(Source: NoFilmSchool.com) Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Lieberman are the award-winning creators of the online series The West Side (http://thewestside.tv/), which won the 2008 Webby Award for Best Drama Series. This past week, the team took their most recent project 'Third Rail' to Power to the Pixel’s first competitive undertaking, The Pixel Pitch, a cross-media pitching forum that showcases the best UK and international cross-media film projects – stories that span film, TV, online, mobile and gaming. (Read more about Power to the Pixel here.)
Seeing as our man Jim Thacker was in London to cover the event, and we're set to roll on several related stories in the next two weeks, we fished out this great article from NoFilmSchool.com, penned by Bilsborrow-Koo, on the competition experience and the state of the transmedia market.
Despite the fact that Zack and I have been pitching and developing our transmedia project Third Rail for over a year, it was a mad rush to pull together a trailer and rehearse our presentation for yesterday’s first annual Pixel Pitch here in London. During this process, which we had to conduct virtually — with him in New York, and myself temporarily in North Carolina — we considered a few different approaches to our verbal sell, some more theatrical and some more straightforward. Ultimately we went with the straightforward approach, and, in retrospect, that was probably a mistake.
Heart of the City won the Pixel Pitch prize with a great presentation. A genre mashup reminiscent of our own erstwhile series The West Side, the project was pitched incredibly well by Raafi Rivero and Michael Hastings-Black, and for their energetic and prop-laden show they deserve the Babelgum-sponsored prize. Raafi and Michael were the living embodiment of something said to us at one of the Power to the Pixel parties, which is, when it comes to seeking film finance, “Europeans know how to fill out forms. Americans know how to sell.”
For our own presentation, we went with a pitch focused on the story and interactivity of Third Rail, and, as we’re allergic to PowerPoint, showed a trailer (Zack and I will post it to our just-launched company site, Exit Strategy, soon). Considering we filmed the trailer informally on a late-night train without lights or permits, it was nice to hear members of the roundtable — who often see content produced for millions of dollars/pounds/euros — comment on it being well-shot, stylish, and well-edited. The footage was shot on my newly acquired DSLR, which cost less than the camcorder I won as a student in a contest eight years ago, and I edited it on a laptop that I purchased with grant money from the National Endowment for the Arts four years ago. From a technology standpoint this is invigorating; to be able to produce something of quality with little to no outlay may be as large a development in filmmaking as are the new cross-platform distribution possibilities.
Read the full article here or visit Bilsborrow-Koo and Lieberman's company Exit Strategy at www.exitstrategy.tv.
