Ok So we’ve had the dummy pitch – a great idea because it stops us making big mistakes too late.  However – with now only 2 weeks to go not the initial 3 proposed, there is so little time to do changes, and the potential for gloom to creep in is high.

Spoke to the other groups  involved and I think we all feel battered and bruised after – such positivity from our Execs over the past few months – the Sony rep in the team meeting was not keen on the constructuve bit if constructive criticism and it seems other companies too are baffled a little by confliciting opinion.

We are keen to get this right and I just pray our super positive exec is really on the same page as Phil @ Sony or we may have been the wildcard who went feral.

And Pete @ Sony – I’d stick with the day job and leave any dreams of a career in diplomacy far behind!

On the bright side – we knew our presentation needed tightening so with solid feedback now, we’re bang on track to condense the pitch for clarity and really get a chance to shine.

We know from the mountains of research we have undertaken that the future will include a section that is this shaped in it’s desire to extend the PS experience  in the way we are working towards – but will it be with Sony PS?  time will tell

Pitch day  - and despite setting out with acres of time, cars, vans and lorries decide they want to make the journey to Liverpool with us – slowly!! and a 90minute journey takes 180minutes and we miss our slot.

first rule of pitch sales techniques…don’t be late.  Oooops. F***

Any nerves we felt on route, were smoked and bitten away, but on arriving at Sony Liverpool, we become serene, and giggly.  It’s a calming building and, though we have genuine doubts as to whether what we want to pitch is of any interest AT ALL to Sony and the guys at Pixel Lab, we’re ready to go for it.  We’ve some nifty slides and a ripomatic we’re proud of and even I’ve grown a set of balls!

So, yes, we’ve pitched a banana in an apple flavoured world – but what a buzz! I love pitching (I know, I am getting help for this one)

As we crack on with the pitch, I realise that our ethos, our desire to push boundaries and try something slightly left of field is, though probably not what Sony want, it is something that we will persue beyond this pitch and this process has helped define a future vision for Savvy that, if Sony don’t buy it, we will continue down this road.  Which, again, we have GITG and Northwest Vision and Media to thank for – an opportunity to think big and plan bold.

The 6 (or was it 300 panel members (felt like a lot around that table)) gave us a really exciting, thorough, uplifting and heated gentle grilling which is exactly what we needed.  And the two or 3 unanswerable questions  - that were asked (you know the kind, small matters like business models, making it pay…..) took us to the heart of the holes in our pitch idea…. holes we knew were big ones, and that we weren’t sure we could fill.

By the end of the session we knew that we were knocking on the right doors in terms of the sorts of products we wanted to develop, in terms of what shape we thought the future might become and we knew that Sony would hear our pleas again but now wasn’t the right time.  Marcus had made a convincing technological knowledge and plan, Richard proved the possibilities with some wider research and a good deal of gaming knowledge and I, well, I got all over excited and empassioned… it’s a flaw.

Rather ill advisedly, I found I could no longer contain my over theatrical nature and left thanking them for listening and saying that although it was a wild card – wasn’t development about pushing boundaries? and the chance to try something different?  - and if funding like GITG wasn’t the chance to aim high and wide what was?  And anyway what did they have to lose?

I was thankfully rescued by the team from climbing my soap box (which in the absence of one may well have become the conference table…. and we left, knowing we’d blown it but were strangely ok with that; in the time we couldn’t have done more.

Half way down the M62 (Where were all the cars from earlier!!!) Marcus had a Eureka moment and we found a plug for a big hole and realised what we were missing… c’est la vie.

So what happened?

When, late Friday evening, 2 days later, I got a call to say that no one was more surprised than the panel of judges to be giving us one of the 5x 10k to take our ideas further……. we were for a very brief moment Speechless!

We know we have something, we know what we have is potentially really exciting, we think it might be exciting to Sony, but to be honest we are the banana in a box of apples……

An interesting development process ensues, I think we’ve spent the 10k in advance on post it notes and midnight oil, so it is a relief when we meet a fellow pitcher Onteca at the Media Festival and realise we’re all up against it.

We are keen to move across into the gaming world,   traditional gaming is, we think and (have some evidence to support),  open to moving in to entertainment that is defined beyond what is know and labelled as traditional gaming…… but as a company with an expertise in cross platform narratives and technology development, how far across do we go?

Lots of time spent debating the lines between entertainment and gaming, passive and active engagement and where narrative fits in.  So much so that I find myself sitting with an equally scary bunch of gaming types at a Matt Costello event @ the BBC organised by NWVM…………  Inspired? Terrified? Who Knows.

I also attend  narrative in gaming event with a fab company (what the hell are they called? he looks like Matt Lucas with curly grey hair) who help me through designing a shoot ‘em up – at the beeb – another NWVM event.  Am I any the wiser?

And how exactly is this helping? Sometimes not knowing what you don’t know is a distinct advantage.

Day 3 of the GITG sessions  @ FACT and we learn from different companies the tricks of the trade, the intricacies of the gaming world and the pleasures and pitfalls, blitz games and media molecule take us through some of their work… and I survey my Savvy team and realise I am the only member without a Playstation (shameful truth laid bare!) –  in this building probably, so tonight it is to be Christmas and Little Big Planet is moving in.  My 7 year old leaps for joy and promptly teaches an old hand new tricks.  And I am excited at the possibilities beyond the titles that are held within this Pandoras box.

The hi-light “defining the X statement” was a really useful pitch – a gaming shaped log line and elevator pitch exercise that has proved absolutely vital in defining our product.  more useful stuff to take away

All the companies  eagerly await the session from Staff at Playstation and are disappointed to find that Enda’s summing up probably gives us more direction and insider information, but we leave with a burning desire to get in the game when 14 (or is it more?) companies become the winning 5

Day 2 of Training and it is pitch practice day.  Having been pitching and won many commissions with the BBC,  this is an easy day for me and I wonder what I’ll get out of it.  I also sadistically love public speaking so no sweat there too, but Marcus – the head of all things technological at Savvy is sweating gently at my side.  So the camera comes out and there’s a big screen view of our attempts – and even I feel nervous, but it is excellent training from a journalistic  bent and we all learn loads and improve hugely.

The great surprise to us at Savvy – was that,  I, having always pitched solo and always taken on that public facing role, Marcus and I did really well when asked to pitch as a team – adopting different roles (we are very different) and personas to illustrate the pitch “Sell me a favourite game” (Monopoly)  and we realise that this might be a way forward…… for the company.  If we don’t get through the next stage – then this made 3 days away from the offices absolutely worth it!! When else would we get this kind of an opportunity.  Surprising place to learn something that will change our working practices as a company way beyond any future work with Sony Playstation….  And for once, the alien company in this exciting mix of gaming world inhabitants starts to feel very much at home… Bring it on

Bringing together Savvy’s team of technologists programmers and coders with directors, producers and development producers – required a huge amount of terminology unravelling and working practice changes, so when we did the Agile training it was interesting that half the team considered themselves to be working this way anyway and the other half found a strategic look at project working practice a real gem…. Great. Still feel like the Kola Cube in a packet of Smarties, but interesting none the less

So, those GITG decision makers seemed to think that we might just be an interesting fit for the project. From the off, we have been labelled “The Wild Card” – not because of our crazy reputation for partying, but because the rest of the party belong to a different universe!!!
1st day of the 3 day training event at FACT in Liverpool and I walk straight into a conversation about RENDER FARMING !!!!! What the???? – So the twilight zone is alive and well in Liverpool and the language is alien. After 3 days of terminology like gaming mechanics and metagaming and a whole pile of acronym’s like npc’s and mmorpg, I am starting to believe that the gap is one of differing terminology rather than a whole new industry and there’s a little bit of me starts to believe that the holy grail of finding the missing link between passive broadcast entertainment and interactive gaming could be there for the taking if only we can unravel the Enigma code…. An Enigmatic and compelling challenge… I start to thank Enda and David and the team for believing that we might fit, somewhere in the picture. After all what is development about if not pushing the boundaries.

So it’s late summer 2009 and there’s an advert on the NWVM site which Savvy decide to pitch to develop a Sony Playstation project… And yet we are a company that developed from broadcast narrative through creation of a digital toolkit towards cross platform narratives – online on mobile, radio, TV. So why does gaming appeal? Well, Savvy’s main aim is to put its audiences at the heart of the drama – with interactive experiences that engage and entertain… and, well, the gaming industry has been getting this right for rather a long time. They also have an audience who expect and are willing to pay for content and who are creating key online communities, and as 6% of the bbc iplayer traffic comes through the PS3, the boundaries are definitely blurring and we like blurry. What’s not to like? I think there’s a lot to compliment our current work and interactive dramas and narrative games are closer than the terminology would seem to suggest. So we applied…..