Writing and Developing Original TV Pilots:
PlayStation

PlayStation wanted to find a way to avoid the traditional development and production model in order to tell original stories that wouldn’t typically see the light of day. At the same time, they wanted to empower the next generation and challenge them to share their stories with the world, whether they had any background in television or not.

The result: The PlayStation Emerging Filmmakers Program, a year-long initiative produced by Ideas United that was designed to find and produce shows from the next generation of talent. Evan served as head of story development for the program, overseeing the writing of the five TV pilots. He also co-wrote one of them, The Many Lives of Ayn Winters.

The PlayStation Emerging Filmmakers Program began with a call for concepts, in which Evan oversaw the team who reviewed over 700 submissions. Next, there was a live pitch event in LA. Leading up to it, Evan mentored the 10 finalist teams to help perfect their pitches to a panel of judges that was made up of working showrunners and PlayStation executives. At the event, Evan also moderated a discussion with the showrunners about TV writing and development.

During development of the five winning pitches, Evan worked with each winning team as they turned their pitches into shooting scripts.

It all culminated with the production of five pilots in Atlanta.

The program made a splash across the US, and the press surrounding the program was overwhelmingly positive. PlayStation also saw some of the highest viewership on their online cable platform, PlayStation Vue, during the program’s launch. The pilots are now in development for series production.