.

I think people felt like it didn’t get enough laughs or had too many flaws, and every suggestion was thinking about being added without critical analysis of it. But I think we collectively lost vision a little bit of what our pitch actually was: a coming of age film first, comedy second. A lot of the feedback was, realistically, from the point of that we were making a comedy. It was still definitely helpful (and we implemented 90% of it), but there were a couple of things that probably didn’t fit with that theme. We were, also, the only ones as far as I know to read the whole script, so there was a lot more to get feedback on in that respect comparative to other groups.

So that led to a discussion about what we wanted to achieve with what we currently had, and when we double-downed on the coming-of-age film (or perhaps more appropriately, a story first and comedy around it) as the priority, things got a lot smoother. I reiterated that we were intending to go for something more understated, and we knew going in it wasn’t as traditionally funny as other groups were likely to be. I used Hannah Camilleri’s Little Shits as an example (and one of our core inspirations for the piece itself). No-one in our group thinks it isn’t funny, but there wasn’t a lot of overt laughter in the original screening of it (more the loud exhale through your nose type of laugh and smile). I think that gave a lot more reassurance we were a lot closer to the mark than we realised.

The feedback we have implemented though I think benefits the script well. Some of the jokes definitely did work better when rejigged with the suggestions (I can’t believe I didn’t think to add the milk quip prior to the scene rather than after, it is incredibly obvious!), and we were all totally in agreeance with Hannah when it came to the ending, which realistically we expected to change elements of anyway. We also got really important feedback about how to heighten the important feelings we are trying to convey, which I think is the most important feedback we got from it all. I’m now just musing over how to end the whole thing…

Filming starts on Monday and Daniel has done a fantastic job of pre-production planning and organising everything that needs to happen, and look ready to do 50% of our film then!

Some of my mad scribblings of the feedback. People liked the Perth accent joke, for some reason.