I am so grateful to have had the conversation with @Melissa Verdugo and have taken her suggestions to heart. I created a Producer Pitch Deck that I feel covers what we discussed, and it's so much better. When she spoke, it clicked, and I am so excited about the results. Thanks @David Stem for creating this amazing community and the opportunity to do something I never thought would happen. I wrote a screenplay, received placement in four film festivals so far, and made two pitch decks! Yahoo! I would so love to know what pages strike you most, and perhaps what feeling you have when you finish looking at the deck. It's structured a bit differently because it's got a theme that relates to the screenplay. And I hope it makes everyone want to see the final product. Fingers crossed!

And it will transform your writing quickly if you let it. I watch it play out every week on the Premium calls. People come in doing what they've been taught. Save the Cat. Beat sheets. Get the hero out on a journey. They end up with scripts even they don't love. Uninspired, but "technically" correct. Then after a few sessions in The Forge, they lean hard into character and their work takes flight. Case in point: Thia joined mid-March. She'd been carrying her story in her bones for decades. Rugby, found family, belonging. A life nobody else lived. She was trying to write it as a memoir and getting nowhere. Four months later: Finalist, Oxford Script Awards. Selected by the Cannes Script Festival out of 410 submissions. Quarter-Finalist, LA International Screenplay Awards. Festival directors are finding her project and personally inviting her to submit. Her first screenplay. So what changed in March? Not more structure. No beat sheets. No 18 plot points. She started before structure. She found the wound, the lie, the small life, the primal question. She used the Primal Forge GPT to dig until the emotional engine of her story was alive. Once it was, the story she couldn't crack for decades practically wrote itself. Structure became the loose cage that barely contained it. That's the method. Thia plugged in come March. You saw what happened by July. If you've been here a while, you've seen this work in your own pages. Drop your story below. New here and want to know how this applies to YOUR screenplay? Comment NEW and I'll personally reach out.

Hey everyone Hope you’re all having a wonderful day. I was hoping to please get some feedback. Before I carry on. I’m working on my pitch deck - I’m just playing around with tone and the vibe of how it looks - the writing will be changed as I just wanted to se show it looked. Soo ignore the actual words because they will be changed. I’ve only done three pages. Before work - is this the kind of thing and way it’s meant to look. I’ can’t seem to find examples or many online, so I’m guessing. Thank you sm.

I got the news yesterday, and I am incredibly grateful! The thing is, my rugby team is from San Francisco, that's why I submitted to the SF Int'l Screenwriting & Film Awards. Then I submitted to the Cannes Script Festival Summer Season because it's in France and my team and the sport of rugby have deep roots there. I am so honored that out of 410 submissions, Cannes selected my story because it brings this wild life I had full circle. On the 1967 Olympic Rugby Club tour to Ireland, England, Wales, and France, for which my dad was the athletic trainer, and my mom got to be a tourist, the rugby team literally broke apart from the Olympic Club in a hotel room in Paris and returned to San Francisco as two different teams—the former Olympic Club, and the one that raised me, The Bay Area Touring Side, B.AT.S. And I got to celebrate my 18th birthday in Paris in a most fitting way, under a full moon at a rugby match with a special man in my life who happened to be the coach of the team. LOL, but that's another story for another time. So wild that on the same day, two different countries that had an impact on my life, selected my story about rugby, found family and belonging, and it feels so good! Thanks to the Writer's Forge @David Stem , @Anna Fermin, @Chad Desrochers and everyone here for being so supportive as I share my first screenplay's awesome journey!

There's something very appealing about being in the habit of showing up to the page and working the story. Even when I feel like I'm lost in the woods. I'm tired because of life stuff, but I feel good that I was able to get some pages revised, complete some voice-over recordings, and send them off for my proof of concept. Shout out to @Jason Smith @Shauna G @Thia Markson for showing up and for the great chat afterwards