The Pitch

At the beginning of each of the past few years, I have been focused on trying to get writing projects ready to pitch. Two years ago, I had several projects that I was preparing to pitch before concerns for a family member took precedence and I shelved them for much of the year as I focused on doing what I could to help. Last year, I had three projects that I was preparing before the WGA strike took the wind out of my sails. 

The past few years have been frustrating as far as writing. That said, I have streamlined my approach this year. While I can always fall back and talk about several projects, my main focus has been on one TV series. It is a project a few years in the making. That extra time has actually helped mold this project into something quite unique. 

While I have not used AI to write this story, the continuous advancements of AI helped me think beyond the conventional norms of a TV series to create something I was definitely not thinking about when I first envisioned what this series could be several years ago. I, of course, cannot go into much detail here about the story or explain exactly how it is different from most TV series, but I will do my best to tell you as much as possible. 

What I can say is that if this thing gets green-lit it will change how we view TV shows. I'm not saying that because I'm some arrogant jackass who thinks too much of himself. I say that because of all the technological advancements over the past few years and the way I have shaped the story to work with those advancements. In some way, it was a total fluke the way things worked out with this story. 

First, I created a fictional location where several different stories could take place. Those who have been reading my blog for a while will know that I love to blend stories together to tell an even larger tale. Initially, I was focused just on the one story in the possible anthology. Wrote the pilot script, the series bible, and the pitch deck and even began to pitch it as this one-off story. Then I had someone take a protracted interest in another story that I wrote pre-pandemic. Did a bunch of rewrites on that before things ultimately fell through.

When I returned to this anthology series, I began work on another story inside the same universe. Wrote the pilot, the series bible, and the pitch deck. At this point, I had two separate stories set inside the same universe. The way I was describing it was in comparison to American Horror Story. 

Then came 2022, and I was preparing to pitch both of these stories separately and as a package. This was when I affectionately started to call it the Super Series because of how big the world had become. Little did I know that was only the beginning. 2022 was also the same year I had to help out someone in the family with going through their massive trading card collection and put things on hold for several months. While it was tedious work I came to understand a lot about the hobby and learned about interactive media, which would help shape the way I would go on to think about the Super Series. It was also the time I started to think about a third story in the anthology series. 

Remember, originally, these were all meant to be standalone stories, each with its own season or seasons, but all set in the same location. Then 2023 and the WGA strike threw another year to pitch into disarray. It did however give me a chance to think. One of the things I thought about during last year was a true Super Series where all three of these stories are combined into one season. 

Now I had created a bible for two of the three stories by that point and had begun work on the third when the strike hit. So, I had plotted out a season plus for each of the three stories. My challenge was to whittle it all down to the bare essentials for all three of the stories to be told in a handful of episodes instead of a full season for each. 

Here is where I had several formatting ideas. I won't go into the specifics here but I will say that I have a fondness for movies and am often frustrated when shows don't take the opportunity to do a one-hour-plus episode at times. Game of Thrones was one such show. There were times during that series when we would get a 59-minute episode or even a hair over one hour and we would all be so excited and beg for even longer episodes. And then the following week we would get a 42-minute episode and feel cheated. 

Let's just say that I took that into consideration when creating the Super Series with three stories intertwined during one season. The TV series Lost was one of my favorites. It had a pilot episode that was so long that they had to break it up into two episodes. That was on ABC so you can understand why they did not want to air a movie-length pilot episode. If it had been on a streaming service, they may still have tried to make it two episodes but they may have released them on the same day. I would have preferred a single two-hour movie event.

As last year and the WGA strike rolled on I became more and more aware of AI and the rapid advancement in technology. A writing friend of mine asked during the strike if I had any ideas for a podcast. Seeing as he had helped me write the pilot for the first story in the series, I mentioned that in the second story of the season, there were these two secondary characters who had a radio show that the main character listened to. Needless to say, there is now a fourth story in this universe and the radio show has become a podcast.  

While writing that fourth story in the series, and as the strike waged on and as the AI updates continued to flow last year, I could not help but see how a fictional podcast separate from the main televised series could be part of a transmedia experience that adds more depth and potential fan interest in the entire series universe. Again, so much of this had not been planned when I first imagined this series, but it has been wonderful to see how it has developed into something that truly is greater than the sum of its parts. 

With all four of those stories in place, I had to create a new series bible and pitch deck to reflect the scope of the Super Series I had created. So, after finishing the January re-release of Michaelmas with illustrations, I put my energy towards the pitch documents. That was when the most game-changing idea struck me. While I cannot go into too much detail, let's just say that if people want to find a series with more content that they can interact with then this series will be geared for them. 

Ever since last Spring, I have been keeping up with all of the changes in AI. Not only were the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America wanting to protect themselves from AI taking their jobs but they were preparing the world for how much things were going to change in every industry. AI is not just good at predicting the next token it can digitally clone people's voices and images. But it does not stop there, not even close. So when Apple released the Vision Pro and I saw how people were using it I started to think of other ways to augment the Super Series. 

While AI would be needed to help make some of the interactive aspects possible in this series it could not have come up with this story. No way. Could it create the plot for the next CSI spinoff? Maybe. But not a series like this. I know a lot of people are afraid of AI and some hate it with a passion. A lot of those people work in the film and TV industry and are worried AI will take their jobs. How I would incorporate AI into this series would be implemented once filming was done. With an interactive experience that would not cost any jobs, which is key for me at this point. 

This project is super ambitious, but if it clicks it will click in a way that could not only entertain the hell out of people but also bring us into a new era of storytelling. I cannot wait to share more with you. Wish me luck. 

How to Save Cinema?

I started to create a reply to the above tweet but thought a blog post best, as I have thought about the Cinema-going experience for twenty-plus years. Even before COVID Cinema was losing ground to streaming. The movie-going experience has always been special to me because I grew up with it. However, I am not the target audience any longer. Younger people live on their phones and grew up watching streaming content on their phones or on their parents' massive big-screen TVs. And a lot of people don't want to be around other people as much as they used to before COVID. It's a dilemma for Hollywood. 

While I like the reclining seats and films shot on IMAX film, is that enough to draw people into theaters in droves all year long? The short answer is no.

Over ten years ago, I started writing more TV shows than movies because it was obvious that streaming was the future of entertainment. People in the business can moan all they want about it, but that is the evolution of entertainment. You can delay releasing a movie from going to streaming by trying to force more people to go to the theater to see it. For some films that works. For others, not so much. Soon AI will be involved even more and helping to create content and new ways to consume it. 

The main key is to make something great that deserves to be watched in either format. People like all kinds of stuff: Documentaries, Crime Dramas, Reality TV, Cartoons, and on and on and on. We are definitely oversaturated with content. No one person can or should even try and watch it all. It's too much. And that is all stuff people can watch at home. 

If you want to get people to go to a theater and sit next to strangers for two hours, you better have something that most people would want to watch if you hope to get butts in seats. I am guilty of not going to the theater as much as I used to before COVID. But even before then I only had a handful of movies that I would see a year in the theater.

I'm of an age now where I have gained some experience and insight into things just on account that I've been around for a while. Through the past ten-plus years, I have tried to adapt my writing to accommodate for some of the changes discussed above. Though, I have never had anything play in packed theaters for weeks on end, so don't take me too seriously. 

However, if I were in charge of a studio I would try and do something similar to what I have done over the past twenty years. That is to blend things together to make something greater than the sum of its parts. While I am no Aristotle, my default for writing has largely been to have multiple stories combined into a larger story. The goal was always to tell a more important story by having told all of these individual stories. Like this style or not it has become the method to my madness. What does this have to do with getting butts into theater seats? 

People are finally tiring of superhero movies, which were the main driver of theater ticket sales for the last decade. I had to be forced to go see the last one I saw and it was awful. Barbenheimer was the big draw last summer. These two films could not be any more different if they had tried, but collectively they generated buzz. Yet they were outliers. 

My head is in both worlds, that of film and television/streaming. For me, I don't know why there isn't more cross-platform collaboration. If someone was dumb enough to give me control of things, I would create a spectacular two-hour movie that can totally stand on its own and release it in the theater. Good luck, right? That's what everyone is trying to do.

True. Except I would have that incredible movie be the pilot episode of a series, where the other episodes are shown on a streaming platform. It's a gimmick to get people into the theater. One of the biggest complaints I have and that I have heard from others is that there is nothing to watch on streaming platforms or that most of it is garbage. To be fair, a lot of it is hard to find or is released so far apart from one another that there will be times during the year when it seems like there is nothing on. 

If you can knock the pilot/movie out of the park, you will have people wanting to watch the series.  I wouldn't stop there though. I would also incentivize people going to the theater by having their ticket stubs enable certain perks online and on the streaming platform. Top of the list would be to eliminate commercials from the streaming platform during the viewing of the series but also link to transmedia content online to make the whole experience more immersive. 

This way you tap into more than just a simple movie-going experience. You want people excited to be at the theater. To then walk out with more than you came in with is also exciting. As long as the movie is good then that would get people invested in the series as well. 

It's a thought. Will anyone come along and do it? I'll try and do it for sure, but will any producer see the possibilities like I do? What if the movie flops and the series only does ok? Would others try the same thing? Maybe not. But if you could lay down a marker for the future then maybe, maybe executives might see the benefit of thinking outside of the box and take positive new steps to try and save the theater-going experience. Movies have been around for over 100 years, and yet it's still just an image on a screen. Sure the process of filming has changed but it's still just moving images with sound. It's like bread and water. You've got to spice up that meal somehow or some people are going to get bored of it.  

This idea is only one option. It coincides with my own style of writing, so it was natural for me to think of it. I do think there needs to be a better link between the theater and streaming experience instead of making it an either-or option. Hollywood wants more people to see their films in the theater instead of waiting for them to come out on streaming so they can make more money. But we also run the risk of a generation of viewers also missing out on the movie-going experience. No one wants to see theaters shuddered and closed. 

I often write about movie theaters in my stories. They mean a lot to me. They are a place of discovery, like a library, or a museum. But they are also a place of pure entertainment like a ballpark, a racetrack, or a carnival. We owe it to society to try and keep theaters open. But we can't do that without adapting. 

Technology is advancing at lightspeed. Streaming is only our current favorite format for consuming scripted entertainment. Soon we will all have holodecks in our homes and we will all be able to get lost in worlds of our own creation. How will movie theaters be able to adapt to that if the people in charge cannot even adapt to streaming services? 

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

For the past few weeks, I have been in awe of what OpenAI's Sora Video model has been able to create. The early examples that have been released to the public show great promise. At the time the Sora team dropped the first videos, AI Video was not good enough for me to focus on. I was focused on the early stages of planning my first Graphic Novel. Something I have wanted to do since I got swept up in the AI frenzy last Spring.

However, when I glimpsed those first Sora videos I realized that such a tool would allow me to make movies. Short movies to start, but movies nonetheless. Not only have I written novels, novellas, short stories, movie scripts, and TV scripts I have also illustrated a book using AI tools, acted on stage and screen, as well as directed, produced, edited, and designed the music for several short films. While I would never claim to be an expert at all of these, I feel confident that in combination with what I have been learning about AI tools I can not only create graphic novels but also movies. 

There are a ton of people who are much better than I am at using these generative AI tools. I can not claim to be an expert at prompt engineering either. So many of these bright people are a lot younger than me and grew up learning about programming. A decade ago, I took a couple of simple courses about coding because I knew it might be a skill worth having. I did not stick to it and I regret not having done more at the time. Last year, I considered taking a few more courses on coding as I was learning about Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and LLMs. My goal was to understand the technology so that I could better use it myself. 

What I learned is that the engineers who have created these tools are not making it just for people like themselves. They are constantly trying to make these tools usable for everyone, whether you have a degree in Data Science or not. My hope was to get out in front of the technological wave so that I might gain an advantage, not to become a Machine Learning Engineer. 

I made some sacrifices over the past year that I would not have made had it not been for the rise of AI. Last Spring, I, like most of us, could see where things were headed. While I have jumped in with both feet to try and adapt to the inevitable change, not everyone has. A lot of people are scared of AI. And I get it. My first reaction when I realized where things were headed was one mixed with pessimism having seen movies where AI goes rogue and destroys humanity. That is definitely in our collective psyche. And we are right to be apprehensive. We have no idea what things will be like once Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is achieved. Will the public be allowed to interact with it? If so, how long will we have to wait? 

AGI is only the next step with AI. There is not even an agreed-upon definition of what it is. Some say that it may not be smarter than us but that it must be self-aware. Others say that it must be smarter than us in every way. For me, I need the next step in AI, which may have been achieved with Claude 3 or with GPT-5, to be the ideal assistant. GPT-4 has been pretty good but it seems to have regressed a bit, taking several prompts for it to understand what was clearly explained from the start. 

I am a storyteller and while I have no intention of letting AI write my stories, I need it to be better at completing tasks that I ask it to do. For example, I have been working on pitch documents for a TV series that I created. It is tedious work and there is a lot of trial and error like most writing. I have fed GPT-4 a script and other documents about the story to see how it might do in reviewing what I have written. I did make some changes to the bible and pitch deck based on its feedback, and, during the chat, I also discovered more information about interactive storytelling. 

While the interactions are usually helpful in some way, this model takes a lot of prompting and input to create material that is useable and it is usually less than you need. For instance, what would help me out a lot is if I were to provide GPT-4 the pilot script and the Bible, which is a detailed explanation of the TV series, and have it create the Pitch Deck. These are much shorter than a Bible and serve more as a summary with plenty of images. While GPT-4 can create a summary of the Bible it cannot take all that I provided and create a Pitch Deck, even though it can create images. It is okay at summarizing things and can definitely help in the overall process of creating scripts, Bibles, and Pitch Decks. However, it cannot do any of these in a way that would reflect what I want it to do to save me more time. 

This will not be the case in the near future. Soon, I will be able to have a multimodal AI model be a more competent assistant that will not only help me brainstorm and summarize what I have already written but actually be able to take what I have written and help me create materials like a Pitch Deck. I know these new models will be able to do even more, but I want to maintain control of the writing of the story. I enjoy the story-creation process more than anything. However, I am open to having these tools make my process even more efficient so that I can write even more stories instead of being bogged down by having to create all of this other material. 

What a current model like GPT-4 can help me do right now is help me create graphic novels. It is very good at reformatting screenplays into a graphic novel script, which it can then help generate images with panels that make up graphic novel pages. It is not perfect. The main limitation here is Dall-E 3, which is a decent AI Image generator and can handle some text, but it is by no means perfect. I see future models being much, much better at this, making it a hell of a lot easier for me to turn my screenplays into graphic novels -- something I have always wanted to do. 

These current models will only improve, which makes this a frustrating time because we can all see what will be possible. While I was right to get my hopes up last year, things aren't quite where I need them to be for me to create a media empire all on my own just yet. We are close, very close. That is the frustrating part. Because I am ready. 

Some people are attempting this with pre-Sora AI video content, but I don't want my stories told with that dodgy-looking stuff. Then I saw these Sora videos and it had me thinking I might need to change plans for the year and focus on AI videos. That was until I saw the following interview with the Sora team (Bill Peebles, Tim Brooks, and Aditya Ramesh) 

last night.

They said that Sora would not be made available to the public anytime soon. My heart sank as I had been desperate to get my hands on it. The good thing is they are working on making it more user-friendly by adding controls to the output so that you are not just stuck with an output created only by a prompt. That is great! Then the team lead Aditya chimed in with what their main goal is by saying, "Modeling reality is the first step to be able to transcend it." 

Their interview with Marques Brownlee starts at 53:00. 

Not only will that help me as a filmmaker but it is also something that will help OpenAI reach AGI, if they haven't already by one of the many definitions out there. That also means they are likely thinking of interactive experiences that are not yet possible. This is something I am also very keen about. Star Trek: The Next Generation brought us something that we have wanted ever since "The Holo Deck." This would allow you to go anywhere and do anything and it would seem like you are there. It would be like The Matrix or Ready Player One. A virtual reality that is indistinguishable from our own. A place where our digital selves could live forever, as long as the power stays on. I wrote a story about that with my longtime co-writer Chuck Thomas over a decade ago. Might be time to revisit that. 

Anyway, it sounds like we are a ways off from that as well as having access to Sora. This means there is no need for me to jump into AI Videos other than to keep up with how to integrate these tools into projects. While I am not keen on the all-AI video projects at this moment, I am interested in those who are combining live action with some AI video. While I can see this being an acceptable way to tell a story, that only seems feasible if you are already shooting films with actors. I haven't done that as an independent filmmaker in a very long time. I don't anticipate myself going back down that path unless I have funding up front. Not that I wouldn't like to it's just that it doesn't make sense at this time. That is why I am so keen to create AI films. I have the content and ability, I'm just awaiting the tools to progress to the next level and be made available to me. 

In the meantime, I will revert back to my plan of focusing on the illustrated novel series. Sora had me dreaming of all sorts of AI Video possibilities but that will have to wait. I just need to keep learning and preparing for the time when I will not only be able to transform my screenplays to Graphic Novels but also into AI Movies and TV Shows. We are getting so close that it is okay to dream about all of that being possible. I am so excited for all of this after years of thinking I would just have to be satisfied with having written these amazing stories that no one would ever get to experience. Buckle up world. AI is improving and with it I will be creating and releasing all kinds of new material. Exciting times.