The TwoDays concept was invented by my friend, Jack, in 2002 as a device by which to motivate and structure an Alleycat race that he organised around the streets of Edinburgh. It was a great success, and by 2004 he decided that he wanted to do a sequel. It was at this point that he approached me, to produce a comic which would recap the events of the first adventure, and serve as a springboard for everyone who was taking part in the second event (hence the cliffhanger ending).
We started work on the plot of TwoDays in summer 2004, with the intention of releasing the comic in early 2005, in time for the TwoDays race in September of that year. Shortly after we started though, we thought it'd be a good idea to try pitching the story at the last of Kev F Sutherland's London Comic Festivals, being held at the Holiday Inn near Russell Square in October 2004. I produced the concept artwork that you can see under Character Sketches, and we both tried to boil down the essence of TwoDays into a punchy 3 minute pitch, without giving away any of the surprises.
I'd also finished the first 3 pages of the comic, which we produced as a sort of ash-can teaser to give out to people. As you can see, Jack was pretty pleased by the product:
On the panel were four industry professionals; including Dan Didio and Mike Avon Oeming. One of the other panel members was the winner of a previous year's pitching session, who had gone on to write professionally for 2000AD. Unfortunately, I can't recall the name of the fourth fellow on the panel, which is a shame, because he was by far the most encouraging one of them all.
All I can really remember of the pitch itself is that the conference room was darker than I'd expected and warmer than any of us would've liked, and of course, that our time ran out far too quickly. The pictures below show, from left to right, myself, compere Kev F and Jack, while we were in mid-pitch.
Time was particularly tight on the day, since I think there were around 15 or 16 pitches to get through in 90 minutes. I don't think we even managed to cover half of the material that we'd hoped to, but I imagine that is probably true in most cases. Seeing my artwork blown up on the overhead projector was certainly a bit of a thrill though.
In the end, the panel thought our pitch was a bit vague and slow to get to the point, which is probably pretty fair. It was certainly a learning experience though, which helped both Jack and myself to see more clearly what our story was actually about, and how to sell that succinctly. It was also another step in thickening my skin to critical earbashing, which is always a good thing. Once the dust had settled, our pitch was voted by the audience into a fairly comfortable 8th position.