Quotes from the annual Pitch Conference
Quotes from the annual Pitch Conference, seeing a host of volunteers pitch their projects to a panel of experts including Virgin Produced’s Tobin Armbrust, and Independent Producer/Agent, Cassian Elwes.
Producer Cassian Elwes, Pilar Alessandra, Instructor/Consultant of On The Page, and Tobin Armbrust, President of Virgin Produced, arrive at the American Film Market Pitch Conference at the Fairmont Hotel on Saturday, Nov. 5, 2016, in Santa Monica, Calif. (Photo by Dan Steinberg/Invision for IFTA/AP Images)
Tobin Armburst
President, Virgin Produced
“The takeaway of a pitch is that one logline; and the person you are pitching to has to turn around and pitch to someone else, and they will want to be able to distil it into a logline, they won’t want to deal with all the details”
“The one thing that movies need to have is a character or characters in the heart of them that you can identify with”
“Some people come up with ideas and reverse engineer them into a podcast or comic book to start; then make it into a film when financially feasible”
“The angle is the most important thing; find an angle and seize on that and use that as the thing that you tell the story through that lens”
“Things can be dramatic yet still have a concept that you can gravitate to”
Cassian Elwes
Independent Producer/Agent
“We spend our lives pitching to people; people come to us with ideas and the way they pitch is so important; passion is KEY; it all gets pitched from one level to another, we take a pitch and pitch it to someone else; it takes so many levels to work its way up. So, unless it is a really great idea that was pitched in a great way it will never make it to the next level”
“Baseball films are worth absolutely nothing oversees; it’s all about how you sell your films internationally and finance them, and you need a story that will work and make money internationally.”
“I like biopics that pick a moment in someone’s life and tell a story in a short period of time; this is how you hook an audience; it’s much easier to get someone to understand the story and you tell the story in a more interesting fashion”
