Since May 1, the action of the powerful WGA (Writers Guild of America) union has caused a thrombosis in the flow of scripts on which the world film and series industry feeds. But for Fiona Gillies and Christine Hartland, this strike by Hollywood screenwriters is timely. The co-founders of SmashMedia see in this crisis the proof that the strange system of supply and demand for gray matter in the audiovisual sector must reinvent itself.
Both women have solid careers behind them in creation and production for British television and cinema. Their idea is simple: on the one hand the demand for scripts has never been so strong, on the other the screenwriters are not making any profit from it. Their average remuneration tends to fall, competition is fierce, clients – production companies and platforms – above all tend to take advantage of the plethora of proposals: each year, the astronomical figure of 50,000 original scripts are submitted to the Writers Guild of America. A very small fraction ends up on the screens: the studios produce around 700 films a year, more than half of them by the five majors, Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, Sony and Disney. For their part, video-on-demand platforms (streaming) such as Netflix, Disney +, or Amazon Prime Video release 500 films or series each year. It takes a mind of steel to get down to screenwriting.
Rethinking the scripts offer
However, platforms and studios do not stop complaining about the poverty of the offer. This applies to Hollywood as it does to the European market, especially since the new requirements for diversity of authors and subject matter. As Netflix’s content manager for Germany, Katja Hofem, reminded us at the Série Mania festival in Lille, audiences across the Rhine need subjects that speak to them, such as stories about migrants or stories for framework the Turkish community of Germany. This applies to all countries.
This gap is a perfect problem to solve for a start-up. Hence the idea of SmashMedia, an intermediation platform that is reminiscent of dating sites – some technological bricks are also from one of them. Its slogan, “Own it. Share it. Track it.”, sums up the purpose of the company well.
For a scriptwriter, the first problem is that of the protection of his work, in other words, the respect of his intellectual property, an elastic notion in the audiovisual sector. “Typically, the author is caught in the dilemma of saying enough about his project in order to arouse interest, without risking having the idea taken, explains Christine Hartland. The first element therefore consists in registering the project in the blockchain, which protects the authors against most disputes. Thanks to this, it can be followed throughout its life: the interest it arouses, the options, the transactions of which it is the subject …”.
But the heart of the reactor concerns the use of semantic data, which requires a powerful layer of artificial intelligence, more precisely of NLP (Natural Language Processing). On the platform, authors will be able to submit their project in all its forms. What is called a “processing” can include multiple elements: the script itself, with the description of each scene and possibly the dialogues, but also everything that will allow the potential buyer of a film or a series to get an idea: visual elements on the general atmosphere, biography of the protagonists, visual choices, color palette, atmosphere, types of cinematography – wide or close shots, use of specific techniques -, information on the sets, characters in situation with the clothes they wear, etc.
This precision is essential to speak the “language” of video-on-demand platforms and, to a lesser extent, that of studios, which are often less precise in their requests. “Smash will be able to offer a Netflix the possibility of finding what they are looking for at any given time with great precision: if one of their Latin American teams wants a story with a young 23-year-old Venezuelan as a central character, she will find it on Smash”, continues the founder. A producer can even search by type of plot, or even according to the dominant color of the photographic direction: pale realism of a David Fincher or saturated formalism of a Wes Anderson.
The Smash platform should generate several types of income: a premium subscription for buyers-producers – the idea is to charge an Amazon Prime a few tens of thousands of dollars per year -, a commission deducted from each transaction, and the possibility of provide the sector with a precise state of the market: who is buying what, what are the amounts paid for this type of scenario… Enough to feed lucrative studies for which the market is greedy. Its creators also do not refrain from selling their platform as a “white label” to producers wishing to increase their flow of creative material. “We will even be able to give precise trends in audiovisual creation”, further notes Fiona Gillies.
“Their platform protects the most modest authors against looting”
SmashMedia is at the start of its journey. The start-up won a prize in the technology component of the Cannes Film Festival — Cannes NEXT — and in early June, it was presented in Vienna, Austria, at the festival Cult Tech, a European accelerator that finances start-ups in the field of culture. Among its first customers, it counts Paramount + and the British channel Channel 5.
“They hold something, comments an investor present at Cult Tech in Vienna. Their platform protects authors, especially the most modest against looting. The matching system between supply and demand should accelerate flows and raise prices Finally, their very analytical approach allows them to generate valuable data for the market, so it is logical that they are of interest to a Netflix or a Disney +, which may sign them a nice check to acquire their platform and control thus the creative flows”. For the two young Britons, it’s obviously a pleasant scenario… But for that, they will probably have to cross the Atlantic, at the very least set up a bridgehead in the City of Angels, because it’s there. everything happens.