Typed by hand. It may still contain mistakes; the recording is the original.
Announcer: Welcome to Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.
Angry Man: Is this some kind of joke?
Confused Woman: Biagio-WHO???
Announcer: This episode…
Biagio: It’s episode 45 and we’re talking about your POV. How to shift your POV to instantly up the value of your reality TV and documentary series pitches? The concept that we’re looking at versus living with, host versus characters and meet Joke and Biagio. Extreme basket weavers. What?!
Joke: Help.
Announcer: Music courtesy Dave Pelman Music, davepelman.com
Biagio: Hey everybody, she is Joke.
Joke: He is Biagio.
Biagio: We’re married. We make unscripted film and television and want to help you do the same.
Joke: Hopefully by teaming up with us!
Biagio: Alright welcome to episode 45, which we’re calling “Pitch secret shift your POV for pitch success”. Before we get into the needy-greedy of today’s episode I want to remind everybody that we’re going to be in Washington D.C. at Real Screen 2015.
Joke: Yes! Let the cold commence.
Biagio: Let the cold commence! They really need to move that some place warm. But anyways, for those you who are going to Real Screen or going to be in the area, please reach out to us if you want to see if we can maybe meet up for a few minutes in person. We’d love to know who you are and what you’re doing.
So, listen here is an easy way to let us know just respond to any one of our newsletters with the subject Real Screen in the Subject and we’ll try to connect. We’ll try to hook up. Now you’ll get our newsletter, right? They get our get newsletter, right Joke?
Joke: I don’t know.
Biagio: Way to sell it, honey. Of course they get our newsletter and if they don’t they can sign up for it over at…
Joke: www.producingunscripted.com.
Biagio: Very well said, honey, very well said.
Okay well, getting into the topic of today’s episode. We get a lot of pitches that suffer from one big problem and that problem is the POV of the pitch is all wrong. Okay now, what do we mean by this? If you follow Joke’s advice from the very first episode of this podcast – you’re watching a lot of TV, right honey?
Joke: I sure hope they are darlin’! You’re asking me to predict what these people are doing. I don’t know? I hope – I mean, if they are still listening to episode 45 I sure hope that they’re paying attention to the advice and not just ignoring it.
Biagio: Well I pay attention to everything you say, so hopefully they do as well. Most of the things that she says I pay attention too.
Alright, anyways you’ve been paying attention and so you know your biggest homework from that episode was to watch TV! What’s on the air right now? Now one trend you need to understand in modern unscripted television shows is that by large, TV shows are not about looking at someone or something. They’re about living with someone or something.
So listen to what I just said – living with, not looking at. Living with not looking at. I’m going to let my very smart wife elaborate on this.
Joke: I think darling, what you’re trying to say here is that instead of the old reality shows that were very much hosted and came so from the early days we’re all like, “Oh! It’s kind of like journalism but more fun perspective,” it’s now all turned to character.
And so even, the “hosted shows” today are really about following these characters on their journeys as they’re exploring different thing. So while you may think that Anthony Bourdain is a host, he really isn’t. He’s a character that you’re living with on his journey. Morgan Spurlock, another CNN character with Inside Man, is he looking at different world? Sure. But we are living with him on that journey.
And it’s a fine distinction but it’s an important one as you either pitch yourself as a “host” as you pitch a piece of talent you may have found. But if we’re not talking docuseries, if we’re talking more of kind of format shows that are the host driven is just thinking of them less as a host, that’s a traffic cop and think of them more as a character.
The only place in reality were there very much is a need for traffic cops are kind of the big studio shows whether you see American Idol, sort of game shows those things. While some shows allow for more personality in those hosts, at the end of the day they really are there to keep that show running and the kind of be the traffic cop.
Where the other type of shows whether you’re thinking, whether it’s travel or food or some of the more kind of on the road shows, we’re always trying to explore subcultures but we’re trying to do in a way we were not just looking at something but we’re living with someone.
Biagio: That was perfectly said, Joke. Perfectly said. And I want to point out an awesome example that you listed today and think of when I was putting together the notes for this episode is Morgan Spurlock. He is the quintessential example of living with someone to experience a world as supposed to simply looking at our world through the eyes of a traffic cop.
When we watched any of his 30 Days or we watched Supersize me, right? It’s not about simply looking at what McDonald’s was doing, it was about living with Morgan Spurlock as he went on his journey and that’s a perfect example of the POV that we’re talking about.
Now I want to give you a little bit of a before and after of a fictitious pitch. I’ve purposely made this a horrible pitch so that we know no one’s going to accuse me of stealing their pitch or actually try to pitch us the show but let me use this as a before and after.
I have a show I would not pitch in making, but let me show you the right way and wrong way to pitch it. So it’s a show called Extreme Basket Weavers. Okay, now here is the typical way we would hear the show pitch, “Every week we travel the world to look at the zaniest, craziest, most exciting and funniest basket weavers in existence today. Along the way we learned what it takes to make a basket, how dangerous it can actually be. We see the incredible obstacles that we must overcome to put a revolutionary basket into the market place and feel the heartbreak of basket weavers who’ve innovated basket passion projects get rejected by manufacturers everywhere.”
Joke: Seriously, if this is the worst pitch we ever received then I don’t know what I’ve been listening to. There was at least the use of adjectives in this one.
Biagio: Okay, okay. Perhaps the style of the pitch was not too bad but the idea of it. If you substitute basket weaving, extreme basket weaving with any world you can come up with and I’m not going to do it because we’ve been pitched that show whatever you’re thinking of; those are the pitches we get. It’s ‘we’re going to look at this world’ and so many funny things and so many crazy things and so many dangerous things happened in this world – that’s not how to pitch the show.
Okay, that feels like shows from 20 years ago or it feels like shows that are a piece on 60 minutes or a news magazine show where a true traffic cop host takes you to look at a world. That’s where those kind of shows live these days, they’re small pieces on magazine style shows on new shows.
Joke: That’s exactly what it is. If you think this is a segment on a 60 minutes or any one of those shows it were a segment on a daytime show or on morning news program, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a reality show it doesn’t mean that you can’t find inspiration in those places but just because it makes a good segment on one of those shows does not make it a good reality show.
Biagio: Now let me show you how you could get in to the world of extreme basket weaving in a way that would definitely get our attention, okay. Here’s the better version of the basket weaver pitch.
Joke: Oh god, no. I just read that. No.
Biagio: Oh yeah, you’re going to love this, okay. “Joke and Biagio are Extreme Basket Weavers. This married couple explores the world’s deadliest spots to capture unique materials for their basket designs. Watch as they travel every place from war zones, to snake infested jungles and even the bottom of the ocean, in their quest to find perfect raw materials for their extreme basket weaving.”
“Along the way they’ll leave and go head to head with competing basket weavers, battling it out for raw materials and you’ll see just what it takes to survive and thrive in the world of extreme basket weaving.”
Now a ridiculous show please don’t pitch us that show and me and Joke don’t actually weave baskets. But, let’s look at the before and after of this pitch.
In this version of the extreme basket weaving pitch, we’re living with basket weavers, the extraordinary Joke and Biagio. That’s the shows focus. Yes, we’re getting glimpses of the extreme basket weaving world just like we did in the first pitch but it’s all secondary to living with the married stars of the show.
So you get a sense that the drama, conflict, excitement, danger all come from living with Joke and Biagio on their extreme basket weaving adventures and being tossed into their lives as supposed to taking a vanilla look at the world of basket weaving.
Okay, a horrible show pitch but you get the point. It’s always better to build your show around the real people who would habit the world and live with them as opposed to finding a cool world and just looking at it. Alright! Hey it was a good episode honey!
Joke: Okay for the record, please don’t pitch us as basket weavers. We don’t basket weave and please don’t pitch any reality shows starring us if we’ve never even had a conversation.
Biagio: Yes, yes. We don’t want to be reality TV stars, we like making them not being in front of the camera. And although I will say if I could actually go to the bottom of the ocean in search of basket weaving material, I just might do it. Maybe not the war zone but the bottom of the ocean.
Joke: Who are you kidding? We went scuba diving once and you had a panic attack like 5 feet underwater/
Biagio: What can I say? I’m not much of a swimmer.
Anyways, to wrap things up I won’t be scuba diving with any of you anytime soon. Please remember you can see our first eight episodes on YouTube at youtube.com/jokeandbiagio and those come with a clickable table of contents so you can easily find what you’re looking for.
And if you want to reach out and connect with us you can always find us at Facebook at JokeAndBiagio and Twitter at, you guessed it, JokeAndBiagio.
Alright, well listen we want to thank you again for tuning in. I really appreciate that you guys take the time to listen to us for a few minutes every couple of weeks.
I hope you guys are developing your ideas. I hope you’re using the information we give you to make your projects better. And more than anything and this is true Joke will vouch, I really hope that we get the team up on a project.
Joke: I vouch.
Biagio: She vouches. We’ve already teamed up with a bunch of view and actually a lot of the projects we’re taking to real screen this year came right from you on this podcast. So hopefully yours will be next and until next time. You know, keep at it people. We’re going to make some TV together someday!
Joke: Woot! Woot!
Biagio: Yeah, yeah!
Announcer: Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.
