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.

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”