Blackout at The Big Pitch Final (2008)

This was literally 'The Big Pitch' for our micro-budget thriller feature Blackout, after nine months of script development and finance packaging.
On Saturday 6th December 2008, at the Northen Light Film Festival in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Bex and I stood up on stage in front of a live audience of 300 people and three industry judges (Clare Binns - Programming Director of City Screen Ltd, Denise Parkinson - Head of Film at Bauer Media and Brian Gordon - Director of the Northern Lights Film Festival) to pitch our film, in the hope of winning the £250,000 production prize.
Clare Binns gave us a bit of a grilling, which frustrated me at the time, but looking back on it, both Clare and Denise had very valid points that I did eventually accept. Brian too, was right to question 'why we should feel for the main character.' At that time 'character' was my weakest area of scriptwriting and I struggled to answer that question even in script development meetings.
Despite being tipped to win, we missed out on the prize by just a handful of votes (you can even hear the sighs of frustration and shock in the audience when we were announced as coming a very close second). It was clear to everyone that some of the 300 members of the public were in fact known to one particular pitching team and as a result pushed the vote in their favour. In the end we all lost out, as the winners never did in fact receive their £250,000 prize to make their film, I think it was because the script itself was not strong enough despite further development.
All in all, it was an amazing opportunity that taught me loads about film finance packaging, pitching and development. I wish there was something like it for talented genre filmmakers today, as I'd jump at the chance to apply again.
Our feature screenplay Blackout was in fact later optioned by Ipso Facto films with the intention of making it for twice the budget - £500,000, but due to the financial crash that year, there was very little money available at Cannes and nobody was interested in financing it without a strong USP (unique selling point). In an attempt to make the script better for Cannes 2010, we ended up faling into the trap of over-developing it into a confusing mess and so when the option ran out after two years, the rights were handed back to me and the project was sadly shelved.
A year earlier and things might have been very different. Today (2024), I think it would be perfect for Netflix where as long as you had one big name attached, word-of-mouth (rather than an expensive theatrical marketing campaign) could bring it far more success.