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Hey everyone.
It's me, Hallease.
Endeavoring to persevere, as always.
If you're new here, I make videos about my chaotic good life.
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All the things.
Thank you so much for stopping by.
I'm an Adobe Creative Resident for 2021 to 2022.
To get this, I actually had to build a pitch deck of my project, pitching it to Adobe.
In this video, I'm gonna actually show you how I built my pitch deck and how I build
pitch decks in general whether it is for something like this, a residency.
Or for clients potentially, or a lot of times I'll get requests to build decks for potential
sponsorships, partnerships, things like that.
I think there is a bit of a formula to building pitch decks.
I think that formula can be tweaked and adjusted based on your different medium or what kind
of artist you are, et cetera.
I'm gonna actually break this video up into three sections: pre-production, production,
and post-production, because again I am a video producer.
That is how my mind works.
Something I will say to start us off in the pre-production section is keeping this in
mind.
Remember that a pitch deck, your pitch deck, is a form of communication that is a combination
of written words and visuals.
First thing you wanna do is write everything out beforehand.
Get it all written out and then also start to find all the different assets you think
you will need visually to enhance your written word.
But first and foremost, your pitch deck is the written word.
The visuals, the fluff, the design, all that kind of stuff ... it's all just that: fluff
(laughs).
You need to actually at the core, the content of your pitch deck needs to be there and it
needs to be solid.
So go write that first.
Everything that I've included in my pitch deck that I used for Adobe, start to think
about how you can potentially adjust these things.
The first thing is the artist statement, or I would say a personal statement as well if
you're not considering yourself an artist.
Maybe you're an entrepreneur.
Something like that.
And the artist statement personal statement is really a chance for you to explain who
you are, what you're about.
I would consider it like a log line of you but a little bit longer.
It really shouldn't be more than two short paragraphs.
Again, if you're gonna go the artist statement way, I would say it should give a canopy understanding
of the type of art you create.
The next thing I think you should include in your deck, and what you should start writing
about is expansion plus context, or ... again depending on what your deck is, introducing
the problem.
For my deck with Adobe for example, I focused on expansion plus context.
Really it ended up expanding on what my artist/personal statement was.
Expanding on it in a way that gave context to my experience as a video producer, digital
storyteller, artist.
Here's what I've done the last few years.
I made those as examples to sort of expand on my artist statement.
I think this section you can also use to expand on who you are and in the process of doing
that, give context to what your problem is that you think you can potentially solve.
Maybe you ...
Let's say you're a product designer and you're pitching a design for a product.
"I'm a design engineer, blah, blah, blah.
I mostly focus in this," whatever.
Expansion section, go into it a little bit more.
I have done x, y, and z over the years and because of the things I've done that are x,
y, and z, I have started to see that this type of product is missing from the market.
You have now introduced the problem while also giving context to your qualifications.
Think about how you can do that in this next section.
Then, that'll help to lead you to the pitch or pitches that you're making.
I'm not gonna tell you what exactly to put because every pitch is different.
But, what I can make sure to mention to you and I think is most important that I think
a lot of people forget: while you may have been ruminating on this idea in your mind
for days, weeks, months, years even.
You've been thinking about it a long time.
This has been in your head a long time, they haven't been thinking about it a long time.
This will be the first time potentially that they have heard of your idea, seen your idea,
are gonna read about your idea.
So, be straightforward.
Say it with gusto.
Okay, say it with your chest.
Explain it out in very simple terms.
The second thing I think you can follow up with in this section is including relevant
samples of your work whether it be.
Again, this is what I talk about in pre-production, gathering those materials.
For me it's about producing a web series, but have you produced other things before?
You know, I used some of those relevant samples in my expansion section but I think also in
this pitch section, this can be a good place to put relevant samples.
What they be callin' it?
Case studies, okay, this is a good place to expand on putting case studies.
Whatever I'm pitching, I haven't officially done before, but here are things that I've
done that are adjacent to that.
Here's how that turned out.
Or here is how that went wrong and what I learned from it, what was the tangible takeaway
from that to now.
I feel like I am ready to do this with it.
Consider including a timeline as well.
It's fine if the timeline changes just because you're pitching a certain timeline doesn't
mean that'll necessarily happen.
But giving the reviewer of your pitch deck a firm understanding that you've thought it
through.
The last thing I will say in your actual pitch deck.
Say thank you.
Say thank you for having them take the time to review your pitch deck and look it over
and all that kind of stuff.
You know, I'm from the south.
Say thank you.
I know that's a lot of pre-production, but those are the types of things you should be
writing in your Google Doc and your Word doc, whatever, before you ever are looking for
design ideas, for the fluff and the blah and all that kind of stuff.
Now, we move into production of the pitch deck.
My biggest tip for production with building a pitch deck is work from a template.
Work from a template.
Unless you are in fact a designer, okay, unless you are truly in fact a designer.
Even your pitch deck itself is showing your design capabilities (laughs).
Unless that's who you are, work smarter, not harder.
There are so many amazing pitch deck templates available for you.
My residency application pitch deck is a combination of two different templates that I found on
Adobe Stock.
I would say 80% of my deck was this template, which again is available on Adobe Stock if
you're interested in looking at it buying it, I will link it down below.
Then, I also found this template that I really liked.
I really enjoyed the sort of scribble scrabble vibe to it.
I felt like it was just something that was very true to my style of ... me (laughs).
If that makes sense.
But, when I looked through the template, I felt like it didn't have enough sections.
I would have to rebuild a lot of it and move things around and so on and so forth, but
I love that scribe aspect of it.
So, I took it.
These are both InDesign templates.
If you're not familiar with using InDesign, don't worry about that.
You can also get on and find photoshop templates and Illustrator templates as well.
You'll see those parameters in Adobe Stock.
But, literally all I did was go to Adobe Stock and type in "pitch deck" and make sure I change
the parameters so that way the right things popped up.
If you are interested in me literally walking through, taking this production section further
and literally walking you through the mechanics of opening a brand new template in InDesign,
let me know in the comments below.
But, for this video I'm just trying to keep it straightforward.
More of the overall goals of the pitch deck.
Alright, moving into post-production.
This section is more things to think about that are a bit more abstract and ethereal,
but also, again, giving y'all a few more tangible takeaways when it comes to building decks.
Think about flow.
I am a digital storyteller (laughs) that is what I do.
If you look at my pitch deck, it tells a story.
I really pulled from ideas around three act structure within my pitch deck.
There's a question, there's an exclamation, there's a period.
With my pitch deck for example, on pages four and five of my pitch deck, there's a section
that transitions the reader from "who I am and where I've come from" to "where I'm at
now, and the struggles I'm seeing now, and what's happening now" and that section is
literally called "The Transition."
Don't be afraid to be literal and say, "this is the transition I wanna make.
This is how I feel stuck.
This is," all of that.
Again, the pitch deck is a way for you to communicate the logistics, framework of what
your project is, your budget is, but also you wanna insert, interject emotion whenever
you can.
My last thing around post-production of your pitch deck is don't make it too long.
If you were to actually take literally all the words that you have typed and put them
in your Word doc, it shouldn't be more than a page, page and a half.
What actually makes the pitch deck long is the design.
Maybe "The Transition" section needs its own page.
'Cause you really want that to be a statement.
You really want that to stand out.
You really wanna make sure that the person who's viewing it is seeing that.
Again, I'm a digital storyteller, video producer so I'm a very visual person.
With my pitch deck, I really did try to figure out on each page, what do I want their eye
to be drawn to.
Obviously, yes, I want them to read the whole thing.
But, if they're only skimming, what do I wanna make sure they know?
What has almost a half a page to itself, what has a full page to itself, what's kind of
condensed in a section?
If you want to take a look at my full Adobe pitch deck, it is up on my Behance and the
link will be down in the description box.
In the comments below, I would really appreciate it if you let me know if this video was helpful.
Whenever I do this sort of "how I did this" or "here's what to think about" types of videos,
I always wanna make sure that I'm giving tangible takeaways and giving valid resources for y'all.
If this was helpful, please let me know so that way I also know to keep doing stuff like
this as well.
Likewise, though, if you felt like something was missing, you wish I had expanded upon
something more, please let me know that in the comments, too.
Critique is helpful.
That is how I do better, so please let me know.
Just be respectful.
That's the big thing.
A big shout-out to my Patreon producers for being my production partners here on this
channel, pateron.com/hallease if you're interested.
There you get early access to videos as well as private weekly vlogs from me.
Again, I am Hallease.
Thank you so much for stopping by.
If you're new here, I hope you subscribe and I will see you when I see you.
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