Movie Studio As a Service (MSAAS) - Tech Co-Founder Wanted
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Good luck!
You can google Red Zeppelin Digital, there's still some web mentions and press releases. The principals are all local so you might reach out to them, heck you might find your cofounder!
If done properly, could be an awesome service...but it seems so easy to mess it up and end up flaming out.
Don't mean to be a downer, just encouraging you to be cautious and make sure the product is extremely easy/straight-forward to use for the consumer.
Done right, and priced right, I would definitely use this.
For instance, say someone wants to create an hour long video. From the little that I know of rendering video on my desktop machines - to render a small 5 minute video can take a few hours.
So it just seems that a long-form video will churn up CPU cycles that you are paying for.
Although, now that I think about, I guess you could just charge per CPU hour or whatever.
But I was more thinking of the creation - than the distribution/hosting.
I love the viral nature of the service - you have to tell your friends about it so they will contribute their clips to your movie.
It would be cool if you had some great placeholders and the author of the clip could edit and cut a placeholder full version. That way as each friend drops their clip in they can view the whole and adjust their part.
Making the system modular so you could collaborate on a large movie would also be cool.
You could have an import tool that accepts a script as a text file. It finds definitions of characters, scenes, dialog, direction, etc.
It then breaks the script into acts, scenes, shots and creates the corresponding data-structures on your end to present same.
You then use chunks of dialog as placeholders for the rendered imagery and presto, instant placeholder movie. Author then replaces dialog with storyboards, early renders, then finished content.
It could be truly social, like a movie creation wiki with many users. Each user might have different permissions to edit, add content for (some subset of) scenes, etc.
I realizes this is a consumer product, not a directorial production. I'm having trouble grasping this concept: 'You provide an outline of topics for each clip you need'... are you suggesting your client (average consumer, I guess?) would be well prepared to have an entire editing session in their mind and prevized the whole montage in their head before they hire your service? Because that's a bit..er far fetched.
I feel I don't understand it - can you explain it a bit more? My first idea when I heard about consumer oriented MSAAS as you call it, was that you would provide them with guidelines about story structure (however simple it may be - because it can be made formulaic), offer them a slew of templates like digital juice and, on top of that, list them required material to be shot for a given project... and in the end you auto-magically comp and edit it with a sound sheet and they take of their product.
If you could hook up with some template guys (to cut down costs of making them yourself - both money and time wise), maybe hook up with guys like dramatica to devise a simpler version of structure process, and you do the tech part for comp/editing... you'd have something that nobody currently has, and online... I bet youtube guys would be interested if you lose interest in the business along the road. Of course, you could do all the steps without partnerships, but it would take a long time. Just my 2cs.
Essentially iMovie provides an outline of the "production"; it requires you to fill in the actor names and makes suggestions for the different types of shots needed "Add a two second action shot here", "add a 3 second romantic shot here". Even the generic segway text is already in (but editable by the user).
The videos that the user chooses are perfectly synched with a pre-chosen orchestra background track. E.g. as the music tempo picks up, one of your action shots are chosen.
It really makes for a compelling end production; definitely check it out.
But...'movie studio as a service' is a terrifying prospect, because there are a ton of people out there with scripts and a ton of people out there with cameras, and a tagline like that is guaranteed to attract the very worst of both groups. Same thing with the domain name - 'cine' puts people's brains into art mode, and when people are disappointed they often blame their tools. This is the sort of hump that besets products like MovieStorm and XtraNormal.
I am overstating it a bit to give you the pessimistic angle, but after about a decade of working in indie film and video doing everything from narrative to commercials, it's very hard to work around the inevitable quality problems in the post pipeline - the worse the input material, the less realistic the expectations of the customers about the ability to 'fix it in post' may be. The people who can shoot quality video don't really need a product like this, and the people who really need a product like that may be the trickiest customers to deal with. There's an industry joke to the effect that if the sound is no good, people will say there was something wrong with the lighting; the ability to manage expectations is going to be key to how the public receives it.
"The pieces get plugged in to the appropriate areas, combined and narrated into beautiful product that you can share on all your favorite outlets"
Who does the combination and narration? The quality of the final movie is going to be a strong driver perception of your product - how do you ensure the quality stays high as you grow?
Is it the users that do the narration? That might make it easier, but then your value proposition drops since they could use iMovie, right?
I think it's a cool idea though; definitely sounds interesting.
Good luck finding a partner and growing the business, I've been saying for years that the movie industry needs some disruption. Just make sure that if you sell, you sell for enough to make yourself not feel bad when the studios inevitably kill your product.