Paper Pitches: 5 Steps to Awesome

Announcer: Welcome to Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.

Angry Man: Is this some kind of joke?

Confused Woman: Biagio-WHO???

Announcer: This episode….

Biagio: It is episode 23 and we are talking Paper Pitches. What are the five steps to perfect paper pitches? Which five sections do we look for in every paper pitch sent our way? How long should your paper pitch be? When is the wrong time to turn into an Avant-Garde film student? And I tell Joke where she can stick her finger.

Announcer: Music courtesy of Dave Pelman Music, davepelman.com

Biagio: Hey everybody, she is Joke.

Joke: He is Biagio.

Biagio: We are married and we make unscripted film and television and want to help you do the same hopefully by teaming up with us. Well, welcome to episode 23, Joke, can you believe it?

Joke: Yes, I am so excited.

Biagio: I am too. So we got a good one for you this week. A lot of you have been pitching us shows and we have been getting a question over and over again. What do you want my paper pitch to look like?

Today we are going to give you five steps to writing a perfect paper pitch. Now granted this is a perfect paper pitch for us, however, I think that if you wrote up a paper pitch like this for just about anybody, they would be impressed. We are going to take you through it one little step at a time.

Joke: Number one.

Biagio: Number one. Title. Okay, right off the bat, this kind of gets me excited or puts me down in the dumps because I cannot tell you how many shows I get pitched that are like this totally vague, meaningless titles that would never be on TV. Right, Joke?

Joke: Yes, the key to a title is it really just needs to – this is going to be your number one sales tool. It is what the audience is going to see. I mean, we have sold shows just based on the title. There are shows that have made it to air just based on the title. You have a killer title, you are ready. You are now way, way ahead of the pack. So the title has a clearly kind of tell you what the show is but also be cool, be clever, be something new.

Biagio: Yes. I think the problem with a lot of the titles we get is that they are very vague and they will be called something like, The Challenge or Forevermore or just titles that are very meaningless. If you think about the shows that are on television, a lot of the times they will have a double meaning or they will be very clever. But they will give you a hint as to what the show is.

Ghost Inside My Child, you instantly know what the show is and you get an idea from the title alone that it is going to be a little bit spooky and it is a title that grabs attention. I mean, I think we get really good ratings on that show that’s due to a small part to the title.

Survivor, wow. It totally tells you everything you need about the show. People are competing to be the survivor, right? So please, put a little thought into your title. Now side note, chances are, the network that buys your show will completely change the title.

Joke: And that is fine. That is totally fine. I would rather we walk in with a killer title that they are like okay we are never going to be able to use this or this is too risqué or this does not make any sense. It is just too cool for school but as long as it catches the attention and it has a great hook to it for the buyer that is all that matters.

Biagio: Just put a little thought into your title. That is step number one.

Step number two, second thing that should be on your paper pitch right after the title, number two logline.

Joke: And I am sure you have read a ton and ton and ton of stuff especially those who dabble and scripted about loglines. Again, the key to a logline is that it is just a line. It cannot be a paragraph. It really has to be one solid sentence that tells me what the show is about. Is it a character show? Format? I need to be able to get some of that from the line. We do not need to go into all the details here but we just really have to get like what is the hook of the show? Why would I want to watch the show?

Biagio: For instance, and please do not pitch us Survivor or anything like Survivor but a logline for Survivor might look something like “A group of contestants compete on an island to see who will be the last person standing and win a million dollars.”

Joke: Exactly. And a lot of times you will see in the openings of shows when they do their opening and they have beautiful music and nice shots, either with voice over or with cards, you will see pretty much the logline in there.

Biagio: Yes. Ghost Inside My Child, another one of our shows, one liner for that, logline for that might look something like this “True stories of parents dealing with children who have memories that don’t belong to them.” Done. It is enough to hook me in. I get it. It is one line. It is a logline. It lets me know what you know the show is about.

And that it leads me directly to step number three. The third thing that should be on your paper pitch – a description.

Now, where a description comes from, this is directly tied to the five magic words of selling reality TV. So if you have not heard that episode, it is producingunscripted.com/005. Again that is producingunscripted.com/005 Five Magic Words of Pitching Unscripted Television. And basically what you want to do is describe the show for us using terms like self-contained or arced, follow doc, hybrid.

What do these words mean? Go ahead back to producingunscripted.com/005 to remind yourself of how to use those words and then put those into a little description that lets us know “Oh, this is the kind of show you’re talking about.”

Joke: Now when we say description it does not mean write us an encyclopedia. It literally means one to two paragraphs. No more than that. Again you have to be synced with the words you use. Therefore going to those five magic words will help you get a lot out.

So when Biagio said Ghost Inside My Child, true stories of parents dealing with children who have memories that do not belong to them. Okay that sounds awesome and I am hooked. And now if I go to description it will say this is a format show every week. We will hear from two different families as they recount when this process started and we follow blah, blah, blah.

Again, it could have also been like it is a docuseries where we follow families in everyday life going through this. That is not their show. Again the description is very important to give us a context to your logline. What kind of format, what boundaries of the TV show are you putting this in?

Biagio: Exactly, so next up, number four? Yes, I lost count. Next up, number four, style.

This is a very short paragraph telling us how you see the style of your show. Is it a rough-and-tumble show shot totally verite-style with handheld cameras and hidden Go Pros or is it a reality show shot more in a style of a classic sitcom where cameras are on tripods and scenes are a little bit more set up?

Tell me what the style of your show looks like. What is it going to feel like to watch your show?

Joke: And please do not try to be the Avant-Garde film student here. Okay, do not come up with a style that absolutely makes no sense for your show. It is way more important, if you are going to pitch me Real Housewives of Alaska, do not tell me you are going to be shooting it on Go Pros and hidden cameras. Because that is not how those shows are shot.

However, if there are specific things even little things that you can do to the show that add a layer to it, the style, that maybe we have not seen before, then again it would not be the style for the entire show but it could just add a cool new point of view to it or something like that. That is your chance again. It is in one paragraph to tell us what you see that being.

So if you see this in studio show, if you see it in the field, man on the street, if you see it as Biagio said, either run-and-gone verite-style versus more filmic Laguna Beach, Long Lands kind of thing. Those are the kind of things that you put in the paragraph at style.

Biagio: Exactly. Now you have your title, your logline, your description, and your style. The last thing you want to put in your paper pitch, what I am going to generically call, ‘samples’ because every show is different.

So sample, this could be sample episodes. This could be sample storyline or it could be sample challenges depending on the kind of show you are pitching.

Joke: The key here is to show the reader, your buyer or your partner, that you thought this through and that there is more than just one episode here, that there is something for an audience to keep coming back to over and over and over again.

For example, if we are doing a Ghost Inside My Child style paper pitch then we would list example families. This is a family that we found that is going through X and this is the family whose child is seven and doing this. And this is a family whose child is 14 and finding out that they were reincarnated from this time period.

Biagio: If your show is more of a follow-doc, what are the storylines that are going on in your characters’ lives right now? If you are pitching a show what is often referred to as an occusoap which is a docusoap set around a business. Okay what is happening in this person’s business right now? Are they about to open a new location? Are the father and son arguing who is going to run the business? Is there descent in the family over which direction the company should go?

What are the real life stories that are happening right now that you would be able to focus on if you went to series?

Joke: Yes and if you are doing a hidden format type show, it is important to say kind of the hybrid stuff, these are more kind of the storylines that are happening in our characters’ everyday lives but then these are kind of client of the week stories that we can see coming in.

So if we are dealing with kind of like the Cake Boss, it is like, okay the boss is dealing with some employees. Maybe they are opening a second location but then the story of the week maybe we will make a cake for the Kentucky Derby. Maybe we will make a cake for the inauguration, whatever.

Those kinds of storylines that you know are possible with your talent. Those are the ones that you put in.

If you are doing a Survivor or challenge type show, you would write more of like the different kinds of challenges the contestants would be going through at this point is X. By the way, if you are doing these kinds of shows, those challenges better be stuff that we have not heard or seen before. Because if you are just rehashing challenges that have been done a hundred times then it is not that exciting.

But again, it is important in the samples section, which again if you have 5 to 10 samples that are really good, that is enough, I do not need three pages of it, but again it is to show that there will be story going on in more than one episode. Because at the very least, you are probably going to get a three or six episode order and that is the very least.

So you need enough stories to sell a series. No one is in the pilot business. They want to know if you have a season of television. So again, it is very important that you are able to show that you have thought that through.

Biagio: Yes. So that gives you title, logline, description, style, and samples. That is really all we need. Now you do get major bonus points.

Joke: From me.

Biagio: From Joke and Me and really anyone in the business.

Joke: But major, major bonus points – we are getting this on to one page. And before you go like, what? It is 100% possible. We do it all the time. Remember, the title that is just a few words. The logline, it is a sentence. The description, it is a paragraph, maybe two. Style, small description. Samples, it is a bullet points of 5 to 10. There is no reason you cannot fit this on a page if you know your stuff.

Biagio: Exactly. So there you have it. Title, logline, description, style, and samples all in one page will make you look totally pro. Again for the description, please go back to producingunscripted.com/005 if you do not know what words like docusoap and arced and format and hybrid all mean, we described it all there and that is pretty much it for this episode.

Oh wait, I think Joke has a finger in my face which I think we are going to get some bonus material here.

Joke: Okay it really was a finger in the air but we are sitting very close so therefore it seemed like it was in his face.

Biagio: You can put a finger in my face anytime.

Joke: Oh my God, this is…

Biagio: Okay we will just leave it at that.

Joke: Okay. So anyway, what we have just described with you is obviously the kind of the paper pitch material, right? Now as Biagio has mentioned and as we have all mentioned in previous podcasts is that if you are pitching us characters, you need to send us a video with this. Whether at Skype or whatever, we cannot judge character-based shows without seeing the characters.

If this is about a very specific world that we have not seen before, you need to send this video or at least picture. You need to have this one page or you need to have this paper pitch but if your show requires additional materials you also need to provide us with those additional materials.

Biagio: Yes and that is just common sense. You have some phenomenal pictures, you have a link to your video, obviously that stuff will be submitted as well but for today we just really want to talk about the paper pitch because so many of you have asked us about it.

So I just want to wrap up by saying one thing, I am a full-time TV producer but a part-time geek although Joke would probably say I am really a full-time geek and I am working on something very special again like everything else we do. It is going to be totally free resource for listeners of this podcast and basically for people on the newsletter.

If you are not already getting our newsletter, please go to producingunscripted.com/newsletter and sign up. I am hoping to have this resource live for you by next episode but if not by then hopefully sometime within the next two weeks to one month. I am going to have something very special for you guys that is going to make it a lot easier to pitch to us.

So that is all I am going to say for now. Stay tuned and until next time. Write some good paper pitches, right honey?

Joke: Yes and send them our way.

Biagio: Send them our way. Alright, signing out.

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