Toronto Film School Alumnus Simon MacIntyre enters CBC’s ComedyCoup
Toronto Film School alumnus Simon MacIntyre has thrown his pitch into the ring to win a half-million dollars to make a half-hour comedy special.
Now living in Vancouver, MacIntyre along with two of his friends have entered the CBC ComedyCoup, an opportunity to accelerate an original show concept towards development and production.
MacIntyre, 31, graduated from the Toronto Film School in 2006 with a Diploma in Acting for Film, Television and the Theatre. His ComedyCoup pitch is for a show called The Eligible Bachelors, a comedy about two singing detectives from the 1940s who find themselves in the present. With the help of no-nonsense detective Laura Everheart, the three work to stop the super criminals.
MacIntyre is working on the project with writer and co-creator, Amro Majzoub, and director/ show runner, Geoff Rieck, two friends he met after moving to Vancouver in 2012.
“The show itself, I have been working on with my friends for over a year,” MacIntyre said. “We were just trying to figure out a way to go about pitching it to networks when we discovered ComedyCoup.”
How ComedyCoup works is concept creators put together a team of three Canadians who can create, execute and market the original screen-based comedy. Each of the teams made a 90 second teaser video and social media accounts for the ComedyCoup project.
Fans have until Dec. 10, 2014 to vote for their favourite ComedyCoup projects. The pool of potential projects will be narrowed down to 50 and then 15. The top 50 and subsequently the top15 will be chosen based on a combination of performance indicators on social networks and voting results among other criteria.
The teams will be challenged to make a number of fresh content and videos during that voting period.
“They track how many people watch our videos on their website and that factors into their decision as well as how many people vote for our videos,” MacIntyre explained.
ComedyCoup will then option at least five projects for development. These final five teams will take part in a live event in Toronto where teams will pitch their projects before a panel of industry pros and the ComedyCoup “Uberfan”.
The winning project will be green-lit for production, which will air as a “CBC Prime Time Special” in the fall of 2015.
Click here view the teaser for The Eligible Bachelors and to vote for MacIntyre’s pitch. You can view the show’s Facebook and Twitter accounts to stay up to date on new videos.
