Group Project - The Pitch

It was time to present our pitch to the 'Dragons Den' again, which for our group was definitely quite a daunting experience. The last group project pitch we had done together was certainly an experience we'd much rather forget and is obviously something we wanted to improve upon this time round. However, since we had done this before and knew what not to do, this time we made sure to be much more prepared and had a good knowledge of what the panel would want to see from us. That said, considering two thirds of the panel were the same people who'd seen us the time before it didn't stop us being nervous and although prepared, it gave us a lot more reason to try and impress.

Our Pitch was presented just like that of Dragons Den

As prepared as we were however, we did have a slight technical glitch with my laptop when trying to connect to the whiteboard to project our PowerPoint presentation. Unfortunately this proved problematic and we instead had to show our accompanying presentation on a smaller Apple Mac screen instead (and may have neglected to use later on in the pitch), which in my case was a little embarrassing. Nevertheless, you can't always rely on technology and it was up to us to present our pitch as good as possible regardless of any beginning problems.

Our Powerpoint was Improvised Onto a Mac after a Last Minute Technical Hiccup

Within our pitch we explained to the panel our intentions for our World War 2 Documentary, starting by explaining what it was about. Having come up with the name 'Wartime Memories' we explained how our film would be made up mainly of interviews, with overlaying pictures and clips playing throughout. When asked where we would get these pictures and clips from we explained how we planned to go out and film a variety of establishing shots around Weston including the war memorial in Grove Park. However when describing how we were going to 'borrow' our pictures from 'Google', we were rightly called upon as there would be a degree of clearance needed for this. Instead we came to the conclusion (with a little assistance from the panel) that we would collect any pictures we could from our contributors.

The War Memorial at Grove Park

On the subject of contributors we explained who we were going to use and how we were going to find them. For this, we planned to go to the Somerset Legion house and we also had various back up plans in case we didn't have enough contributors, in the form of Dean's relatives and a few neighbours.

We also presented an idea for our films planned structure, which would consist of the following:-
- A significant theme for the documentary
- A montage including various cutaways and pictures that would establish the mood for the audience
- The inclusion of a narrator to open and close the film, as well as introducing each interviewee
- A decent amount of contributors to be filmed, with a final 3-5 ending up in our final cut
- To have it edited to follow the questions rather than each interview, to avoid continuous shots of each interviewee
- To incorporate cutaways over each interview so it doesn't become to tedious
- A possible ending that would feature the War Memorial cross-fading into a poppy field and then fading black, with the song 'We'll meet again' by 'Vera Lynn' playing over the top. We feel this would be quite sentimental and show remembrance to those who died in the war.



To accompany our presentation we also included handouts for our panel that featured our structure, role allocation, production schedule, contact and equipment lists, as well as our budget.


Whereas there may have been a few flaws and technical difficulties, the panel did agree that we had done a lot better than our previous try and seemed suitably impressed with our idea. They gave us the 'Thumbs up' and after a sigh of relief, me and the guys were allowed to begin filming our project.