Wanna' read along? Here’s a machine-generated transcript you can use. Yes...expect a few mistakes, especially with funky industry terms, interesting names and tagging whoever's talking. If something sounds weird, trust your ears. But...sometimes that really is what we said!
Announcer: Welcome to Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.
Angry Man: Is this some kind of joke.
Confused Woman: Biagio-WHO???
Biagio: This episode. It’s episode 52 and we’re talking cinematic recreation shows three tips to make your recreation pitches rise above the crowd. Some major warnings about pitching recreation shows, fleshing out the style for your TV series, and some heartfelt chicken curry. Music. Courtesy Dave Pelman Music Dave Pelman.com hey, everybody sees joke. He’s Biagio, we’re married. We make unscripted film and television and want to help you do the same, hopefully.
Joke: By teaming up with us.
Biagio: All right, it’s episode 52 and we’re talking about pitching cinematic recreation shows and recreation shows. These can be comedic, these can be dramatic, but essentially a recreation show is a show that at its heart has and has interviews or a voiceover or some other device that presents a real life story. And then dramatic or comedic recreations are filmed to bring those stories to life, right? Joke.
Joke: Correct. And sometimes it’s also some verité in there, as well as some of the recreate and the interviews. It just kind of depends.
Biagio: Yeah, every show is different in a lot of these recreation style shows use different levels of recreation in their overall mix. Like how much is recreation, how much is interview, how much is new footage, is new verité. Our own show goes inside my child. We use interviews and recreations, and we also have modern day verité that’s mixed in. So all these shows are a little bit different. Now what went to layout today is three very important tips for how to pitch these shows. Okay, but.
Joke: First a warning.
Biagio: First a warning.
Joke: These are not the shows we usually encourage people to pitch. We are really just doing this podcast because we’re inundated with these questions about shows like this. But as a warning, since most of these shows, even with pitch and we’ll try and tell you to make your pitch as good as possible, so it really as value and you may have, you know, like an actual show and not just an idea, but most of the time these shows are being pitched as purely ideas. And like we’ve said a million times, those are not TV shows. And so, you know, it’s really important that if you’re going to pitch in this Jara, that it is as fleshed out from top to bottom as possible.
Biagio: Yeah. And I mean, listen, what joke is really getting at? And like you said, you’ve heard it through all of our podcasts. If you’ve looked at our free guide, How to Pitch a Reality Show, you know, we harp on it again and again and again. An idea is not enough. And the reason we haven’t gone out of our way to say, hey, why don’t you pitch us some recreation shows is because unlike a doc series, unlike a television show that is really based around a real person, place or thing, a recreation series is sort of by its very nature, you know, an idea brought to life. And so what we want to try to do today, and now that we’ve warned you, you know, that a lot of people will pitch very similar ideas in the space that your idea may not be unique. What we want to try to do is give you some tools that will take your recreation ideas and make them a little bit more concrete, so you can give yourself a leg up on the 50 other people. And I’m not kidding, who are pitching the exact same idea is you. Not just to us, but to networks everywhere.
Joke: And that’s not just the 50 people like you. I mean, we ourselves are pitching these ideas all the times. Networks are internally generating these ideas all the time. So you know, where if you find, you know, the Robertson family and you attach yourselves to them, nobody else is going to find the Robertson’s family. If you come up with a show about, hey, let’s do a crime show where women, you know, kill with knives. Well, you know, there’s wives with knives on discovery ID channel, and everybody probably had that idea in some form or another. And yet one company with that one network got it done. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t already pitched a hundred times.
Biagio: It’s just as jokes said, we really haven’t reached out about receiving these kinds of pitches because it’s so easy to feel like it’s so easy to feel like your idea is so unique. What? Unfortunately it’s not. So enough harping on that you guys get it ideal are not enough. So here’s the first thing you need. If you’re going to pitch a recreation show, be it comedic or dramatic. Number one, you need a killer title that clearly presents a unique concept. Okay, now nobody does this better than discovery ID, right? Joke?
Joke: Well, especially in the crime space, whether it’s southern fried homicide or, you know, wives with knives or who the bleep did I marry? You know, right away. Okay, I know it’s going to be a crime show because I’m watching discovery ID and it’s like great wives with knives. I know what kind of stories those are.
Biagio: What kind of stories are those?
Joke: Shall I show you darling?
Biagio: Who is that myself. Up for that one. Wives with knives. You get it? You know, wives stabbing their husbands, right?
Joke: Yes, yes.
Biagio: To put it. To put not too fine a point on it. Red rum murder told him. Reverse. Great title, great concept. Does gangbusters for him.
Joke: Yeah. So you know. But at the same time, then we also have the slightly more comedic ones, which are sex sent me to the E.R..
Biagio: What could that show possibly be about? I’m guessing it’s going to be interesting comedic recreations about those late night sex sessions that send people to the E.R., and that’s exactly what the show is salacious stories that works well for. That’s on TLC, right? Yeah, yeah. Hey, another brilliant title, Drunk History. I mean, what a fantastic concept. I’m going to get some comedians drunk, have them tell me how they remember a particular historical events, and then bring that to life with recreations. It’s fantastic. Drunk history done sold our own show. Ghosts inside my child. I will toot my own horn. Even though we didn’t come up with that title, was a terrific network executive. Came up. We were originally called the show Back from the dead, and they came up with Ghosts Inside My Child, which is a terrific title, and the show has done gangbusters for them. So. So that’s number one. You need a great title that clearly presents a unique concept. Okay. Number two, a style guide who incidents in our last episode was about Style Guides joke.
Joke: I don’t know, is it.
Biagio: I don’t know, I don’t even think we know what we’re going to do the day before we do it, but our last episode was about style guides and listen. Part of the reason is because right now we’re doing three of these projects. We’re doing Ghost Inside of My Child, which all of you know, we’re doing an as of yet unannounced series, very, very big crime recreation show we can’t wait to tell you about on a on a big major cable network coming later this year. And we’re doing a big pilot for a major cable right now. It’s a comedic recreation show. What tied all those projects together right now was we had a right style guide for them. So I encourage you to go back and listen to last, the last episode we did, which talks about creating style guides. But the reason it’s so important for recreation shows is think about it, how different. And again, I’ll just pick two crazy ones. Do you think sex sent me to the E.R. is when compared to drawings, history? When compared to Wives with Knives, they’re all recreation shows. They’re totally different. So what are some of the things you want to talk about? Well, is the show going to have interviews or voiceover or both? How much do you see dramatic or comedic recreations playing in? Is it most of the show? Is it a small part of the show? These are some of the things you want to talk about in the Style Guide. What else is important to mention in the Style guide for these shows?
Joke: Joke I think the number one thing is Style guide needs to convey is tone, and so you convey that with like the visuals kind of how the audio is going to work, you know, how do you see your interview setups, you know, is it intimate? Does it feel more studio like, is it funny, is it straight to camera or is it to an interviewer? Is the interviewer part of it? Is the interviewer not part of it? So those are all really important with most you know, we keep saying these are semi scripted, but the reason that they are scripted is, is the the the requisite based on the actual interviews you’re getting from people. So you always have to shoot the interviews first and then figure out, you know, okay, which part do we think are going to end up in the show of these interviews? So then you go shoot the B-roll in the background and to recreate stuff to cover, you know, to help tell that story visually.
Biagio: Yeah. It wasn’t especially all you indie filmmakers out there. I mean, this is a great way to, you know, to flex those muscles, to get to basically make many movies, to get paid, to make many movies as part of a TV show. It’s great fun. You know, we’re out there on this, the big crime show we can’t tell you about yet. We’re out there using cranes and dollies and jibs and all sorts of stabilizers and just having a blast. And it’s a lot of fun. It’s great to be able to flex those muscles in the unscripted space. So so it’s a lot of fun and all that stuff would go in your style guide.
Joke: And number three.
Biagio: Number three, and this is important people, you need to actually do some research and present real examples of your story. Because if you walk up to us, you know, before Wise With Knives was on the air and you pitched us, you know, married, you know, married women who stabbed people, and it was basically the exact same show. But all you’re pitching was an idea. It would have just been an idea. What you need to walk in with is real world examples. You need to hit the web. You need to do your research. You need to come up with 1012 examples of real life stories that fit your concept. If you were pitching wives with knives, you better have 12 very cool, interesting, different stories about wives who stabbed people. What about like our own show goes inside my child joke because that we we went in with a bunch for that.
Joke: Yeah. I think it’s very important to show that you can do multiple episodes of this. And so I always say coming in with 8 to 10 one pagers per story. So it’s not a one paragraph or a one sentence per story. It’s literally showing. Look, these are the cases I’ve done the research. These are the twists and turns. Because if you have one crime story per hour and there aren’t enough twists and turns in it, it’s like, yep. You know, cops got called by the neighbors, they showed up, the wife had the knife in her hand, and the husband was laying dead on the floor. Well there’s that. I don’t know how I stretched that out for an hour. So, you know, it’s important that, you know, you find cases or stories that will have those twists and turns. And, you know, this obviously comes as part of pre-production. But if you can show that there are people willing to talk to you that are bookable, that helps because then it makes those stories actually viable. Because if you don’t have the people involved wanting to talk to you, then you can’t really tell that story. Because again, we need their interviews to drive the show.
Biagio: Yeah. And so, so again, you know, whether you’re pitching the next great crime show or you’re pitching a set me to the E.R. or you’re pitching, you know, wise with knives, or you’re pitching a comedic recreation show, like, you got to have those real world examples so people know you can go out and make a series and joke. It’s okay for people just to completely make those up, right? Just just fabricate them. Totally. Oh, yeah.
Joke: Absolutely.
Biagio: This is sarcasm, people. It is not okay to just make these up. That is the worst thing you can do. And I personally know of several shows not sold by us because I am not that stupid and have gone out. Several people have gone out and sold shows based on concepts that there was no freaking way for them to make, but they just made up examples that didn’t exist. And when the network bit and said, well, go do those, well, they didn’t exist. They weren’t real. So to wrap up the three things that you need to to pitch recreation reality and give yourself a real leg up. Number one, you need a great title that presents a really unique concept. Number two, you need an style guide that clearly spells out how your recreation show works. Comedic, dramatic. You know how many recreations, interviews, voiceover, whatever make us understand what that show is going to look and feel like. Get the tone across and listen to our last podcast about style guides and number three. Research real world examples. Jokes is 8 to 10. I say 10 to 12 one pagers that really spell out not only the stories that you’ve discovered, but actually break down the twists and turns we’d see along the way of that story so we can imagine what the show looks like. And that will help you not just in pitching recreation shows to us. It’ll help you pitching recreation shows to anybody. Now, again, I want to reiterate, you know, the warning that Joe gave at the top of the show, which is you need to realize everybody is pitching these ideas. I mean, think about crime. How many different kinds of crimes are there? Everyone has pitched the show related to those kinds of crimes, but you come up with the title Wives with knives, and you come up with a bunch of really interesting stories that work with that, and all of a sudden you have an interesting package you might be able to get someone excited about. We’ll be talking about this a lot more in the future, because we’re doing a lot of these right now. Oh, my wife just raised a finger. And when joke raises a finger, people, I am wise enough to shut up and listen to what she has to say. Joep, what are you raising a finger about this fine day?
Joke: I’m a little hesitant about even accepting these pitches, but I’m taking the leap of faith. My husband has convinced me. However, please do your research. Please go on to. If you’re going to pitch a crime show, please go on the discovery ID website and look at all the shows they have and don’t pitch us anything like it. You know, it’s very important that you do your research. You you think you come up with a great title, at least do a Google search and make sure that that show hasn’t already been done at some place somewhere. So do your research. Please, please, please.
Biagio: So there you go. I think you guys get it. We’re doing a lot of these shows right now. Of course, we’re still doing a lot of other kinds of shows as well. We’re one of the few companies in town that does verité doc that does docu soap, does big competition, and it also does recreation. I think we’re probably one of the only companies in town who has all of those kinds of shows to our credit, which is neat. It’s fun. It gives us a chance to play around and experiment and have a lot of fun. And hopefully this, you know, for those of you who are dying and do nothing else but recreation shows, this gives you a way to develop them and think about them in a way where you’re not just spinning your wheels, but you’re presenting a cohesive package. So that’s it. That’s it for tonight. We’re in the middle of so many projects right now, I can’t even keep track. As a matter of fact, my wife has been cooking dinner this entire how are you cooking dinner right now? We are in production on like 19 shows. And you just cooked chicken curry. How did you do that?
Joke: If you’ve noticed, I finished cooking and I’m now eating it. So if you want some. This podcast should end quickly.
Announcer: Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.
