Ripcord Adventure Journal 1.3 Second Edition

The Antarctica challenge
Mark Terry
“Qu’est-ce qu’on va faire?” my cameraman asked. What are we
going to shoot?
“Money shots,” I said. Without any pre-conceived notion of a script
or concept – after all, that was the purpose of the exercise – I
surveyed the festivities and concluded the one thing everyone had in
common was money. They were either buyers or sellers sipping
champagne side by side.
I recruited teams of volunteers to act out skits lampooning sales
meetings: stealing credit cards, renewing old acquaintances with
complete strangers, compromising creative to make a sale, excessive
celebrations of handshake deals, etc.
The performers were not professional actors, of course, but they
were accomplished actors, just the same. Everyone attending these
markets are amateur actors to some degree. They come with a script
to either pitch a project or reject them and when the desired result is
not achieved, they easily slip into improv mode. As a result, my cast
of highly-skilled amateur actors resulted in an engaging threeminute
short film scored to the music of the John Kander and Fred
Ebb classic from the movie Cabaret, Money, Money.
As it turned out, the assignment was more of a challenge than we
had thought – only half of the selected directors were successful in
completing a film. With that out of the way, I was able to focus on
the real reason I was there. My meetings the rest of week went
better than expected as my reputation for being one of the top
directors to watch came with a lot of industry trade media coverage,
paving the way for enthusiastic one-on-ones with the buyers.
One of the most promising was National Geographic Television. I
met with three representatives during my meeting in their pavilion
for about 20 minutes, about four times longer than the average
meeting at MIPCOM. My main contact for follow-up was Ceire
Clark, a young programmer at NatGeo`s UK headquarters in
London. Although there was no commission offered on the spot,
there was a very positive suggestion that there would be one, subject
to providing some additional material on the project.
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