Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

If you're a writer you can write a book just by yourself, and there are already many writers that create awesome stories. Furthermore, from all the movies I've seen and all the books I've read, I think that the story in an average book tends to be of higher quality than the story in an average movie.

An interesting goal for a really disruptive storytelling technology would be to create a tool that allows a writer to create something that looks like a movie but doesn't require much more work than writing a book.

It's already possible to use computers to create a movie without using any cameras, or building physical sets, but it still is a labor intensive and expensive process. Right now you need:

* Voice actors to act all the parts

* Modelers to create all the 3D models

* Texture artists

* Animators

* Sound effect technicians

* Composer & musicians

* A rendering farm to render the movie

Let's look at each of these items and see if we can find a way to work around it.

We can start with the easier ones. You don't need a rendering farm, you can use a game engine to render the story in real time using the GPU.

Music & sound effects are also easy to solve. Computers can synthesize music and there are already many composers who allow you to use their music for free or by paying a very small one time fee. You also can buy at a low price a library of sound effects, but below I propose an even better solution for that.

Next we have to look at models & textures. This is harder to solve but I think there might be one solution inspired in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. When you install World of Warcraft on your computer you're installing the whole world with all the models and textures, so that when you play the game all of them are loaded on demand from your local hard disk. So, any company that wants to create a tool that enables a single writer to create a whole movie by himself, would have to invest in creating all the models & textures for a large array of different locations (urban, country, desert, jungle, interiors, exteriors, etc.) that the audience would install on their computer. Then writers would have all those locations available to use for their stories. Furthermore, it would be a good idea to allow third parties to create new locations that can be added to the set of available locations. On top of that, if you are already installing all those models & textures on people's computers then you can also throw in good sound effects library.

All of the above is easy, in the sense that, although it requires a large investment to create a good set of models & textures for the locations, it doesn't require any technological innovation.

Now comes the hard part. The part where we still haven't developed the needed technology. We need digital actors that can play their roles by themselves. The writer should only be required to give them their lines & stage directions. This would require some more research in how to improve text to speech synthesizers & procedural animation. But I do believe that's something that could be solved in the next ten years.

I certainly appreciate that they didn't gloss over the fact that SOPA's potential damage to civil liberties and the world economy was what raised their awareness of the viability of startups in this space. People should publicly stand up for causes they believe in.

I've been looking into this space for a while with plans of disruption. I see a lot of posts on here from people who work in the industry talking about how expensive it is to create high-quality video. As an independent filmmaker and entrepreneur, I only somewhat agree (on the price of hiring indie filmmakers: http://crewtide.com/2011/11/03/price-of-video-narrative-vs-v...). There are a number of things that make Hollywood productions so expensive, like name actors or car crashes/explosions. But another big one is location, location, location. Hollywood production studios are expensive because they can create any location you can imagine. Crowdsource to award-winning independent filmmakers (as my startup will do) and each of them will shoot in whatever amazing-looking locations they know they can shoot in for free.

sanjiallblue writes as if every independent film shoot uses non-professional cast and crew -- that is ridiculous. In my recent shoot (we're releasing a six-episode thriller-romance web series around Valentine's Day) the only conflict was that one of our leads got into a play with the American Repertory Theater. I'm interviewing 20 independent filmmakers for my blog this month and all of them are full-time filmmakers -- some have day jobs shooting for local TV stations or editing for production studios, but most are full-time freelancers doing commercials, corporate work, music videos, and their own shorts and features.

By the way, brands are beating Y Combinator to the punch. Who has funded television since it began? Brands, and they're starting to skip tv and the exorbitant price of advertising there and create their own content. Since BMW's The Hire series early last decade, plenty of other brands have jumped on board creating their own mini TV shows (http://crewtide.com/2011/10/14/branded-entertainment-example...). You should really read these guys take on it: http://www.reelseo.com/every-brand-will-be-a-studio/. ReelSEO always has the latest news & best commentary on this industry.

Right now BMW, Kmart, YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu are still going to Hollywood to get their content produced, and they're paying through the nose. Kmart spent $100,000 per 8-mninute episode of a low-budget web series by going to Hollywood; an indie filmmaker could have made that for 1/10th the price with an all-professional crew.

* "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation." (at least I hope you wouldn't call me "Mr 278" to my face. I am not my HN Karma)

* "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."" (You didn't have to bring up my karma at all)

* "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized." (Twice in parent comment)

Not that I agree with everyone posting on 'my side' of this issue, but as we can see here, karma is not a perfect system. Just because I haven't spent as much time commenting here, you think you can simply ignore my arguments, put forward independently of my own credentials. The guidelines exist so that they can be followed, and we can always have meaningful, productive discussions. Not so that certain people can flagrantly break them. But, if you won't listen to other arguments against breaking the guidelines, will you listen to your own? If I may,

> Second, plenty of people are wrong every day. That doesn't mean they need to be called an ass. it means you talk to them civilly. Try to convince them of the error or their ways. That's why Steve Jobs formed a friendship with Rupert Murdoch. Not because they're such kindred spirits.

I kinda wish you had responded to the OT portions of my comment, but I feel like that would have been equally fruitless.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've been wondering if an apps-like model would work for TV shows and movies. EG, if you like The Daily Show, you have a Daily Show app, instead of having to subscribe to a whole slew of channels you'll never watch. Or for sports: Like Formula 1? Get the F1 app. Need some news? Daily News app, done. After you've got all your apps, you can mix & match, set whether you want to be interrupted (watching the daily show and some F1 qualifying is starting, switch to that app y/n?), heck, even set the number of ads and length of ads (longer ads means less ads, and vice-versa).

Similar for movies. There, you could split up the apps either by genre, franchise, favorite star. Like Leo DiCaprio movies? D/L the Leo app. Like the Batman franchise? Get the app, and have everything from the 60s TV show (yes, I know, mixing TV and movies, here) to The Dark Knight.

The real difficulty, and what needs to change, in my opinion, is creating an avenue for independent producers to show their content and STILL have it be considered worth watching. In a way YouTube and Vimeo lets you put your work online which immediately makes it available to a billion people. The problem, though, is that having your work shown on youtube means nothing. Having your work screened on TV means something. Being screen in a theatre means something. Getting into Cannes means something. Having Ebert review your film means something. You can argue that Eberts opinion doesn't mean much, but the fact that he is reviewing your work is meaningful in and of itself.

Hollywood has this huge system to help itself legitimize the work that comes out of it, regardless of the actual quality. There's no real system that helps individuals who want to cut out the middle man effectively convince strangers to watch their content (afaik). There has been an insane amount of growth in the number of film festivals that exist in the last 5 years, but all that does is lessen the value of screening your film in a festival. (Wanna see? Just check out withoutabox.com). Also it's just growth that in my opinion tries to emulate and validate the current system.

So what I think is needed is something like Netflix, or a bunch Netflix-type sites, that serve curated and independently produced shows and films. Each site would serve a specific audience, and each site must be careful in what it chooses to show. It must legitimize itself to "normals" as a valid mode of entertainment, and also to artists and filmmakers as a valid mode of distribution. This, I believe, would allow for more diversity and more democracy in content creation, and is a viable way to legitimize quality content that would otherwise get lost in a sea of Internet junk.

Edit: grammar and some messed up sentences that didn't make sense :)