Conferences + Festivals

How to Pitch an Interactive Documentary Project

Many documentary festivals have a market or forum attached where filmmakers are able to pitch their ideas to an assembled panel of potential broadcasters or other funders, often in front of an audience. Power to the Pixel is a similar forum that is dedicated to the development and funding of cross-media projects such as the interactive documentaries A Short History of the Highrise and Alma: A History of Violence.

At Power to the Pixel 2014, eight projects were pitched in the Finance Forum: Block Seven (pictured); The Flickering Flame (a Ken Loach biopic that won the €6,000 ARTE International Prize); The Infinity Engine; My Enemy, My Brother; How to Kill Uffie; On Screen Off Record; Urbance and Loving Long-Distance.

Although the assembled commissioning editors and digital content executives were briefed to offer advice on where the producers of each project might go for finance, inevitably there were questions about the structure, content and viability of projects. Here is a round up of the most common concerns and suggestions that may help you better develop your own interactive content.

Developing the Story

• Don’t let the technical possibilities cloud your judgement of what constitutes a good story. There is a risk that the use of technology can dehumanize your characters by casting them as stereotypical avatars in a game rather than real people with real lives. What’s the guiding question that your contributors and audience are trying to answer through your project?

• Identify the emotional heart of your story and use that to incentivise the viewer to engage interactively with the content. This is particularly important when trying to reach people who aren’t gamers; non-techies are easily alienated and won’t interact with content they don’t understand. What’s the emotional narrative that will pull them through?

•  When developing content with a social action campaign in mind, think carefully about the tonal issues that might arise from combining gaming/interactive elements with a serious social issue.

• If considering user generated content make sure your intended contributors have access to social media e.g. don’t live in a country where social media is undeveloped or banned. Don’t underestimate the length of time it takes to collect and assemble user generated content as it may hold up the production; but if you get it right the content will be much richer.

Choosing the Platform

• If you have aspirations for a television transmission be sure that there is a real TV-shaped element that stands alone as a narrative.

• The advantage of  digitally native project is that the content isn’t constrained by a standard TV schedule slot, so the audience can explore many hours of content at their leisure. But don’t add different platform elements for the sake of it. What is the best platform for the material/story that you want the audience to explore/experience? How does interactive content add to the storyworld? There needs to be some narrative purpose to playing a game rather than the game being an add-on to a documentary.

Understanding the Audience

• Who is your intended audience and which parts of your project will appeal to them? You may have more than one distinct audience and they will respond to different elements in different ways. Think about having different entry points for different audiences/users.

Finding the Funders

• Straight docs are favoured by TV commissioners, and digitally native projects are favoured by interactive commissioners; the trick is being able to pitch to both in a way that makes it seem natural for them to commission it. Splitting the project into its component parts and then doing very targeted pitching can help.

• Interactive projects are increasingly partnering with newspaper websites rather than broadcasters, as there can be a more natural fit in the way the content can be shared with the audience e.g. they can choose to share different segments each day on their website.

• Universities are an interesting new source of funding as some have have pre-bought projects that have particular academic interest. For example, Flickering Flame – a biopic of director Ken Loach told through the lens of the conflicts that arose in the making of his political and social justice films – is of equal interest to film studies students and social history scholar.

Explore More

TVMole’s Interactive Documentary List on ScoopIt

Here are some tips from Mike Dicks (with a focus on TV-related projects):