The most important difference between “thinkin’ about stuff” and a generative creative process is the feedback loop: Building something outside your brain, looking at it, and iterating.

The tricky thing with filmmaking is just how much work it requires to externalize a film.

Even if you remove all non-visual filmmaking elements: dialogue, sound, music. Even if you remove environments and performances… Left only with blocking/staging of characters, camera movement, and cuts/shot flow, it is crazy difficult (expensive) to build, “see,” and iterate. The more elements in a medium that need to work in concert, the harder it is to create a meaningful feedback loop.

There are three unusual people that do this well for filmmaking:

  1. Genius Visualizers
  2. Genius Sketchers (who draw real fast)
  3. Super Patient and/or Rich People For the rest of us, it’s easy to get stuck in a single facet of the movie: the dialogue, the performance, the shots, the sets, the music.

Without the ability to quickly write or sketch these elemental dances and iterate on them, we get stuck thinking about one or two at a time. I’m now 100% convinced that the problem with the filmmaking feedback loop is not about talent or will. It’s about tools. Seriously.

The technological solution that visual storytelling has been waiting on for 100 years can now be had for $300 (the cost of a VR headset). I can now scan an environment (or not), walk into virtual space, pose characters, set cameras, build and iterate story, intuitively, like I’m playing with dolls (or $25,000/day worth of cast and crew).

The scale of this shift in accessibility to filmmaking cannot be overstated. My friend Charles Forman and his team created a storyboarding app called Storyboarder. The cool kids already use it. But an unbelievably robust set of VR features that I’ve been playing with is shipping imminently. It even has multiplayer…

Storyboarder is free, by the way.

I’ll share some more visuals of how this all works next week, and then you’ll start to see me streaming on here and everywhere as I filmmake (actually filmmake, not think about/talk about/write about, but FILMMAKE).