How to Win Pitch Contests: Pitching Tips For Pitch Festivus!

How to Win Pitch Contests: Pitching Tips For Pitch Festivus! Coming up on December 9 is our second annual FREE Pitch Festivus and Holiday Party. We're going to have eight different members of the Jacob Krueger Studio faculty sharing some of their very best pitching tips.  There are going to be opportunities to connect with our community.  Most exciting of all, we're having a little pitch contest where we are going to randomly pick volunteers and give them a chance to pitch their scripts, get some helpful feedback, and compete for a chance to win a one on one pitch consultation with me worth 1500 bucks. It's gonna be awesome. And it’s totally FREE!  With that in mind, I thought it might be helpful to give you guys some information about how to do a quick pitch.  How do you create an elevator pitch? How do you pitch for a contest or festival? It's important to understand that this is different from a professional pitch or from the kind of pitch that you do at a party, because in the real screenwriting business, there is no such thing as the elevator pitch. In the screenwriting world, the elevator pitch is a giant myth. If you haven't heard the term, the elevator pitch imagines a scenario in which, if you were to bump into Martin Scorsese on the first floor of an elevator, and he hits the button for floor 14, you now have 14 floors to pitch in your project. This is your only opportunity to pitch your screenplay and if those doors open before you’ve finished, you're screwed.  That's not the way it works in the real world.  In the real world you want a nice quick pitch that you can share with anyone. But no one's going to cut you off in the middle of your pitch. No one's going to say, Sorry, that pitch was two minutes and three seconds, and that’s just too long. Basically, your pitch is simply a pitch of a short length that can hold a person's attention. But when you're competing in a screenplay pitch contest - and there are lots of pitch contests, pitch slams, or other pitch opportunities, including our Pitch Festivus event coming up on Dec 9 - there's this kind of added pressure of a ticking clock.  I want to talk to you about how to deal with that pressure, how to prepare yourself for that pressure, and how to be really good with your pitch when you're pitching for a writing contest or festival like ours. Here's the first thing you should know about how to make a quick pitch: Do not rush your pitch. Take your time. Slow down. A minute and a half, two minutes, two and a half minutes, whatever the time, is actually a lot of time to pitch your story. 30 seconds is a lot of time to pitch, even 10 seconds.  Take ten seconds right now and just listen to how long ten seconds really is… No, actually do it. If you did it, I think you just realized that’s actually a lot of time. That's more time than you would think when you actually listen to what that dead space sounds like.  Far too many well-intentioned screenwriters end up rocketing through their pitch so quickly that the person listening can't even pick up what the pitch is.  The first thing you want to focus on is the purpose of your pitch. Why are you actually pitching this story? In the normal world, the only purpose of your pitch is to get somebody to say, Yes, I would like to read your screenplay. In the real world, unless your name is Sorkin, nobody is going to buy your idea off of a pitch. They want to see the execution on the page. The real purpose of the pitch is to open a door. You know what?