Pat Ferns is President of Ferns Productions Inc. and has produced some of Canada’s finest award-winning programming and the world’s leading media events. He presents his signature pitching sessions worldwide. In 2018, he moderated CoPro20, CCDF-9 and GZDOC. Pat is currently engaged in the Canada/Germany co-production Whale Talk. He recently completed China: The Miraculous Transformation, a feature-length documentary on Deng Xiaoping and served as Executive Producer on an 8-part series 1491: The Untold Story of the Americas Before Columbus. Called in his native land 'the father of independent production', Pat was awarded The Order of Canada in 2005 for his services to the industry.

In this Q&A session between Pat Ferns, the creator of documentary pitching, and the GZDOC 2020 pitcher Xin Shan, Pat shares his experience of starting a documentary project and how to pitch a project more efficiently.