Rob Yescombe on How Not to Pitch Onion Soup

Tuesday February 12, 2013

First impressions – Do you even lift? Well he does…

Rob is a very nice guy but looks intimidating because he’s built, less of the man crush and more on to the lecture. It was very good at first I was like wahh? Because he started talking about onion gravy (which made me hungry) and how to make it which was a complete was of my time because I’m not doing a cooking course at west notts I’m doing a gaming course at an awesome college J.

Any-who this was meant to be a complete was of my time as he was demonstrating that we don’t want to know the recipe for the onion gravy we just want to eat it and salivate over it get dreaming of the smooth juicy onions on our tongue and the taste of beefy goodness swishing through our mouths helping make the roast potatoes slide down our throat so smoothly that you can even feel it go down… well let me off here ive only had a cheeseburger today for café so im well hungry!  Well this was demonstrating a Pitch, the thing where you beg publishers or someone to give money to you so you can start doing what you pitched them.

it was a productive session as rob gave some background info how he worked for Crytek and Free Radical and worked on the main script for haze and showed a nice video of him doing a really bad pitch on haze and then said “don’t give them the homework they don’t care about you or your game they just want something they can put in their mouth and walk away with it and tell other people what they think of your game.

Right rob told us some pitch ingredients which are!
Internal & external flaw

  1. Desire
  2. Bad guy
  3. Plan
  4. Battle
  5. Self- revelation
  6. Walk off into the sunset

This is what you need to create a pitch as long as you follow this them your pitch should be awesome, hopefully.

Right to construct your Pitch you need to follow these steps:

  1. Who is your hero?
  2. Why will the audience empathise with him?
  3. Where is there before the story gets going?
  4. What events starts things rolling?
  5. What is the heros outer motivation?
  6. What is the main comflict?
  7. What is the hero’s arc? What will he learn?
  8. What other successful stories is it similar to?

After taking robs advice we had to create a pitch now I won’t say what our group one was because I forgot, but I will say one that I wrote on the bus home because I forgot.

Okay so what we had to base are pitch on was this: our hero is poisoned and has to solve his own murder before he dies in 2 hours.

So this is what I wrote: Officer Higgins has been poisoned after eating a bad doughnut and has to find out who has done it, in the meantime he has to impress his boss to get a proper military burial like he always wanted but there is a catch because he is so busy sucking up to his boss he misses out on family life and regrets everything and as he prays to be a better family man he lives and the guy who poisoned him drop dead. This turns out to be the boss. It’s a twist on the film click.

Anyway thanks for taking your time to read this and make the perfect pitch now you can all become awesome lairs Thanks rob!

Confetti Industry Week Guest Post By
Rhys Evans