Pickford Dev Blog — 001
Introduction
In 1890, the world was introduced to the first motion picture camera. This revolutionary new technology could have immediately brought about entirely new storytelling techniques… but that didn’t happen for another ~30 years. Instead the camera was placed in front of a stage play and recorded what would normally be watched in person.
In the 1920s, Mary Pickford started exploring how storytelling could fundamentally change through the uniqueness of a camera — different shot types, camera movements, transitions — these were a break from merely replicating previous methods. This was the true birth of an entirely new medium of stories.
More succinctly, we note that once a new storytelling medium is created, it takes time for the language of that medium to be perfected. Reiterating this from the audiences point of view: how viewers understand these new types of stories is an endeavour in itself.
As stated in our first blog post, we also need to solve the tool problem. What is the motion picture camera of the next medium? This puts us in a precarious but exciting position, we need to solve the creation problem and the interaction problem. Chicken, meet egg.
Creating vs Interacting
When faced with a circular problem like this, one could either freeze, spend months strategizing the ideal approach, or start moving. We started sprinting.
Specifically, we chose the creation tools as our initial steps. This happened for a few reasons.
- These tools are going to be needed either way
- They are less ambiguous, giving us more time to explore interactivity
- The connective tissue between both sides will become clearer as we go
We still have a ton of questions to answer, but a few components have started falling in place. Stories will always follow certain arcs, characters move throughout, and there is some way to experience them. Whatever tooling we build needs, at minimum, these 3 components.
Pickford Studio
Despite my mention of avoiding months of strategizing, we have still been spending a lot of time talking to experts and thinking about what we are creating. We’re just doing it while we run.
Our initial version of this has developed into Pickford Studio —a platform to craft a story, create 3D characters and worlds, dictate camera shots and movements, add audio/dialog/sound effects, and watch your vision play out. A pretty ambitious first attempt, but we have some amazing people working on this!
Coming back to our 3 required components, let’s break down how and why we have approached it this way.
- Story Arcs: We have opted to have stories defined as Hollywood-style scripts. These have existed in some form for over 100 years, have been tested 10s of thousands of times over, and fit a lot of useful information in an easily consumable format. Although typically stuck in a linear path, we have some computer science tricks up our sleeves.
- Characters: Every story is about someone or something. Although they come in many forms, characters are defined by certain attributes — what they look like, their personality, their motivation, and their backstory. We want to make sure any participant in your story is well crafted and brings a deep importance to what you are giving to the world. This comes to fruition in our character sheets that will only get better over time.
- Experience: Our tools operate in 3D. Your characters, and the worlds they live in, need to be in this dimension since it gives creators the most control. What get’s outputted shouldn’t waste your time, it should always put you closer to what’s in your imagination and cut down on time spend iterating. This also means that anything created in Pickford Studio should not be vendor locked and must fit naturally with any tool you already use. It’s an added bonus that 3D maps nicely to 2D, meaning we can use style-transfer, video-to-video, or traditional editing to add any touch ups once our story is just right.
Throughout all of this, our tools will always be creator focused. Our job is to make sure you can tell the story that you want in a way that makes sense.
Conclusion
We have been hard at work getting our first version of Pickford Studio ready over the past few months and are excited to announce that our Alpha is officially open! If you would like to be an early tester, please join our waitlist and chat with us on Discord.
Onwards and upwards!
