[Project Related] Pitching for the First time

As you may have read previously in the blog, I am working on a project for the Royal Armories with Anthony and Will. However, part of this project is to pitch your idea to the client if you are looking for a budget. We would like to pay for a few things during the animation process so we decided to pitch our idea directly to the clients at the Royal Armories, for me, this is a big step in my life, as I have never pitched an idea to a client before, an experience I wont soon forget.

We had two weeks to prepare for the pitch, this would include some preproduction for the animation, an animatic, a script and then a power point with it all in it, including rehearsals for what we are going to say. I'll go more in depth later when I talk about the Royal Armories project, however i'll touch on what we did before the pitch. Me and Will both wrote a script, I did the draft for it and then Will re-worded and added stuff to it. Anthony was incharge of the power point, Will was incharge of budgeting and the animatic, whereas I was incharge of doing background concept art as well as deciding the style of animation we'd do. The day before the pitch, we had finished the power point, and all that was left was the learn what we was going to say, below is the power point:

The big day came, and we had a drawing class before the pitch. After class we went into our animation room and practiced what we were going to say, before we knew it the time had come and we were walking upstairs to the room where we would be pitching.

The room had roughly seven people in it, all with paper in front of them like judges, we spoke to them and introduced ourselves as we set up the laptop, and before we knew it, we was pitching our idea. Will was confident and spoke well, as did Anthony. I didn't have much to say, and the worst thing that could happened occoured; I lost my train of thought. During my spoken part of the presentation, my mind wandered after over thinking what I was supposed to say, and I stopped dead in the presentation. After 5 seconds of silence I took a deep breath and started again, saying everything correctly this time. The clients seemed to like our idea and were very intrigued by the art style, a job well done all in all. We left the room and could finally relax.

We found out later that we got green lit and acquired a budget, everything went well! I learn't something from this experience, that is if you do forget what you are saying, don't give up, just start again. That and learn what you are going to say a few days in advanced and not the night before.. oh well!