Introduction: Please Pass the Serial

I was recently awarded the video production for a Major Retail corporation's New Associate Orientation program. I won this working as a contract writer/producer for Production Company X. The competition was really between us and an arch-rival company. Also, Major Retail is ProdCoX's client. If ProdCoX lost this job, they stood to lose the entire account.

We had to win, and I put everything I had into assembling the creative portion of our proposal. We also had a technical side to our proposal. And it was truly a team effort. We all worked together to pull it off. No one person or thing won the job. (Although I'd like to think I played a significant role in assembling a winning proposal.) The other major player I'll call the Mantis. The Mantis is an old ad agency art director who does storyboards for me. He's seen it all, done it all. And he's a great collaborator.

Mantis and I beat through all the creative and developed 5 good proposals upon which we based our whole pitch. ProdCoX wrapped a whiz-bang technical solution around the whole thing.

Here, I'm going to serialize the whole process. I'll try to make it interesting, because it is. I'm not sure it will be profound, but there is ample drama.

The other player is a Human Resources Consulting Firm I'll call Big HR. Big HR won the bid to develop the curriculum and manager the project. ProdCoX and ArchRival were brought in to bid on and compete for the video production based on creative pitches.

Today was our first official meeting with Major Retail, Big HR, me, and ProdCoX. As I got ready at the hotel this morning, I was slightly amazed that I was actually going to be writing and producing a big job for Major Retail. It occurred to me that this could be a career project. I'm relatively young at 34. This is shaping up to be a great opportunity.

But it was the events of today's meeting that inspired me to serialize the whole experience.

By the way, I've decided that Blogging is keeping me from working on any TV specs. I hope this doesn't prove to be a fatal mistake.