This panel was followed by an orientation where three previous participants, indie producers Amy Hobby (Secretary) and Jamin O'brien (Hurricane Streets) and writer/director Tze Chun (Windowbreaker, the forthcoming The Kids Are Alright) gave some words of wisdom. A lot of their advice was good and the type that could only be gathered from having gone through the program. Stuff like keeping pitches extremely short ( ie 2 minutes or less) and definitely staying away from any blow by blow descriptions or getting bogged down in the minutiae. When people either get a glazed look or start looking like their about to pull their ears off to make you stop it's usually a sign that you've entered that dangerous territory. This is a very easy thing to do especially when your nervous so that advice bears repeating. Short and sweet. Just giving more of an overall sense of the story since most of the people will read the script and already read a detailed synopsis in the dossier that all the companies are given. They actually choose the projects they want to meet with so there already is something about it that piqued their interest. A good icebreaker suggestion was  actually bringing that up and asking about what drew their interest.  Tze gave a concrete example of how the meetings were all about starting a relationship when he discussed how he and Dan Cogan at Impact Partners met briefly about a period project at No Borders and through followup e-mails and conversations figured out they had similar taste and interest in films. Six months after meeting Tze submitted a new script which Impact funded and now it's currently in post-production. Other salient advice "desperation is never attractive".  Or in other words make it seem like the project is happening with or without their financing and this is the game plan that is being executed to get there. Financiers and distributors feed off of a filmmaker's passion and their willingness to walk through fire to get the film done.  

I'll talk more about  our actual pitch meetings later...