This assignment was very eye opening not only for myself, but for my group as well. It was apparent that many of us, myself included, had never really pitched an idea like this before so getting our initial format in order as well as knowing how to speak were the foremost challenges that we had to overcome. Another obstacle early on was the script, as for our rehearsal pitch in class we were very unprepared since we were unsure about what was required. In the end, the main things we needed to work on were knowing what we needed to say, making sure we sounded persuasive, making it interesting and practicing what we were going to say so we could hold more of a ‘conversation’ rather than a slide presentation (some positive feedback from our rehearsal that we wanted to incorporate into our pitch was to leave out slides and just talk). This being said, we still wanted to add images to get across our point more clearly, however this worked not as well as I’d hoped.
The feedback that we got was extremely interesting and proved to provoke thought amongst our group, enough to decide to change our concept. Due to initial concerns of portraying refugees as monsters, we agreed to focus more on government control, however the board made us realise many different aspects of portraying government control that we didn’t realise. For instance, since Australians are now the refugees, we might need actors of different ethnicities to play the controlling government or reporters. We also realised that we needed to define our characters further, and reconsider the overall objective of our survivors, and how the ‘cannibals’ played a part in the government manipulation. Altogether, the pitch not only helped to cement our concept, but it also gave us enough insight into areas where we could improve and flesh out to make it better.
Here is our proof of concept: