Lackadaisy Pitch Packet (Patreon)

So, I thought this might be of some interest to anyone here who's busy fleshing out an idea of similar type or proportion. And for anyone else, perhaps it'll serve as a little project-forensics curio - the pitch packet Fable Siegel, Ashley Green and I put together before we wound up doing our own filmmaking, via Iron Circus.

The images above are scattered bits of it, but you can download the sequenced PDF attached to the post. That's the full pitch, minus some content like the ending page because it had contact info on it, and the proposed episode synopses pages. (That part was extremely speculative about format and also kinda spoiler-ish.)

There's a lot we'd do differently now, looking back at this. In assessing it, though, it's also  worth bearing in mind what a pitch is and what it isn't. Generally, it's simultaneously informational yet delightfully concise - the presentation of a specific idea, uh, broadly. Really, it's about saying something enticing enough to get yourself invited to a sit-down meeting. Though pitches often contain look-and-feel concepts, it's not really a style guide or an art bible. You'll notice the characters here aren't precisely on model, for instance, but being persnickety about that at this stage would have been missing the point. A pitch is also not a storybook, script, or compendium of lore. You might bring source material like that along as accompaniment (Fable brought the Volume 1 book) but they aren't the pitch itself. You generally go in assuming no one wants an encyclopedic heap of paperwork dumped on them upfront. Because they don't. They don't want that.

I think we were probably in the right ballpark on the amount of information we were trying to deliver, but it was tonally askew. It comes across a little too Disney-esque relative to the subject matter. That leaves the answer to the question of intended audience pretty hazy. It also doesn't quite capture how Lackadaisy is supposed to feel, but in realizing that after the fact, I think we were better able to alter our approach for the purposes of crowdfunding. If we had endeavored to keep pitching this (if you aren't some kind of Big Deal or known entity, you are going to have to be persistent on a level just short of pathological), we'd have been honing it along the way, too. I guess you could say There Was an Attempt, but ultimately the feedback and advice we got out of it was worth the fumbling around we did here.

For the record, the main point of feedback we got from some studio people and showrunners Fable approached was that this is interesting but unusual to its detriment. It doesn't fit the family sitcom formula and it's not for kids, so it falls outside the rather narrow scope of what a lot of (North American) studios and producers would consider pursuing in the realm of animation. The studio system is, if nothing else, risk averse. If we wanted this made, we'd have to produce one heck of a proof of concept - "go make it yourself" was their advice, in other words. Maybe that's what they say to mostly everyone, and it was just a polite way of telling us to scram. I don't know. Whatever it was, we took it to heart.