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 41 and we’re talking investors. Should you get an investor for your sizzle reel? How much did your sizzle reel cost? How much time should you spend making a sizzle reel? To what level should you polish a sizzle reel before you send it to us? And we both have baby brains so we might ramble a bit. A 9-week old baby will do that to you.
Announcer: Music courtesy of Dave Pelman Music, davepelman.com
Biagio: Hey, everybody. She’s Joke.
Joke: He’s 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, we got a quick but important podcast episode for you guys this week, because I’ve gotten a question that has come up many times since we started the podcast. And I guess after somebody asked it for the 13th time, I thought to myself, maybe we should actually address this on the podcast.
Joke: You got to listen to your customers, man.
Biagio: You got to listen to your customers. So you’ve been asking, we’re answering. And the question that we’ve gotten is, should I get an investor for my sizzle reel? Now, for those of you that are maybe new to the podcast or haven’t listened to our first eight episodes, now available on YouTube with a clickable table of contents at YouTube.com/JokeAndBiagio, a sizzle reel is essentially a mini movie trailer for your TV show.
Joke: Correct. And they can range anywhere from two to five minutes depending on whether it’s just a format tape or you’re showing characters in their new world.
Biagio: And again, if you’re not sure what format or arced or hybrid is, check out those first eight episodes. But essentially, a sizzle reel is our number one tool for selling TV shows in this industry. You might have heard a few episodes back about a pilot we sold to Oxygen called Sister Witches that was sold off of a pitch tape. Our current show, Ghost Inside My Child was sold off of a pitch tape.
I mean, we started our career basically making pitch tapes for other companies and selling shows for them with our pitch tapes. So pitch tapes are sort of our bread and butter.
But how much money do you spend on a pitch tape? How much time do you spend on a pitch tape? The answer is very simple: As little as possible.
Joke: As little as possible.
Biagio: As little as possible.
Joke: Well, okay the whole point of a pitch tape is that it’s sales tool, correct? So you don’t want your sales to end up costing more than you’re going to make from the sales. That’s selling 101.
Biagio: Yeah.
Joke: And that includes your time and energy. So that’s why I forgot which podcast it is, but I’m sure Biagio will tell you, how not to go broke. It’s really about figuring out from the very beginning okay, is this something? Is this something? And so, this whole process of putting together a sizzle reel, even for us, when we do it internally evolves in steps. And so, each time has to be a step for it’s like, okay it’s worth to start the next step, to go to the next step. And then by the end of that, you have a sizzle reel.
Biagio: Yes. Now again, because our take on this is to spend as little time and money as possible on a pitch tape, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be good. Listen, all the initial pitch tapes me and Joke made, we made for less than $500 out of pocket and people thought we spent thousands on them. And that’s because we shot the hell out of them, we edited them, we sound mixed them.
Yes, we put more time in than money, but when you’re just starting out, you more time than money. It doesn’t mean you should spend six months on one tape. We had pitch tapes that people fell in love with that we had spent as little as a couple of days on or maybe a week on. And money-wise, never more than $500 out of pocket.
Now here’s why this is so important and this is why it ties back to the question of, should you get an investor for your sizzle reel? First of all, you will never ever see the money back that you spend on a sizzle reel. It’s not like when a network commissions your show, they go, “Oh, and you know what? Let us reimburse you for that great pitch tape you made.” That’s not the way it works.
That pitch tape you go out with, that’s basically your investment in your show. And when you’re starting out your career in yourself.
Joke: Think of it this way: When you get the job, they’re not going to pay for your business cards.
Biagio: Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. And that’s exactly what your sizzle tape is, it’s essentially a business card to help you sell your show. If you spend and yes, we’ve heard of people who’ve done this- $50,000, $100,000, even more on a pitch tape that money’s not coming back to you.
And since you already know from listening to this podcast that this is a numbers game and you pitch far more shows than you sell, chances are when you make a pitch tape, you’re not going to sell that one. You’re going to make a lot of pitch tapes before you sell a show.
So, should you get an investor to fund your sizzle reel? I say, absolutely not. No way, don’t do it. Because what’s going to happen is, usually if someone is silly enough to invest in a pitch tape, it means they don’t understand our end of the business at all. It’s not like funding a feature film, it’s not like putting up money to make other types of business investments.
If you invest in a pitch tape, you’re never going to see return on that tape. Especially if they put in a lot of money. And then, what do they really want from you? What do they’re going to want from you in return?
Joke: Right, I mean, or if neither of you understand the business very well and their investment in a tape they believe they’re now going to get a certain percentage of the show it’s not going to happen. The networks won’t pay for it, so pretty much at that point, you’re left having to pay them completely out of your pocket. And depending on the kind of promises you’ve made, that means you may end up working absolutely for free.
More importantly and this is the big one, if you come to us or any other production company or any network and say, “These are all my investors,” because when you sign your agreement you have to sign a paragraph that says, “You have the right to enter into this agreement.” And if you have investors, that means that there’s other things that you need to disclose.
So any network or production company that will get information disclosed from you saying, “Oh, I have all these investors.” It just makes a whole project that much more complicated and frankly, it just raises a lot of questions. So we highly advise against it.
Biagio: Basically what it comes down to is this, if someone is going to invest money, they expect something in return. You, as an aspiring producer who’s hoping to have a network commission your television show and pay to put that show on the air, you can’t promise anything in return. Because if you walk in here to us and you say, “Hey, I found this great show. And by the way, this person invested $25,000 in it and I’m going to need to make sure that money goes back to them,” well there’s nothing we can do to help you with that.
The network’s not going to pay you for that, we’re not going to pay you for that. There’s not that much money in reality TV that to have just a bunch of extra money left over to pay back investors. So that’s why we say, the best thing you can do when it comes to making a sizzle reel, make it yourself.
Make yourself valuable to the projects you pitch. And one of the ways, like we talked about earlier in the podcast and these episodes, is to make great tape. So go out and shoot something and edit it yourself. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be flawless. It just has to be enough to show us that you found some great characters or a great world that would truly make a great TV show.
Because guess what? If we’re interested, then we’ll invest in the tape. But we’re going to invest by coming out, flying out, maybe shooting some more tape with you, maybe paying for a couple of shoot days, having our editors on staff edit it into something really highly-polished. That’s different.
So in a sense, we would be investing in your pitch tape. At that point, we’re partnering up and we’re making it together. But the worst thing that you can do is walk in as a newbie and say, “Hey, I raised a bunch of money for this pitch tape,” because you won’t see it back that’s just not the way the business works.
Joke: Now, I understand that some of you may be like, “Now wait a second. Now you’re giving me a catch-22 because I don’t know how to make a sizzle reel, I don’t know how to make the tape or I don’t have money to make tape and I can’t get in anywhere without showing tape.” You’re right, so one of those things has to change.
And the thing that has to change is you believing that you can’t actually make a tape because truthfully anybody can. If you have a phone, if you have a computer with Skype. Frankly, if you have the devices to listen to this podcast, you can make a tape.
Biagio: That’s true. And like we always say, what you bring to a project, when you add value to a project it’s by you bringing something we don’t have access to. So if you discover a great cast who owns a terrific business or takes place in a really interesting activity we haven’t seen on TV. And you make relationships with them and you build up those relationships and you develop the idea and you shoot a little bit of tape and you say to us, “I have found this incredible cast and I put together this little rough tape to show you what they’re about.” And if we look at that rough little tape and we go, “Wow, those are TV characters?” You’ve made yourself valuable.
And by the way yes, if someone walks in here with a very polished pitch tape, of course it gets our attention. Of course, the less we have to do to go pitch your show to TV networks, the more excited we are about your project. And listen, we just teamed up with a few of you who had really polished pitch tapes because the people we teamed up with, they can shoot, they can edit, the tapes were great. We have a few little tweaky things, and then we’re going to go out and pitch those shows as team, right?
But we’ve also teamed up with people who aren’t necessarily great shooters and great editors, but they’re great people people? You know, when you’re a people person. How would you say that, people people? So someone who’s a great people person, right? They’ve made amazing relationships, they understand story, they understand what makes a great TV show, and they’ve given us enough rough tape that we can see their vision. And we can say, “You know what, there’s definitely something here so we’ll come in and help you finish the tape.”
That, my friends, is way better than having somebody write you a cheque and then having you beholden to them on a project that hasn’t even been considered by anybody yet. So in short, should you get an investor for your sizzle tape? My feeling is no. Joke?
Joke: No.
Biagio: So there you have it. From the two us, don’t get investors for your sizzle reel. Invest in yourself. Believe in yourself. And even if you make the roughest tape possible, I promise you, if there is a seed of greatness in what you’ve discovered, in what your show idea is, we will see it and we will team up with you.
Joke: Maybe that’s a subject for another podcast, is what makes a great sizzle reel is not the quality it’s the people in it. I don’t know, how do you say that?
Biagio: I don’t know. We’ll think about it for next time, guys. Don’t forget, we have a nine-week old at home, so we are between working out a bunch of pilots in a TV series right now and a new baby. I have got major baby fogs. So if I rambled a little bit this episode, I apologize. I barely let Joke talk so she didn’t really get to ramble.
Joke: That’s probably a good thing.
Biagio: But I hope we answered the seemingly age-old question in reality TV: Should you get an investor for your sizzle reel? The answer is no, just believe in yourself.
And for those of you who are new to the podcast or just starting out, you know where to find us, ProducingUnscripted.com. And certainly check out the episode I’ll link to in our show notes about how to develop TV without going broke.
And please, whatever you do, when you do believe in yourself and you do invest in yourself, don’t spend a lot of out of money, a lot of out-of-pocket money on a sizzle tape. Just make what you can with the resources you have, it’ll be good enough to let us know if you’ve discovered something that could be a viable show or not.
Alright, so that’s going to wrap it up for this time. Any parting words, Joke?
Joke: Be kind to each other.
Biagio: Be kind to each other, find some great cast, come up with some great ideas for some TV shows, and then go make the sizzle reel yourself. Alright until next time. Take care, everybody.
Joke: Bye-bye.
Announcer: Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.
