I've heard that if you just shoot a few scenes it might help you sell your script. Anyone know any success stories with doing it this way?
What actually helps is to produce a "presentation" (for Television) or a "trailer" (for features).
In a Television Presentation, you are doing a promo reel trying to sell a series. This would give the impression of a complete series using scenes that give the basic idea of the series and the characters and the stories. This can be done many different ways. One that I did was an involved process that required three days to shoot (with a professional crew and actors). It was funded by SONY and intended to sell the series to the syndication market. the final presentation was seven minutes long focusing on the story, the characters, the "feel" of the series and the appeal of the lead. Out of the seven minutes, four mintes was original material. The rest was made up of clips taken from other movies and series that had the same feel (completely legal as long as you aren't selling the actual presentation). Oh, and by the way, I sold the series.
In other presentations, you don't even need to shoot anything. Just use clips and scenes from different sources. I've seen many presentations and most of them go this route. I've got three presentations in my video cabinet that had not one original piece of material in them, but all of them sold series. I've got one now that is made up of guerilla filmaking; on-the-cheap shots and purloined material. However, it's done so well that whenever I show it, the people assume we've already shot an entire season (especially from the foriegn market people). Yet not one episode was shot and the majority of the presentation was done with material from other sources.
As far as Feature Trailers are concerned, it's exactly what it sounds like. Go to any movie and watch the "coming features" trailers at the beginning. THAT'S what you want to create. Those trailers are designed to make you want to see the film. The same is true about selling it to executives; it should make them want to see the film made. And you can do it without any original material (I saw a slew of them created for the low-budget market that were excellent a while back, all intended for Lionsgate and all of them sold).
But don't let the rare stories of success convince you that this is the short cut. It isn't. It's still a rarity to sell this way and you still need to back it up with a good script. The only advantage is that most exectutives don't have the time to read an entire script, but popping a DVD into their machine for five minutes is different. Keep in mind, though, that their thumb is on the eject button for the first thirty seconds. You really need to grab them immediately.
Good luck.
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