Wonder Unit Company

Here's the rub:

"Creativity embraces the bold and ambitious. In film, the bold and ambitious require significant capital. However, capital embraces limiting risk and delivering the familiar."

What if we could embolden creativity without requiring significant capital?

If you look at the costs of an average movie, it's largely composed of production, actors, visual effects, and a small percentage allocated to story.

But what makes a movie successful? A-list actors, a huge production, tons of visual effects, or a great story?

We took a look at the returns for big-budget theatrical movies over the last hundred years. Here's a histogram from movies that have lost tons of money to movies that have profited tons. As you can see, it's bell-shaped with more movies losing money than making it.

If we look at the histogram of all movie returns, regardless of budget, the distribution is about the same. This tells us that big budgets and big-name actors do not have influence on success rate – only scale.

There are plenty of big budget movies that make tons of money, and others that lose tons of money. And plenty of low budget movies that do the same.

Spending more money on actors, production size or visual effects, does not guarantee a film's success. It will just make it more expensive.

There is, however, a correlation between returns and critical reception. If you assume that a good review is the result of a good story, a good story would mean a higher probability of positive return.

We don't need the data to tell us what we already knew. People love great stories.

So why would anyone bother to make a movie with a bad story? Because it is nearly impossible to tell how good a story is until the movie is done.

The typical story development process is rigid. You start with taking a huge creative risk with very little cost. When a script is written, the story is fleshed out, reducing the risk slightly, when the cost is still relatively low. But then, the movie goes into production, where the costs become incredibly high: the creative risk hasn't been reduced at all. By the time you spend tons of money in production, you have no idea if the story will work.

The good news is, there are tools to evaluate the quality of stories. And these same tools can be used to make stories even better.

The idea is to take incremental steps, starting with low cost and high creative risk to iterate on story. With every step, reduce risk and increase cost, so that by the time you go into production, your story risk has been significantly reduced.

We've applied the agile process to collaborative story development. We start with a crazy idea and work that into script form. Instead of going right into production, we storyboard using software we've developed that allows the story team to mock up boards without having to draw. These storyboards are converted into animatics that anyone can watch. This is extremely cheap and does a great job of visualizing the story.

Next, we shoot a proto-production. A proto-production is a full-length production with the cast, but no crew. The end result is a fully edited movie with beautiful performances and music, but no lighting, elaborate sets or visual effects. It's a full low-cost movie that shows us if the story is working and if the performances properly convey the story - the only thing that matters. It's like a beta test of the movie. And it's an invaluable opportunity to get structured feedback and make meaningful changes to the story, if needed. In fact, at any step along the way, we can make changes and iterate, so that when we finally go into production, we know that it's going to work.

Has anyone done this before?

Pixar.

Pixar started as a software development company. Software development is iterative and they applied that agile process of iteration to story development. It's built into their culture.

Pixar literally invented computer graphics. And initially, the novelty value of animated movies was high, but at this point there are many studios that produce animated films. Yet, Pixar consistently produces incredible box office returns and critical reviews unrivaled by any other studio. This difference is that Pixar innovated on story development.

Innovation in the movie industry comes from the people already working in the movie industry. The movie industry doesn't invest in technology and especially not software. You might say the visual effects industry does, but they are contracted vendors and have no influence on story.

If it were as simple as realizing that investing in better stories made sense, everyone would have the box office track record that Pixar has.

But the creation of great stories requires world-class creative talent combined with world-class creative engineers. Together, they can create story iterations, visualize them, test and incorporate changes, and develop new creative tools that aid in the creative process.

Wonder Unit is a creative-lead studio of artists, writers and engineers that focus on story through agility and technology – and we produce those stories into movies.

There's been a huge shift in the way people watch movies. People watch movies through streaming services. People expect high quality stories at a low monthly subscription fee. This means streaming services need to acquire and produce high quality content at cheaper prices. That need reveals a huge opportunity to create a best-of-breed studio that produces reliably good stories directly for the streaming audience.

We are developing stories that explore the theme of childlike wonder vs. cynicism, set in worlds hidden in plain sight. Strong human stories wrapped in the envelope of fantastic wonder. Movies specifically targeted to, and created by, people that normally aren't represented in entertainment.

Our first story, Explorers, is about a group of young adults that get stuck in the underground tunnels of New York. In their effort to find a way out, they discover a long forgotten secret. Even though it takes place in a fantastic world just under our feet, its core is a coming of age story of kids dealing with their insignificance in this world.

We developed this story using our iterative process. It was written in a collaborative writers room. Sequences have been storyboarded many times, and we will soon go into proto-production.

Alongside story, we've been building tools that aid in our creative process. The most important is a storyboarding tool called Storyboarder, a tool to allow people to storyboard without needing to draw. We made it so anyone can create scenes by adding characters, posing them, setting up cameras, and inserting shots. We even allow storytellers to build their scenes and boards in virtual reality. This allows our story team to visually direct a movie without ever leaving the writers room.

Storyboarder is available for anyone to use for free. Today, we have over 250 thousand users, 1.5 million downloads and many well known movies and TV shows have been developed with it. We believe it is really important to make the software available to everyone because this builds the community of creative storytellers and gives us direct access to some of the best storytellers in the world. World-class creative talent make great stories, not technology. Releasing the software helps us grow our team from the very best people.

The ultimate goal is to build the infrastructure of a company that nurtures multiple story teams, develops stories and works alongside engineers to visualize and revise the processes. We will reliably develop great stories and produce those stories into movies with tight-knit polymath production teams to reduce cost. We will specifically release the movies through streaming platforms on a reliable basis. All while continuing to invest in the future of storytelling. Think Pixar, but for live-action films.

Subsequently, as the way in which stories are developed and produced changes, we believe that the cost to not use our tools and processes will be too high for other studios. We will license usage of our tools to studios to create better movies for all audiences.

In the short term, we are getting ready to shoot our first proto-film. This will give us a really good idea if the story works, and if it does, we will go into production. To a huge degree, everything relies on this first movie's success. If it's not successful, none of the fancy software or processes will matter at all. But we're confident in the process of iterative story development, and the results already speak for themselves.

As we move forward, we need people to join our team: writers, engineers, artists, curious tinkerers, square pegs in round holes. We will need advocates and advisors: people to review our processes, give feedback on stories, proto-films, and crazy ideas.

Will you join us?