Documentary Unit: Pitch Research

Today we had a group meeting to contact our potential characters, come up with a pitch and a title.
We decided the best way to do this was to look at relevant programs & ones that were on at the moment and see what their TV guide pitch was.

Sport Relief's Top Dog -

Paul O'Grady: For the Love of Dogs -

Catfish: The Tv Show -

Life and Death Row -

Looking at these synopsis's really helped and we decided to make a list of relevant and important words to help come up with out pitch. They included:

Life-threatening conditions
talents
dogs
special
heartwarming
puppies
trained
ability dogs
medical dogs
life savers
debilitating
Charity
dog loads washing machine

These key words helped us to come up with our 25 word pitch:

A documentary about Ability Dogs and their incredible talents.  We follow people with debilitating conditions as they tell their heartwarming stories about their special dogs.

We then decided to try and come up with a working title for our documentary. Danny was the best at this and easily came up with plenty for us to choose from including:

Hero Hounds

Puppy Power

Mighty Mutts

Courageous Canines

My Hero: Doggie Style

We wanted something punchy and that would appeal to a wide audience. The last title is definitely more tongue in cheek and although it would suit the BBC3 market, it could put people off by thinking it is about something else.

We all agreed that Hero Hounds is the best working title for the moment and will see if anything else comes up during filming that could work.

We decided to split our pitch presentation into 3 key parts so we each could go away and research our own parts before bringing it together to edit and apply the finishing touches.

• Danny will talk in more detail about our title and the work of Roy Dyer, his training centre and his Cynophobia dogs.
• Chris will talk about how the dogs are trained and how they help individuals.
• I will talk about the charities and the bbc3 timeslot research. 

We felt doing this would not only work well for our pitch and help us to deliver something that would flow better. The aim is to not have to have notes so that we can speak directly to the panel as if it was a chat with friends and hopefully at the same time deliver a professional pitch.

Stay safe,

Helen