Unk’s The Elevator Pitch |
Unk is burning up the interwebs these days (if you follow Twitter especially) and he has an awesome post up today called The Elevator Pitch | that I highly recommend.
Here’s a snippet:
So you start by OWNING your pitch. Make it YOURS. Don’t make it mine. Don’t make it some pitching formula you’ve read out of a book or a web site. Don’t get me wrong… That’s a great place to start but it’s only a start. Using somebody else’s method of pitching only works if you’ve literally embraced that same method and made it yours and IF you’ve gone the extra mile and made it YOURS, you very likely are NOT using the formula exactly the way you learned it.
So what do you learn?
Two things first in my humble opinion…
* Tagline
* Logline
What’s a tagline? A tagline is that sentence that you see on the movie poster that sells the movie. Let’s take a look at some of the more powerful taglines that have been used for movies…
* Somebody said get a life…so they did. –Thelma & Louise
* Lie. Cheat. Steal. All In A Day’s Work. –Glengarry Glenn Ross
* Trapped in time. Surrounded by evil. Low on gas. –Army of Darkness
* He’s having the worst day of his life…over, and over… –Groundhog Day
* Seven deadly sins. Seven ways to die. — SE7EN
* The Toys Are Back in Town. –Toy Story
A tagline is a lot like subtext in dialogue… COOL subtext that is.
What’s a logline? A logline is a simple sentence — maybe two at the most — that summarizes what your screenplay is about. You don’t sell the farm in your logline however… Attempt to make it form a QUESTION in the entity’s mind you’re pitching it to so that they can ALMOST figure out the answer on their own but not quite.
It gets even better after that … go and read, young jedi …