Creating a video pitch

1. Six Welsh cakes, still warm, in a box that costs two and a half pence and leaves nothing behind.

2. We are Year Ten Enterprise, and we are selling a hundred and twenty boxes of Welsh cakes at the summer fair. The cakes were the easy part. The packaging was not.

3. This is the blank. One hundred and twenty-five by sixty-five by fifty millimetres inside: two stacks of three cakes with clearance. The four faces add to three hundred and eighty millimetres, exactly the perimeter. It closes first time.

4. The tempting option was a plastic window, so people can see what they are buying. We left it out. A card box with a plastic window is mixed material, and sorting lines reject the whole box, not just the window.

5. Instead there is a forty-gram paper liner for the butter, water-based inks, no laminate and no sticky labels. The whole pack is paper, so all of it goes in one bin.

6. Here are the numbers. Fourteen point eight grams a box. Two point four pence including the liner, so two pounds eighty-eight for a hundred and twenty. The honest bit: only one net fits an A3 sheet, so we waste twenty-seven per cent of every sheet.

7. Six cakes, one box, one bin. Come and find us on the Year Ten stall, and please take the lid home with you.

Total word count	226 words (19 + 31 + 38 + 39 + 31 + 45 + 23)
226 ÷ 2.5 words per second	90.4 seconds
Over or under, and what I cut	Four tenths of a second over, which is nothing. My first draft was 268 words and ran to 107 seconds. I cut a whole sentence about the mixed-spice recipe, because the panel is funding packaging, not baking.

Shot	Framing	Duration	Dialogue	On-screen text
1	Close-up, straight down onto the open box. Hands only — no faces. Cakes going in one at a time.	8 s 19 words	Six Welsh cakes, still warm, in a box that costs two and a half pence and leaves nothing behind.	PICAU AR Y MAEN
2	Mid shot, presenter seated at the bench, closed box in front of them, talking to camera.	12 s 31 words	We are Year Ten Enterprise, and we are selling a hundred and twenty boxes of Welsh cakes at the summer fair. The cakes were the easy part. The packaging was not.	120 boxes · summer fair
3	Overhead of the flat net on the bench, pencil pointing at each dimension as it is said.	15 s 38 words	This is the blank. One hundred and twenty-five by sixty-five by fifty millimetres inside: two stacks of three cakes with clearance. The four faces add to three hundred and eighty millimetres, exactly the perimeter. It closes first time.	2 × (125 + 65) = 380 mm
4	Two-shot of the bench: our card box on the left, a bought pack with a plastic window on the right. Hand lifts the plastic one.	15 s 39 words	The tempting option was a plastic window, so people can see what they are buying. We left it out. A card box with a plastic window is mixed material, and sorting lines reject the whole box, not just the window.	Mixed material = rejected
5	Close-up of the liner being folded into the base, then a tilt up to the printed lid.	12 s 31 words	Instead there is a forty-gram paper liner for the butter, water-based inks, no laminate and no sticky labels. The whole pack is paper, so all of it goes in one bin.	One material. One bin.
6	Mid shot, presenter holding an A5 card with the four figures written on it, large enough to read on a phone screen.	18 s 45 words	Here are the numbers. Fourteen point eight grams a box. Two point four pence including the liner, so two pounds eighty-eight for a hundred and twenty. The honest bit: only one net fits an A3 sheet, so we waste twenty-seven per cent of every sheet.	14.8 g · 2.4 p · £2.88 · 27% waste
7	Wide shot of the finished boxes stacked on the stall table, camera static, presenter stepping into frame at the end.	10 s 23 words	Six cakes, one box, one bin. Come and find us on the Year Ten stall, and please take the lid home with you.	Year 10 Enterprise
Total		90 s	226 words

The duration check. 8 + 12 + 15 + 15 + 12 + 18 + 10 = 90 seconds exactly. Each shot's words also fit its own time at 2.5 words a second: shot 1 needs 7.6 s of its 8, shot 3 needs 15.2 s of its 15, shot 6 needs exactly 18. Nothing is more than a fifth of a second out except shot 3, and I am happy to speak that one slightly quicker because the numbers are on screen anyway.

What I changed before filming. My first storyboard gave shot 4 twenty seconds and shot 6 twelve, which totalled 92 seconds and left the numbers rushed. Swapping five seconds from the window argument to the numbers fixed both the total and the pacing, because the numbers are the part the panel writes down.

What happened	What we did about it
Shot 2 was filmed against the window and the presenter was a silhouette.	Turned the bench ninety degrees so the light came from behind the camera. Refilmed it once.
Shot 3 picked up the class next door through the wall.	Moved the tablet to within 40 cm of the net and spoke across it rather than down the room. The overhead framing stayed the same.
Shot 6 ran to 21 seconds on the first take.	Cut "which is something we are not proud of" from the end. It was filler, and dropping it brought the take to 18 seconds.
File name	group-4-packaging-pitch-2026-03-12.mp4, saved in the class folder on the school system. Not uploaded anywhere.

The fact I remembered afterwards	That their corrugated box protects the cakes far better than ours but costs sixty-five pence a square metre against our forty-two. I remembered it because they put both numbers on screen at once.
The weakness they admitted	That corrugated board is bulky, so far fewer flat boxes fit in a delivery. Admitting it helped: it was the first thing I was going to ask, and by naming it they got to answer it on their own terms instead of mine.
One shot that needed a different length	Their opening shot ran fourteen seconds with no dialogue at all. Cut it to five and give the nine seconds to the cost comparison, which they rushed.