PlotRocket, an AI-assisted writers’ room, will allow anyone to turn an idea into the seasons, episodes, plotlines, acts, scenes, and beats of an episodic story. Not a tool for push-button AI shovelware; It’s a force multiplier for creative talent.
INCITING INCIDENT
I’ve had an idea for a TV series stuck in my head for a few years now. I think this thing could have legs. It will not go away, and I want to watch it. Or read it. Or listen to it… Consume it via some entertainment medium.
Unless one has loads of time to write it all yourself on spec, that’s where such ideas usually stay unless you’re well-connected in Hollywood. I am none of those things. Nor am I rich enough to pay someone to make it happen.
Wat do?
STORY BREAKING
Say you write the pilot, it runs the network gauntlet, and you are lucky enough to get it greenlit. That series will be written in a writers’ room, somewhere in the vicinity of Los Angeles. Or possibly, if it’s a streamer, in New York or Chicago.
As a writer on such a project, you’d need to be able to be physically in one of those rooms. It is in this way a relatively small number of people write all of the serialized content that the other 7 billion of us consume.
In that room, settings, characters, and relationships are fleshed out. The act structure is decided upon, plotlines are developed, etc.. The writers spend weeks or months breaking the season down into the beats that compose the scenes of every episode.
The beats are like gold. They are the proto-story; not the story we consume, but the ideas and action it will contain.
Once the beats of a show are arrived at, any writer in the room, fluent with the series bible containing all of the team’s accumulated worldbuilding efforts, could write any episode. That output could be in many formats: a screenplay for a live action or animated tv show, direction for layout and content of comic book panels, novellas, audio dramas, etc. Or all of the above.
With only me in the room, and maybe an AI buddy, how could I personally leverage this fuzzily defined but apparently reliable process for churning out episodic content?
First I scoured the internet for everything I could learn about story-breaking. Here’s a fun rabbit-hole to start. It’s a topic I’ve been interested in for some time, and I have written a novel, so I have a general understanding of story elements. But episodic is a whole other level. And they have to produce to a tight schedule while maintaining quality. So it can’t be just sitting around and flicking rubber bands at each other all day.
My feeling is that the process itself must have strong value that one person could leverage to at least outline their stories faster without any AI input. And explore story space faster with a contextually aware AI collaborator.
PROJECT GOAL
Allow a single person to take an idea and turn it into the beats of an engaging episodic story, ready to be turned into scripts for whatever medium the creator desires.
Stretch Goal: Use a similar approach to turn the beats of the story into a script in the desired final output format, ready for production.
Super Stretch Goal: Take the script and produce cinematic action, 3d or 2d animation, comic book pages, ebooks, etc., using AI suited to that work as it evolves.
STATUS
Jan 20, 2024
Spent the first half of the 2023 probing GPT for its expertise level in various areas and testing the theory of story-breaking through manual prompts. Reached a high confidence level in its rationality and came up with a system that yielded beats. I could see much room for improvement, but manually cutting and pasting prompts together to step through the process was tedious. It was time to build something to automate the process.
Spent the second half of 2023’s spare time actively building this. It yields beats, and the beats are good. Output of Series Bible and Episode Outlines as PDFs let you take your work away (more formats to come). You can’t use it yet, but you can check out the presentation and get on a waitlist if you’re so inclined.
At every level of detail, It affords the exploration of a much larger space of ideas without resorting to the first few things that come to mind, which is always an exercise for a writer, and the value of a writers’ room – disparate viewpoints yield disparate ideas.
Up next:
👉 Metering so that I can put a coin acceptor on this thing and let people use it and not go broke on OpenAI calls
👉 Automatic moderation so that OpenAI doesn’t shut off my account if you try to trick it into making a bomb
👉 Big picture tools that punch up beats, maintain continuity, and strengthen arcs and themes.
👉 Lookbook / moodboard / character portraits.
👉 Chat with your character at any point in the series, ask them what they know, how they feel, what they want.