The Making of a Bloody Ripper on Gruen

High praise indeed from the founding panellist, and Gruen judge on this year’s “The Pitch”, on ABC’s Gruen.

We were incredibly fortunate and excited to have our creative team invited back on the 2nd most-watched entertainment programme on Australian television, to take part in Season 12, Episode 6’s The Pitch segment; this year taking on the challenge of convincing Australia to embrace Halloween; hosted by Wil Anderson, joined by the panel of Todd Sampson, Russel Howcroft, Karen Ferry and Carolyn Miller.

This year, Synergy’s Senior Creative, Erin Collett, took the hot seat representing us beautifully on the ABC.

With views divided across the country – and just as much within Synergy – on the topic of Halloween, the team embarked on the 4-week project for the ABC with every bit of passion, enthusiasm and drive to influence change as they do with everything else.

BUT HOW DID IT ALL GET STARTED?

We thought we’d share a little bit of insight into what goes into the making of a Gruen Pitch; and how our Creative People think.

Beginning by unpacking behaviour itself, thinking about convincing anyone of anything means you need to answer how it’s relevant, useful, or meaningful. Then, how do we engage, entertain, and convey a message – and create a movement to rally around.

In order to unpack this challenge, in a simplified form, you find the problem, the insight – an edge… and you get your idea. We realised that the problem is that Australians don’t connect with Halloween, and don’t find any meaning to the celebration, seeing it as largely foreign.

However, as a society, we love nothing more than having a laugh, being a little silly, getting together and enjoying ourselves – and any excuse to fire up the BBQ. We celebrate our wildlife, our culture and the fact that life in Australia can sometimes be a little scary.

So, what does Halloween then have as an edge? It’s the perfect combination of all of these things, it just needs a little taste of Australia – and we realised, there’s a lot in common already. If only there was a day of the year, that captured it all… and we could come together to celebrate it, in the most Australian way.

From there, the magic happens that begins to craft the story into a script, a vision, through to the casting, location, direction and production planning, coordinating and then bringing it all together on the day. A crew of highly talented people lent their talents, expertise and insights to build a piece that is truly a collaboration of creative minds to drive home a vision with laser focus on solving the brief.

THE END RESULT