Engineering stories to over-perform
As a producer, you make magic on a budget, and you've got a script that you know is good. But how do you know? If you could open up the black box of your instincts and understand why this project is worth making, would you?
You don’t leave your legal or your accounting to chance. Why gamble with the most important part of your project? It doesn't’ take more money to make a more meaningful film. It just takes more thought.
A well-designed story puts the wind at your back. Nothing enhances pitching, recruiting, and marketing like a solid story whose value you understand and can articulate.
My goal is to help producers supercharge their scripts with an elegant theme using logic and not merely intuition.
-Caleb G. Brown, CEO of
The Story Locker, Inc.
I started as a development intern at Lin Pictures (Warner Bros.) and participated in story meetings on “The Lego Movie” and “The Gangster Squad”. While there, I started teaching a class called “How to Watch a Movie,” where I reverse-engineered successful movies over pizza and beer. So I moved to Berkeley and studied the cognitive and cultural foundations of a meaningful story. A startup in San Francisco hired me to analyze screenplays and test a data-driven story development process. Now I do that work through The Story Locker, and we've helped a number of producers lock their scripts with confidence. |
Even an incremental increase in the effectiveness of green-lighting and story development would go a long way towards reducing risk, stress, and burn-out.