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?

Profit is the measure of success in the movie industry. While maximum potential revenue is difficult to predict in movies, you can control where you spend money.

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

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

We took a look at 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.

But if we look at the histogram of all movie returns regardless of budget, the distribution is about the same. This tells us that bigger budgets and bigger 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.

So if you spend more money on actors, production size or visual effects, that won't make the movie more successful. It will just make it more expensive.

There is, however, a correlation between returns and critical reception. If you assume that good review is the result of a good story, a good story means 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's near impossible to tell how good a story is until the movie is done.

The typical story development process is very rigid. You start out taking a huge creative risk with very little cost. When a script is written, the story is fleshed out, reducing the risk slightly, and the cost is still relatively low. But then, the movie goes into production, where the costs are incredibly high and 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 if stories are any good. And the same tools can be used to make stories 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. So here we start with a crazy idea and work that into script form. Instead of going into production, we storyboard story ideas using software we've developed that allows the story team to storyboard without having to draw. We develop those storyboards 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, no elaborate sets, no 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 things that matter. 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.

Who has done this before?

Pixar.

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

Why has only Pixar done this before?

Pixar started as a software development company. Software development is iterative. It is built into their culture. They applied the agile process of iteration to story development.

Why has no one else done this before?

Innovation in the movie industry comes from people working in the movie industry. The movie industry doesn't invest in technology and especially not software. You might say that the visual effects industry does in fact invest in technology, 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 creating great stories require 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.

That's where my experience comes in. My background is in developing and designing video games and building teams to develop games. I spent time working in East Asia witnessing an explosive new market of games and brought everything I learned back to the US to develop a platform of tools, produced 37 games, and one of those games, Draw Something was played by almost everyone with an iPhone in the world.

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. There is a huge opportunity to create a best of breed studio that produces reliably good stories directly for the streaming audience.

We are developing stories around 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 lost forgotten secret. Even though it takes place in a fantastic world under our feet, at 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. We quickly realized that the story team needed 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.

We made Storyboarder 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 think it's 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, develop stories, working 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 on streaming platforms on a reliable basis. All while continuing to invest in the future of storytelling. Think Pixar, but for live-action. (Live action meaning non-animated.)

Subsequently, as the way in which stories are developed and produced change, 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 the world.

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 story being good. If it's not, none of the fancy software or processes will matter at all.

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.

We may need to raise money for the actual production, but this idea is likely too innovative for venture capitalists to understand and will likely be too late once they receive the social proof. No big deal. We just need one eccentric billionaire.

Does this sound crazy to you? Are you crazy enough to join us?