

Movie Studio As a Service (MSAAS) - Tech Co-Founder Wanted - fapi1974
http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/10700/technical-co-founder-cinecandy

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OstiaAntica
I worked on a similar startup back in 2000 in San Fran called Red Zeppelin, so
I can say definitively that movie studio as an online service is not an
original idea. That project even had local news anchor Stan Bunger as a
founder. However, the cost of developing this kind of platform today is easily
20 times cheaper, with powerful UI tools that didn't exist in 2000, and there
is now a broad mass social market that didn't exist in 2000.

Good luck!

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fapi1974
Your email isn't in your profile - but definitely ping me - would love to
talk!

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OstiaAntica
I didn't have a major role. RedZep had a great team, some funding, and vision,
but the tech was really hard and they were ahead of their time. They set up a
storefront digital studio, and the idea was that you'd do all the
preproduction work online (script, music, backgrounds, transitions), and then
go into the physical studio for an hour to do the shoot in front of a
greenscreen. The plan was to disrupt traditional video production by using the
web to squeeze all of the labor out of that process, and to make it easy to
publish and host that video online. (Back when hosting video was EXPENSIVE).
Then go nationwide with the model. Again, this was years before YouTube and
webcams, when it was kind of hard to publish video online. It obviously
failed, I don't know those details, I was working for a tech partner that
failed first in early 2001. Yeah dotcom bust!

You can google Red Zeppelin Digital, there's still some web mentions and press
releases. The principals are all local so you might reach out to them, heck
you might find your cofounder!

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eggnestceo
Wow, offering an equity split when you are already so far along. Makes me
think, why start my own company. I could just jump on a promising startup that
has already done a good deal of hard work. Easier and less risky.

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fapi1974
A really good point. Much risk has been taken out, but I feel pretty strongly
that a really strong core team is created when there is real equity in play.
I've put in plenty of time and money, but they're not worth anything until we
win. I like my chances of winning better with a well incentivized team!

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myoung8
Very little risk has been taken out until you've found product/market fit.
Unfortunately, ideation and fundraising don't eliminate risk, they're the easy
parts.

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fapi1974
Touche. Hence the equity :-)

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myoung8
You're already ahead of the pack just by realizing that, though. Good luck to
you. Feel free to reach out if you want any help.

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fapi1974
Thanks for the offer - I will.

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marcamillion
Sounds like an awesome idea...definitely tech/infrastructure heavy. I can see
you easily burning through a ton of cash on this.

If done properly, could be an awesome service...but it seems so easy to mess
it up and end up flaming out.

Don't mean to be a downer, just encouraging you to be cautious and make sure
the product is extremely easy/straight-forward to use for the consumer.

Done right, and priced right, I would definitely use this.

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fapi1974
I've thought about the infrastructure issue a lot. The nice thing is that our
value add is in the "create." We can hand off the "host" on videos that aren't
profitable by just posting them to youtube or elsewhere...where they will
still have value for the user, and where we can still generate some ads from
them...

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marcamillion
I was really talking about the creation side.

For instance, say someone wants to create an hour long video. From the little
that I know of rendering video on my desktop machines - to render a small 5
minute video can take a few hours.

So it just seems that a long-form video will churn up CPU cycles that you are
paying for.

Although, now that I think about, I guess you could just charge per CPU hour
or whatever.

But I was more thinking of the creation - than the distribution/hosting.

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jcr
There are a few outfits working on the resource intensive encoding problem.
The only one that comes to mind at the moment is zencoder.com but I'm sure
there are others out there if you look.

<http://zencoder.com/>

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fapi1974
Would love feedback on this post - no mercy expected!

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gridspy
Exciting idea. I'd jump on board if I was "single" and in the US.

I love the viral nature of the service - you have to tell your friends about
it so they will contribute their clips to your movie.

It would be cool if you had some great placeholders and the author of the clip
could edit and cut a placeholder full version. That way as each friend drops
their clip in they can view the whole and adjust their part.

Making the system modular so you could collaborate on a large movie would also
be cool.

You could have an import tool that accepts a script as a text file. It finds
definitions of characters, scenes, dialog, direction, etc.

It then breaks the script into acts, scenes, shots and creates the
corresponding data-structures on your end to present same.

You then use chunks of dialog as placeholders for the rendered imagery and
presto, instant placeholder movie. Author then replaces dialog with
storyboards, early renders, then finished content.

It could be truly social, like a movie creation wiki with many users. Each
user might have different permissions to edit, add content for (some subset
of) scenes, etc.

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fapi1974
I just addressed this with Keyframe. The shining light on a hill is a full
toolbox that could be used to create a full on movie. We'll start simple - but
my sense is that people will be able to take it quite far within the
constraints we establish. All of the above will make awesome premium
features...great feedback!

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yakto
My first recommendation as your pro-bono interim CTO: edit the meta
description tag on <http://cinecandy.com> so it doesn't say "Capture email
addresses with this coming soon template. Suitable for companies in a beta or
pre-launch phase or anyone wanting to build an email list around an upcoming
site or product/service," because that's what's showing up in the first result
at <http://www.google.com/search?q=cinecandy>

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fapi1974
Thanks (sheepish grin)!

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fapi1974
Also - I'm open to discussing extending your interim status, as you might
imagine...:-) The pro-bono status would change, of course.

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tjarratt
This sounds an awful lot like the business model in "Be Kind, Rewind". That
said, it's also a lot more promising.

Good luck finding a partner and growing the business, I've been saying for
years that the movie industry needs some disruption. Just make sure that if
you sell, you sell for enough to make yourself not feel bad when the studios
inevitably kill your product.

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fapi1974
You know, my major motivation for doing this isn't so much about the
disruption, though I can see that - it's about enabling group creativity. I am
not creative myself, but I the idea that you can get awesome social art by
making the tools so simple...gets me very stoked indeed!

