What to gather before you call anyone.

The thing that decides whether your sizzle is any good is not who cuts it. It is what you hand them. I have watched good material get a mediocre piece because the wrong things were sent, and thin material get a great one because the right things were.

This works whoever you hire, including if that is not me. Nothing here needs anyone's permission.

Send everything. Especially the bad stuff.

This is the whole article, really. Everything else is detail.

The instinct is to curate. You send the graded scene, the shot you built the deck around, the drone shot you paid for. You leave out the camera test, the rehearsal someone filmed on a phone, the take where the light went wrong, the audition tape that made you cast her in the first place.

The best thirty seconds in a sizzle is almost never the footage the director is proud of. It is usually something shot by accident, or before anyone was ready, or after everyone thought it was over. That is not a rule I invented to be contrarian. It is just what keeps happening. Polish reads as an ad. Accident reads as true, and true is the thing that moves money.

So do not curate. Curating is my job, and I cannot do it on material I never saw.

The list

• All existing footage. Every take, every test, the short you made in school, the scene you shot to prove you could. Including the unusable. Especially the unusable.
• Phone video. Rehearsals, location walks, behind the scenes. It has a texture that reads as real, and it is often the only record of the moment things actually worked.
• Stills. Location scouts, concept art, production photos, the image that made you want to make this in the first place. A held still with the right sound under it can carry more weight than a moving shot.
• A table read or an audition, even audio only. A voice saying the true line over an image is one of the oldest working structures in film. Audio without picture is not a limitation here.
• Boards, animatics and tests. Storyboards, previz, a camera or effects test. Proof of execution is its own genre of evidence, and financiers respond to it.
• The script, and the deck if you have one. Not to be filmed. So I know what the thing is supposed to feel like, and where the scene that can stand alone is hiding.
• Your references. The films and shows yours sits between. The Duffer brothers helped sell Stranger Things with clips from Jaws and E.T. under synth music. Comps are material too.
• Anything you were embarrassed to include. Yes. That.

The four questions

Before any of that, answer these. If you can answer them in a paragraph each, you have done more preparation than most people who commission this work.

1. What is this raising money for?

Not the film. The next specific thing. A development grant, a market slot, a shoot in a particular month. "The film" is not an answer, it is a category.

2. Who exactly has to say yes?

A name if you have one, a role if you do not. A financier is not a network executive is not a market panel is not the actor you are trying to attach. They want different things and the cut should be different. Almost nobody thinks about this and it is the highest-leverage question on the list.

3. What is the emotional core?

One sentence. If it takes a paragraph the piece will not work yet, and that is worth finding out now rather than in week four.

4. What scares you about pitching this?

This is the one people skip and it is usually the most useful thing you will tell me. The thing you are worried they will ask is almost always the thing the piece needs to answer in the first thirty seconds. Your fear is a very good map.

Two things not to do

Do not try to shoot the whole film small

A proof of concept is one scene at full strength, not ninety pages at half strength. Saw was greenlit off a single scene. Whiplash was fifteen pages of a script financiers had already passed on. Pick the scene the room doubts you can pull off, and prove that one. Compression is the whole trick.

Do not shoot new footage yet

Sometimes there is a hole nothing fills and one day of photography is the answer. That is real, and occasionally it is exactly right. But it should be a conclusion you reach after looking at everything, not the plan you start with. Most projects already have the moment. It is just buried, and nobody has gone looking.

If you only do one thing

Put everything in one folder. Not a curated selection. Everything. Then answer question two: who exactly has to say yes.

Material plus audience. That is the whole brief, and with it almost any competent editor can make you something that works.