Frontières Market Pitch

Lights, Camera, Paranormal Action! prep for Frontières

The week before Frontières and couple of great things happened to Lights, Camera, Paranormal Action!

  1. I got this wonderful banner via the tremendous and generous talents of Kelman Design and Glen Schroeder working on the “Movie Poster” for me. At Frontières, I’ll show a full page movie poster with cool backgrounds and more visual representation of the story in it. It’s thanks to the wonderful WIFT program that this is happening and I’m very pleased.
  2. The Dark Side winners, myself included, had a 2 hour pitch consultation from Jan Miller. It was a great experience and I heard wise advice, not just for my pitch and project but for all four of us. I must now complete my one-pager for the festival and submit that by Wednesday next week. There are so many ways to pitch and it just isn’t something I’ve done a lot. All of my sales were done to people I already knew, who asked for written story ideas. But that was in television, and I was working on shows that were looking for stories. This is my movie and it is looking for a producer.
  3. At Frontières my pitch is in the Created by Women Pitch Session, presented by Telefilm Canada with Women in Film + Television Vancouver. I’m so pleased to be able to showcase my first feature project along with the other 3 up-and-coming female screenwriters from across Canada. This year we are doing it via Zoom. Previously, the festival was in person and it would have been daunting to go up on a big stage to present my story. However, I also have some trepidation about delivering on Zoom. We have many questions yet and next week will be important for our preparations. The pitch itself can only be five minutes, then they give us a Question & Answer period with the panel of experts. Plus, while the Market is going on, we can have meetings with producers, distributors, sales agents, and other interesting people, with a view to pursuing the project.
  4. I feel very lucky this week! I also won an Honorable Mention in a short story contest. See my Bibliography for more info.

Chapter 6 Done!

I’m now at 37,500 words, which sounds like a lot to me. I know a decent novel is 80 thousand to 100 thousand words, so I have some distance to go. SF readers are familiar with the variegated doorstop novels of fantasy, But I will be happy if I can get to the end of one, for now. It’s always been a dream of mind to write an SF or fantasy novel and get it published.
The new IPad combined with the ‘waiting for dancer’ schedule is helping me to get writing done. My friend is reading the chapters as I do them, so I feel like I have an audience.
I’m also experimenting with the way I do it. I’m tired of writing tv series ideas and script outlines. So, I’m writing this with only a bare whisper of an outline, nothing like the massive detailed ‘beat sheets’ I used to have to do in tv. I know this might not work- or I might go down the wrong path with characters, causing a painful double back to rewrite the whole thing later- but the fun of it is partly in just seeing what the characters will do next!

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Photo collage by Jessica