Great event at Good Pitch today – an event where the BritDoc Foundation bring film-makers together with NGOs and others integral to social change to see how campaign funding and networks can help to fund/distribute/gain audience for issue led documentaries, and how films can bring vitally needed oxygen to campaigns. Film-makers here were pitching not to one funder, but to many – and for help – with distribution, publicity and marketing. For example, using charity membership bases to publicise a film, help spread the word, and for an eventual sales channel for DVDs.
The mechanism for Good Pitch involves 2 pitchers (the Director and Producer of the film) facing a table of 12 potential partners wo each give feedback and say what they can offer. Very easy for a format like this to descend into self promotion or point scoring and/or for the feedback to take so long the main point of the film is forgotten and the audience asleep. But a combination of patient and incisive chairing, the right people in the room and fantastic preparation of the content saved this from happening. Participants were disciplined and the ‘dragons’ were moved towards commitment – would they put funding into development, would they help distribute to schools, would they pay for foreign language translation?
Good Pitch is doing an amazing thing – it’s opening out a process that’s usually held inside closed walls and not just creating partnerships between film-makers and NGOs/funders, but helping them each to work together. The production of the film (potential or real) is the catalyst to bring campaigns together – witness the refugee sector saying they’d like to “combine asks” across the sector on the basis of the film. Those of us who’ve worked in the charity sector know that unfortunately that doesn’t happen very often.
These partnerships are also generating new revenue models – Working Films are working on a model for revenue sharing on DVD sales marketed through charity membership bases. Bablegum are offering a share of advertising revenue to film-makers who provide content for their online site.
This kind of collaborative, enterprising partnership working is where germination is at – and what we aim to achieve through many of our events – so it was a joy to watch and learn. Lots of talk though about how NGO/film-maker partnerships break down through the process of getting collective campaign films off the ground and the need for a rare breed of ‘partnership manager’ with knowledge of film production and NGO working to come in and hold the ring for the partnerships as a film develops. We know that feeling. Anyone out there?
Tags: britdoc, collaboration, discipline, film, partnership, pitch, social change