There’s an old-school trick to selling ideas to movie executives. It’s called the high-concept pitch.
A high-concept pitch lays out the entire story — premise, promise, and execution — in one simple sentence. Here are a few famous examples from Hollywood:
- Backdraft: Top Gun in a firehouse
- Ghost: a man dies and becomes his wife’s guardian angel
- Liar Liar: a lawyer is forced to tell the truth for 24 hours
- Hook: what if Peter Pan grew up?
There’s a number of things high-pitch concepts achieve, but they mainly bring together two completely different ideas and then demonstrate in the short pitch why your idea is different from others.
The applications for writers are endless. And the attention they can garner can be massive.
In this 10-minute episode of Rough Draft with Demian Farnworth, you’ll discover:
- How to develop a spooky-good original premise
- Ways to twist traditional ideas to create stunningly new ones
- How to widen the scope of a high-concept pitch to attract the largest audience possible
- What can happen when you merge completely different ideas
- The two-word question that promises great high-concept pitches
Rough Draft on iTunes
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