Not from Pitch Fest, but the whole Directing class after our final Directing class of the semester wooo!

Pitch Fest, also referred to as Story Market, is the time of year that all first-year graduate film students look forward to. Making it to Pitch Fest means a lot of different things, the first and most important being that you’ve made it through your first year of graduate school! The second being that it is time to start, legitimately, thinking about your thesis. Pitch Fest has a mythic feel to it, as all the second years and third years speak of it is a place of fun and anxiety, a place where you pitch your thesis film ideas to faculty, in a very professional environment, and a place where you find your thesis advisers. This year’s Pitch Fest was something my class had been anticipating and fearing for the better part of a year. Read more to see how it went.

Everyone wore plaid for Pitch Fest.

Pitch Fest was an all-day event, starting at 8:30 AM and finishing around 5:00 PM. In the picture above, you can see Diego, a first-year producer, sharing his infamous “mate,” a caffeinated drink more powerful than coffee. We needed it that morning, to prepare for pitch after pitch after pitch. Each producer and director team was required to pitch two thesis ideas to as many of the faculty as possible, and some producers/directors had three ideas to pitch. The stressful part? The time before Pitch Fest, practicing each pitch, and then remembering which pitch you were pitching and not getting confused or flustered when faculty asks you questions.

But here is the thing—Pitch Fest is modeled after the story markets we will be facing in the industry. The stress we all felt is stress we will one day feel again when we go to major story markets trying to sell our ideas to studios and investors. Why is it stressful? When you are looking for someone to believe in your project (in our case, we were looking for thesis advisers), you feel vulnerable. It’s a natural response to feel that way when putting yourself and your creativity out on the line. The key to succeeding in these situations, though, is using that stress and that vulnerability and channeling the energy into something positive, like your enthusiasm for the project.

A wild producer, asleep in their natural environment.

After seven hours of constant pitching, of faculty poking holes in your stories, and questioning the do-ability of the film as a thesis project, it might feel like you haven’t actually accomplished anything. It is actually the contrary! Pitch Fest, while mainly used to see which faculty is interested in working as an adviser, is also a crucial step in the development process of every story. By pitching your ideas to so many different people, with so many different expectations and styles, your story is run through the ringer, but also given the chance to take on a form you may never have imagined. Each faculty member imagines your story in a new light, which opens up possibilities for your characters and plots that you and your producer might never have thought of. This was my favorite part about Pitch Fest.

As we are wrapping up the semester, it is important to keep the feedback from the faculty in mind as we all move forward with our respective thesis ideas. This summer is going to a busy one, but that is how us grad students like it—sleep is for the weak, right?