Pickford Dev Blog — 003
General Updates
The past 2 weeks, development has been focused on getting our Alpha version of the product more and more stable. With little things like characters not being deleted 20% of the time, to big things like only part of the projects saving — we’ve been pushing to get our current features into a solid state to build off of.
With things being stable, we’ve started heavily looking for Alpha users. Individuals who have stories to tell, have patched together current tools, and are interested in having tools designed specifically for them. If this description fits you, sign up here.
Introduction
From the beginning of these blog posts, our plan was always to have the first 4 follow a pre-defined structure.
- 000 is an introduction to us without any in depth details of what we are working on
- 001 is an introduction to how we are approaching the creation of stories
- 002 is an introduction to how we think experiencing stories will change
- 003 is an introduction to the glue between creation and experience
This is required to really outline our thoughts for the entire creative stack in a new world of storytelling.
Stories are such a fundamentally human activity that we would be doing a massive disservice to ourselves, you, and our entire species if we didn’t think about this process deeply. Starting from those with a story to tell and ending with those who experience it, each part of this chain deserves love and care.
So let’s jump into the glue and how we plan on making this work!
Director Style Sheets
Standards are a key component in our everyday life. Electrical outlets, wifi, emojis and so much more wouldn’t exist without a group of people coming together and defining an agreed upon structure to adhere to. This becomes even more clear once you start working on software, everything you see on a computer starts with a clearly defined and maintained framework.
Our early conversations with filmmakers made it clear that the process of bringing an idea to life requires many different modalities of content to be drafted to ensure that communication with others supporting it’s creation is done effectively. This includes things like script, mood boards, shot lists, and character bibles. Obviously artists have their own process that is refined over time, but the realization that these intermediary materials exist stuck with us. Specifically, one question kept swirling: how does this process get better?
Sharing a story is, in it’s most basic form, a process of compressing an idea into a format that others can interact with. When in our minds, these ideas are complex and multi-sensory. They have emotions, visuals, sounds, feelings, and even taste. How we share these ideas has evolved over time, a book for example must shrink these sensations into text based representation. The advent of radio allowed sound effects and music to be added and modern film grants visuals as well.
However, unlike a book, using these other methods of sharing stories adds many other components — sound and visual editing, actors, lighting. Getting the idea into it’s compressed form is just the first step of the production process.
Also unlike a book, this extraction process is prohibitively complicated, timely, and expensive. In reality, the compression process is difficult as well, especially when the creation of different modalities require various types of expertise. I certainly don’t know how to define a shot list or pick a sound track.
After visualizing the process in this format, it becomes clear that current generative AI tools are attempting to be the right-side, purple trapezoid and they don’t include a single pre-defined representation used within the film industry. Instead they try to compress the original idea into a text based description and hope that the algorithm can represent it well enough.
Don’t get me wrong, the fact that images, videos, voices, and songs can be recreated as well as they are now is incredible. But that doesn’t mean they can inherently tell stories.
Instead, we aim to create a standard that allows a structured representation of how the film industry currently approaches things. Something that allows a consistent way for an artist to represent their idea that can be shared with other or rendered automatically.
We call this a Directory Style Sheet, or DSS for short.
Our work in defining this standard is still super early, but has culminated in a white paper draft. As of writing, we have focused in on 13 root components to be defined by the structure.
- Genre
- Tone
- Plot
- Characters
- Setting
- Location
- Cinematography Style
- Themes
- Pace
- Dialog Style
- Music
- Sound Design
- Endings
Each of these pieces are entire topics in themselves, details that are better suited for the white paper format. Ultimately, defining these components within DSS will allow software to visualize a creators ideas in a clear and concise way.
Pickford’s goals will be to use this as an interchange between our creator tools (here) and our rendering software (here). It acts as a necessary part of our pipeline, but we believe it has incredible benefits beyond our use case.
We have started reaching out to individuals who we think will help guide this standardization even further, validating or invalidating certain assumption that we’ve made. If you have thoughts and want to be involved, we’ve love to hear from you!
Our community Discord is here or you can email me at cole@pickford.ai.
Conclusion
Storytelling naturally breaks down into the story teller and the audience, but the process in which the information moves between them is just as important. As we work to redefine this full process, DSS stands out as something that moves way beyond us.
We can’t wait to see how these pieces start falling together and look forward to hearing feedback.
Onwards and upwards!
