Agent 99 - Online story telling

I’m sorry, what the hell does that mean?

This is a short-form recipe for developing and assessing business concepts from innovation maestro Curtis Carlson:

• Need: What customer need does this product or service meet?
• Approach: What approach are you going to take to deliver it?
• Benefits per cost: Where’s the value for the customer?
• Competition: What is it? How good are they? Why is this better?

Carlson point out that mostly people go for the approach bit, so it looks like this: needs APPROACH benefits competition, but what customers and businesses want is NEED approach benefits COMPETITION. Just watch Dragon’s Den enough and you get the idea!

Great, works for making a new car, but what has it got to do with writing?

Well I thought it would be an interesting thing to apply good business practice to developing film scripts and see if I coud use this simple model to come up with a useful tool.

So look at it this way;

Product: A new romantic comedy

Need: What does the customer (audience) want?

• Warm fuzzies
• A barrier to union
• Laughter
• Romance
• Happy ending
• Freshness
• Chemistry
• Setting

Approach: So what are you going to give them?

Most of these are complete givens for a romcom: No happy ending? By definition not a comedy. No love? Then not a romance. The key places to innovate are in the ‘barrier to union’ and the setting. And this is what makes writing the romcom so difficult in fact - we know they are going to get together, but how?

Benefits per cost: Here we have to ask - is the films entertainment value greater than the effort required to watch it? To get to the theatre? To inspire the actors? To get the studio to make it? It has better be - this is reminder of just how good it has to be.

Competition: What are you competing against?

We could also call this the shelf test: When your movie is made will it sit in the DVD shelves against it’s competitors and be appealling enough that people will buy it? In this case we have to put it against: When Harry Met Sally, Notting Hill, Four Weddings, Dan in Real Life.

Taken all together this is a big ask, but it a good way to start thinking about what it is that makes your script worthy of being made, and a great way of weighing your project objectively.

I’ll develop this some more later…