It’s great to see the tool being used by professionals for major motion pictures. Today, there are 173,000 users, and just over half a million downloads. When we released it publicly, we were very surprised at the response. Story art and storyboarding are a huge part of our iterative story development process. We built Storyboarder because we needed a simple tool to help us draw and organize storyboards. The problem is that, up until now, the technological building blocks weren’t good enough to build such tools. To go even further back, Stanley Kubrick had a desire for a tool to diagram shot setups and automatically storyboard his films. My gamble is that the money we spend on it will be saved by the fact that we’ll shoot it that much quicker.” - Francis Ford Coppola
“My interest is more in electronic armature to plan films by constructing them in simulated ways, like a wind tunnel test, where I could make the whole movie before it’s shot, to design the actual shooting of the production more efficiently. Subsequently, I’ve learned that since the late 70’s, Francis Ford Coppola has also had a similar dream. He said that George was obsessed with building a tool to direct movies on the Playstation. We had lunch and he told me that George Lucas wanted to build what I was talking about. He’s one of the founders of PDI, which became DreamWorks Animation (Antz, Shrek, Kung Fu Panda). Richard is a real pioneer in the world of digital animation and visual effects. I want to be able to use it at my desk, my bedroom or at a cafe.”Īfter the speech, Richard Chuang came up to me. I want a tool that allows me to synthesize a movie with no technical or user interface friction. I want to try something crazy only to realize it doesn’t work, but take what I learned and incorporate it moving forward. I not only want to direct the movie in that context, but also I want to write it in that context. I want to direct that movie on my iPad, or Oculus Rift, or phone. “This is the goal: I want to develop a great idea for a movie.
In my speech, I made an appeal for these creative technologists to move away from service-based work, and instead to focus on building creative tools to help creatives realize their visions.
The majority of the people in the room were VFX professionals. In 2014, I gave a speech at SIGGRAPH Asia. And most importantly, you will be able to experiment and play within the worlds of your stories. You will be able to make changes and iterate on your movies with ease. Soon, you will be able to direct a movie without a crew.