The Gifted Babies

15:32, Sunday 16th of November, myself and Piratehelm flipped a coin to help us decide whether or not we should go ahead with submitting our entry to the RTE Storyland competition. Tails, whichs means we’re not going to go ahead. The initial plan for today was to finish off the rest of the submission material such as reformatting the script and the CVs, shoot and edit the 30 second promo, complete the 3 minute director showreel, fill in the budget form and write a 200 word summary on the direction of the rest of the series. All in a space of 6 hours. The only major problem with that idea was that we’d be only able to send it off the following Monday morning and you can’t expect any delivery service to have a package be delivered from Cork to Dublin in a space of 3 hours before the deadline ( 12 noon ). Actually I don’t know any delivery services that actually work weekends, so the only option left, if you don’t send it off on Friday, is to drive up to RTE and deliver the package yourself. Unfortunately none of us can go up that Monday morning due to work or college or just apathy. The last one is a lie, I just couldn’t be bothered writing more excuses.

We’re not sure if they accept any more packages after the deadline, but I reckon late submissions will be forwarded to the folks doing Fair City to inject more story archs into their trite. If by some happenstance Mark O’Hallorahorrhaorraahhaaahaaoran or someone from RTE with a more pronounceable surname decides to extend the deadline to Friday I’d be delighted to send off the packet by post and reconsider paying for a television license. In case anyone was wondering, there was no option for electronic submission due to technical incompetence ( although the website used the euphemism; ‘difficulties’ ), despite the fact that commissioned pilots are to be distributed through the internet. That’s a tad bit odd. Also check out this oddity in the Submission form:

This is where you write your 200 word summary, but how small should the words be?

Even if we did get our work submitted in time, I seriously doubt we would have gotten far, given that I stumbled across a good few websites of production companies with their own Storyland entries, and they usually have things that we can’t afford such as experienced film crews, professional film equipment and a chocolate fountain. Another reason why I think we probably wouldn’t have gotten very far is the fact that the story might be a little bit too strange to be considered a drama.

But we think the idea behind the story has potential so we’re going to go ahead and shoot the series anyway. Good luck to anyone else who submitted their work to RTE, I’ll look foward to watching how the whole thing pans out.

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