Pitcher Up:

Chris Miller Pitching a scene from Shrek:

Artist, by the rule, are not good at talking to groups of people. Most of us would prefer to set in a quite room by ourselves and draw pictures. Pitching a story idea is one of the hardest things for animation students. I have a feeling that it is hard for professional animators too.

Today was the mid-term pitch for my Visual Storytelling class at Brooks College. The mid-term is a pitch of thumbnails, story beats, rough character designs and rough production designs. The class is basically a pre-production class with a mid-term and final pitch.

I have found in the past that it helps the students to show them actual pitches. For that, the best resource is the Shrek DVD. The special features have 3 great examples of story pitch from Cody Cameron, David Lowery and Chris Miller.

All three of the pitch styles are different. Chris does great voices with dead on impersonation and sound effects. David is the most reserved and may I say dignified. Cody falls somewhere in between.

It would be a great service if other pitches found their way onto the special feature menus of other DVDs. Hint, hint. Wouldn`t it be nice to see pitches from the Golden Age of Disney. I bet there is still film on some of them. There is an idea for you Leonard.