72-hour Cannes pitch deck. Major international film rights won within a week.
72-hour Cannes pitch deck. Major international film rights won within a week.
Presentation Design
Sales Copywriting
Sales Campaign
Cannes Film Festival
72-hour Cannes pitch deck. Major international film rights won within a week.
A start-up walks into Cannes. The competition is a household name. The rights on the table include some of the most coveted film titles on the planet.
Cannes Film Festival
Overview
Blue Reign Entertainment had built something genuinely valuable. A distribution model with real reach into the Sub-Saharan African market. Working relationships with the largest broadcast and media players on the continent. A founder whose expertise in film distribution had been earned over years — inside senior roles, across real negotiations, in a market that very few international producers understand well enough to enter alone. For an international producer looking for a credible partner in Africa, Blue Reign was exactly the kind of business worth backing. The problem was not the business. The problem was that the business had never been translated into an argument.
We were on holiday in Edinburgh when Blue Reign asked us to look over the presentation they were taking to Cannes. It was six slides. A company overview — competent, polite, and assembled at speed by a team who had been focused, correctly, on the deal rather than the deck. But Cannes is not a room where company overviews win licensing rights. It is a room of sophisticated producers and licensing executives assessing distribution partners across dozens of markets at once. They are not asking what does this company do? They are asking why should we trust this company with our title, and what will they do for our commercial objectives? Blue Reign's deck answered a question nobody was asking. Three days out from the festival, that was the gap that mattered.
Cannes Film Festival
The Challenge
The issue was structural, not cosmetic. The presentation had been built from the inside out — starting with what Blue Reign is and working forward — rather than from the producer's evaluation criteria and working back. It is the most common pattern we see in high-stakes pitch preparation, and it is rarely a failure of effort. Founders know their business intimately. They trust the opportunity completely. So they explain the business, describe the model, outline the function — and assume the value will be obvious to anyone reading. It almost never is. The buyer who needed to feel the size of the opportunity and the confidence of the team received a document that spoke to neither.
The second challenge was harder, and it is the one every founder-led business eventually runs into. Blue Reign's single strongest commercial asset was the founder's depth of industry experience. But that experience had been accumulated inside roles at other companies. It sat in relationships, in market knowledge, in judgement built over years — none of which appeared on a balance sheet or a client list. As a start-up, Blue Reign could not point to a long distribution history under its own name. So the deck did the only thing available to it: it described capability instead of demonstrating it. Against competitors whose credibility was assumed before they opened their mouths, description was not going to be enough.
Cannes Film Festival
The Solution
Seventy-two hours. A hotel room. One decision to make first: what does this specific buyer need to believe before they can say yes? Working alongside the Blue Reign team, we mapped the business, the buyer group, and the full value stream — the distribution network, the broadcast partnerships, the market access, the individual competencies of the people who would actually deliver on the rights if they were awarded. Most of that already existed. It had simply never been documented as evidence. That mapping did two things. It gave Blue Reign a clear-eyed view of the commercial argument they were genuinely entitled to make. And it turned a founder's invisible track record into visible, credible, checkable proof of competence. The deck stopped explaining the company. It started making the case.
PowerPoint Adobe Photoshop Sales Copywriting Sales Storycraft
With the argument settled, the narrative and the design followed. The story was structured to carry both halves of the decision — the logic a producer needs to justify the choice, and the confidence a producer needs to make it. Opportunity, barrier, and the specific evidenced reasons Blue Reign could clear the barrier where others could not. Design was the final layer, and it was doing commercial work rather than decorative work. This buyer group are visual and emotional storytellers by profession. They read credibility off a page before they read a word of it. Blue Reign needed a deck whose surface signalled the same seriousness as its argument. Everything was built in three days, remotely, in close collaboration with a team who knew their market far better than we ever would. Our contribution was the architecture. The substance was always theirs.
Cannes Film Festival
Performance Results
Blue Reign Entertainment went to Cannes and won. Within a week of the festival, they had been awarded multiple major international titles — among them the Paddington Bear remake. Rights the team had not expected to secure. Rights that, awarded to an established distributor, would have looked routine. Awarded to Blue Reign, they were a repositioning. The company that had walked in as an optimistic local contender walked out in the industry-heavyweight category. It is worth being precise about why. Blue Reign did not win because of a presentation. They won because they had a genuinely superior offer for that market and, for the first time, a pitch that let a producer see it clearly enough to act on it.
Cannes Film Festival
Final thoughts
Cannes Film Festival
Credits
Laura Howie
Daryn Basson
CEO Reel Media
Presentation Design + Development Specialist
Previous Project
Next Project
72-hour Cannes pitch deck. Major international film rights won within a week.
72-hour Cannes pitch deck. Major international film rights won within a week.
Presentation Design
Sales Copywriting
Sales Campaign
Cannes Film Festival
72-hour Cannes pitch deck. Major international film rights won within a week.
A start-up walks into Cannes. The competition is a household name. The rights on the table include some of the most coveted film titles on the planet.
Cannes Film Festival
Overview
Blue Reign Entertainment had built something genuinely valuable. A distribution model with real reach into the Sub-Saharan African market. Working relationships with the largest broadcast and media players on the continent. A founder whose expertise in film distribution had been earned over years — inside senior roles, across real negotiations, in a market that very few international producers understand well enough to enter alone. For an international producer looking for a credible partner in Africa, Blue Reign was exactly the kind of business worth backing. The problem was not the business. The problem was that the business had never been translated into an argument.
We were on holiday in Edinburgh when Blue Reign asked us to look over the presentation they were taking to Cannes. It was six slides. A company overview — competent, polite, and assembled at speed by a team who had been focused, correctly, on the deal rather than the deck. But Cannes is not a room where company overviews win licensing rights. It is a room of sophisticated producers and licensing executives assessing distribution partners across dozens of markets at once. They are not asking what does this company do? They are asking why should we trust this company with our title, and what will they do for our commercial objectives? Blue Reign's deck answered a question nobody was asking. Three days out from the festival, that was the gap that mattered.
Cannes Film Festival
The Challenge
The issue was structural, not cosmetic. The presentation had been built from the inside out — starting with what Blue Reign is and working forward — rather than from the producer's evaluation criteria and working back. It is the most common pattern we see in high-stakes pitch preparation, and it is rarely a failure of effort. Founders know their business intimately. They trust the opportunity completely. So they explain the business, describe the model, outline the function — and assume the value will be obvious to anyone reading. It almost never is. The buyer who needed to feel the size of the opportunity and the confidence of the team received a document that spoke to neither.
The second challenge was harder, and it is the one every founder-led business eventually runs into. Blue Reign's single strongest commercial asset was the founder's depth of industry experience. But that experience had been accumulated inside roles at other companies. It sat in relationships, in market knowledge, in judgement built over years — none of which appeared on a balance sheet or a client list. As a start-up, Blue Reign could not point to a long distribution history under its own name. So the deck did the only thing available to it: it described capability instead of demonstrating it. Against competitors whose credibility was assumed before they opened their mouths, description was not going to be enough.
Cannes Film Festival
The Solution
Seventy-two hours. A hotel room. One decision to make first: what does this specific buyer need to believe before they can say yes? Working alongside the Blue Reign team, we mapped the business, the buyer group, and the full value stream — the distribution network, the broadcast partnerships, the market access, the individual competencies of the people who would actually deliver on the rights if they were awarded. Most of that already existed. It had simply never been documented as evidence. That mapping did two things. It gave Blue Reign a clear-eyed view of the commercial argument they were genuinely entitled to make. And it turned a founder's invisible track record into visible, credible, checkable proof of competence. The deck stopped explaining the company. It started making the case.
PowerPoint Adobe Photoshop Sales Copywriting Sales Storycraft
With the argument settled, the narrative and the design followed. The story was structured to carry both halves of the decision — the logic a producer needs to justify the choice, and the confidence a producer needs to make it. Opportunity, barrier, and the specific evidenced reasons Blue Reign could clear the barrier where others could not. Design was the final layer, and it was doing commercial work rather than decorative work. This buyer group are visual and emotional storytellers by profession. They read credibility off a page before they read a word of it. Blue Reign needed a deck whose surface signalled the same seriousness as its argument. Everything was built in three days, remotely, in close collaboration with a team who knew their market far better than we ever would. Our contribution was the architecture. The substance was always theirs.
Cannes Film Festival
Performance Results
Blue Reign Entertainment went to Cannes and won. Within a week of the festival, they had been awarded multiple major international titles — among them the Paddington Bear remake. Rights the team had not expected to secure. Rights that, awarded to an established distributor, would have looked routine. Awarded to Blue Reign, they were a repositioning. The company that had walked in as an optimistic local contender walked out in the industry-heavyweight category. It is worth being precise about why. Blue Reign did not win because of a presentation. They won because they had a genuinely superior offer for that market and, for the first time, a pitch that let a producer see it clearly enough to act on it.
Cannes Film Festival
Final thoughts
Cannes Film Festival
Laura Howie
Daryn Basson
CEO Reel Media
Presentation Design + Development Specialist
Previous Project
Next Project
72-hour Cannes pitch deck. Major international film rights won within a week.
72-hour Cannes pitch deck. Major international film rights won within a week.
Presentation Design
Sales Copywriting
Sales Campaign
Cannes Film Festival
72-hour Cannes pitch deck. Major international film rights won within a week.
A start-up walks into Cannes. The competition is a household name. The rights on the table include some of the most coveted film titles on the planet.
Cannes Film Festival
Overview
Blue Reign Entertainment had built something genuinely valuable. A distribution model with real reach into the Sub-Saharan African market. Working relationships with the largest broadcast and media players on the continent. A founder whose expertise in film distribution had been earned over years — inside senior roles, across real negotiations, in a market that very few international producers understand well enough to enter alone. For an international producer looking for a credible partner in Africa, Blue Reign was exactly the kind of business worth backing. The problem was not the business. The problem was that the business had never been translated into an argument.
We were on holiday in Edinburgh when Blue Reign asked us to look over the presentation they were taking to Cannes. It was six slides. A company overview — competent, polite, and assembled at speed by a team who had been focused, correctly, on the deal rather than the deck. But Cannes is not a room where company overviews win licensing rights. It is a room of sophisticated producers and licensing executives assessing distribution partners across dozens of markets at once. They are not asking what does this company do? They are asking why should we trust this company with our title, and what will they do for our commercial objectives? Blue Reign's deck answered a question nobody was asking. Three days out from the festival, that was the gap that mattered.
Cannes Film Festival
The Challenge
The issue was structural, not cosmetic. The presentation had been built from the inside out — starting with what Blue Reign is and working forward — rather than from the producer's evaluation criteria and working back. It is the most common pattern we see in high-stakes pitch preparation, and it is rarely a failure of effort. Founders know their business intimately. They trust the opportunity completely. So they explain the business, describe the model, outline the function — and assume the value will be obvious to anyone reading. It almost never is. The buyer who needed to feel the size of the opportunity and the confidence of the team received a document that spoke to neither.
The second challenge was harder, and it is the one every founder-led business eventually runs into. Blue Reign's single strongest commercial asset was the founder's depth of industry experience. But that experience had been accumulated inside roles at other companies. It sat in relationships, in market knowledge, in judgement built over years — none of which appeared on a balance sheet or a client list. As a start-up, Blue Reign could not point to a long distribution history under its own name. So the deck did the only thing available to it: it described capability instead of demonstrating it. Against competitors whose credibility was assumed before they opened their mouths, description was not going to be enough.
Cannes Film Festival
The Solution
Seventy-two hours. A hotel room. One decision to make first: what does this specific buyer need to believe before they can say yes? Working alongside the Blue Reign team, we mapped the business, the buyer group, and the full value stream — the distribution network, the broadcast partnerships, the market access, the individual competencies of the people who would actually deliver on the rights if they were awarded. Most of that already existed. It had simply never been documented as evidence. That mapping did two things. It gave Blue Reign a clear-eyed view of the commercial argument they were genuinely entitled to make. And it turned a founder's invisible track record into visible, credible, checkable proof of competence. The deck stopped explaining the company. It started making the case.
PowerPoint Adobe Photoshop Sales Copywriting Sales Storycraft
With the argument settled, the narrative and the design followed. The story was structured to carry both halves of the decision — the logic a producer needs to justify the choice, and the confidence a producer needs to make it. Opportunity, barrier, and the specific evidenced reasons Blue Reign could clear the barrier where others could not. Design was the final layer, and it was doing commercial work rather than decorative work. This buyer group are visual and emotional storytellers by profession. They read credibility off a page before they read a word of it. Blue Reign needed a deck whose surface signalled the same seriousness as its argument. Everything was built in three days, remotely, in close collaboration with a team who knew their market far better than we ever would. Our contribution was the architecture. The substance was always theirs.
Cannes Film Festival
Performance Results
Blue Reign Entertainment went to Cannes and won. Within a week of the festival, they had been awarded multiple major international titles — among them the Paddington Bear remake. Rights the team had not expected to secure. Rights that, awarded to an established distributor, would have looked routine. Awarded to Blue Reign, they were a repositioning. The company that had walked in as an optimistic local contender walked out in the industry-heavyweight category. It is worth being precise about why. Blue Reign did not win because of a presentation. They won because they had a genuinely superior offer for that market and, for the first time, a pitch that let a producer see it clearly enough to act on it.
Cannes Film Festival
Final thoughts
Cannes Film Festival
Laura Howie
Daryn Basson
CEO Reel Media
Presentation Design + Development Specialist
Previous Project
Next Project
One conversation to find
out if we are the right fit
for YOU
Tell us what you're selling. Who needs to say yes. What's at stake if they don't. We'll tell you exactly what we'd build — and whether we're the right studio to build it.
No obligation. No vague creative brief. A direct conversation about the commercial job your presentation or sales assets needs to do.
One conversation to find
out if we are the right fit
for YOU
Tell us what you're selling. Who needs to say yes. What's at stake if they don't. We'll tell you exactly what we'd build — and whether we're the right studio to build it.
No obligation. No vague creative brief. A direct conversation about the commercial job your presentation or sales assets needs to do.
One conversation to find
out if we are the right fit
for YOU
Tell us what you're selling. Who needs to say yes. What's at stake if they don't. We'll tell you exactly what we'd build — and whether we're the right studio to build it.
No obligation. No vague creative brief. A direct conversation about the commercial job your presentation or sales assets needs to do.