#50 - Jason Carman, Founder of Story Company

Summary

Jason Carman, founder of Story Company, discusses the journey of creating “Planet,” his first short film about a man who builds an artificial planet. The interview takes place at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, moments before the film’s premiere to a sold-out 900-person theater. Jason shares how he went from making short films in middle school to founding Story Company with the mission of creating optimistic sci-fi stories that inspire people about the future.

The conversation covers the intense production process, including 56 hours of straight editing, filming sick, hiring a Pixar veteran for concept direction, and managing over 200 visual effects shots on a tight budget. Jason reflects on the challenges of transitioning from documentary work (S3) to narrative filmmaking, the importance of focus, and his vision for building a cinematic universe with an upcoming trilogy of feature films.

Highlights

”56 hours of straight editing with maybe four hours of sleep”

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“This is Jason Carman and he is the founder of Story Company and he is moments away from releasing his first short film, Planet. I know that this is like years in the making. How are you feeling right now? Well, it’s about 56 hours of straight editing with maybe four hours of sleep. So, I feel alive. For now.” — Jason Carman, 0:39

”Story inspires science, science makes story real”

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“The motto is story inspires science, science makes story real. And that’s this idea that the sci-fi visions that people write that are potentially tractable on a scale one day eventually get built if they sort of win. And by win, I think it means that society and culture falls in love with the idea and wants to make it real.” — Jason Carman, 7:50

”There’s no Nike for technology in science and engineering”

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“There’s no Nike for technology in science and engineering. Like if you like basketball, you can wear a Michael Jordan jersey or some ones. But if you like rockets, engineering, science, space, there’s nothing that cool you can wear other than maybe a SpaceX shirt.” — Jason Carman, 14:15

”The first 6 months 95% of my time was spent on just making sure we didn’t go bankrupt”

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“I decided it would be a good idea to not raise money for Story and bootstrap it off of doing client work, ad revenue, partnerships. And so I’d say the first six months, 95% of my time was spent on just making sure we didn’t go bankrupt and getting our core team set up, onboarded, relocated.” — Jason Carman, 16:20

”What if we just said we were going to film the movie in 3 weeks?”

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“I remember going to my chief of staff, Maxi, one day and being like, ‘Okay, what if we just said we were going to film the movie in 3 weeks?’ She was like, ‘Fuck no. Absolutely not.’ End of the week goes by and I’m like, ‘We can’t do it.’ Now she’s flipped and she’s like, ‘We’re doing it.’” — Jason Carman, 20:30

”We went through 2,000 audition tapes”

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“The moment the film really was like ‘Oh, we got it’ is the moment you cast the lead. And we went through, I think, 2,000 audition tapes. When Steven Miller, our lead, sent his side in, I was like, ‘Oh, this is obviously the right guy. This is Dr. Evan Khan.’” — Jason Carman, 21:30

Key Points

Story Company’s Mission (0:00) - Jason wants to create large cultural stories that make people want to return to movie theaters and feel optimistic about the future
Planet Premiere (0:39) - Sold out 900-seat theater at Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, after 56 hours of straight editing with minimal sleep
Film Concept Origin (3:05) - The idea came while walking in Montreal filming S3, looking at the moon and imagining a second planet in the sky
S3 Influence (2:38) - The film embodies everything Jason learned from interviewing founders, engineers, and scientists during S3
Story Inspires Science (7:18) - Jason’s motto: “Story inspires science, science makes story real” - sci-fi visions get built when culture falls in love with them
Nike for Technology (11:50) - There’s no brand for people who like rockets, engineering, and science like Nike is for basketball
Bootstrap Decision (14:51) - Decided not to raise money for Story Company, bootstrapping through client work and partnerships
Three-Week Filming Decision (24:15) - Convinced his team to film the entire movie in 3 weeks before Christmas, despite initial resistance
Casting Breakthrough (26:30) - Reviewed 2,000 audition tapes before finding Steven Miller as Dr. Evan Khan
Pixar Collaboration (30:45) - Hired Clay Welch who worked at Pixar for 25 years as concept director
200+ VFX Shots (31:30) - Over 200 visual effects shots in a 35-minute movie, most completed in the final 4 weeks
Pickup Shoots (32:54) - Had to do re-shoots 6 weeks before premiere after realizing the ending needed work
Art Company vs Deep Tech (38:28) - Learned that running an art company requires different management than a deep tech company
Trilogy Announcement (40:18) - Story Company is moving into a full feature-length trilogy as their first cinematic universe
Masters of Movies Series (44:57) - Planning interview series with legendary directors, first episode filming next July

Mentions

Companies

Story Company (0:41) - Jason’s company creating sci-fi films and documentaries
Pixar (30:45) - Hired Clay Welch who worked there for 25 years
ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) (33:31) - George Lucas’s visual effects company that made Jurassic Park
A16Z (Andreessen Horowitz) (4:46) - Hired Story to make a video; had a cooler art deco version that was canned
SpaceX (11:50) - Mentioned as the only cool thing to wear if you like space
Fuse (3:08) - Montreal startup with amazing facility, filmed for S3
Extropic (3:11) - Company filmed in Montreal for S3
Astronis (37:15) - Jason’s former employer where he observed company culture

Products & Technologies

Planet (short film) (0:45) - Story Company’s first short film about building an artificial planet
S3 (2:38) - Documentary series Jason created interviewing tech founders and scientists
Millennium Falcon (2:00) - Referenced when discussing building physical sets for next film
Star Wars (8:28) - Example of unifying cultural story
Lightsaber (35:15) - Discussing sword concepts for their sci-fi trilogy

People

George Lucas (33:31) - Referenced for collaboration with Spielberg and ILM
Steven Spielberg (33:31) - Made Jurassic Park with ILM
Steven Miller (26:30) - Lead actor playing Dr. Evan Khan in Planet
Clay Welch (30:45) - Concept director, worked at Pixar for 25 years
Maxi (24:15) - Chief of staff and producer at Story Company
Andrew (27:15) - Filmmaker on team who convinced Jason to hire a DP and later took over editing
Neil (28:00) - Director of Photography, described as best narrative DP in Bay Area
Francis Ford Coppola (33:31) - Had relationship with George Lucas trying to build Hollywood in SF
Alex Platt (27:00) - Actor cast as Greece after auditioning for Dr. Khan
Mark Andreessen (4:36) - Referenced reading his techno-optimist manifesto
Walt Disney (10:30) - “I want more money to make more movies”
Ti Morse (0:39) - The interviewer/host

Surprising Quotes

“What stories are we telling now that people are buying into about the future? When I look around, I see really negative ones.” — 0:00

“I would say the first 6 months 95% of my time was spent on just making sure we didn’t go bankrupt.” — 0:20

“I used to bully directors for doing pickup shoots. Like you guys are so stupid. What? You didn’t have your story planned? Planet was a humbling experience for me.” — 32:54

“I’m not building a deep tech company. I’m building an art company. The rules of the game are different.” — 38:28

“We have some exciting news coming up pretty soon… we’re already moving into our next project, which is a full feature-length film, but it’s not one, it’s three.” — 40:18

Transcript

0:00 What stories are we telling now that people are buying into about the future? When I look around, I see really negative ones. We want to pioneer and innovate on that front of can we create large cultural stories that everybody loves that makes you want to go back to movie theaters again. Founded the company in July and the sole one-year goal of the company was create planet. I would say the first 6 months 95% of my time was spent on just making sure we didn’t go bankrupt. And so as a result, I had very little time to write the script.

0:24 Then I remember going to my chief of staff, Maxi, one day and being like, “Okay, what if we just said we were going to film the movie in 3 weeks?” She was like, “Fuck no, absolutely not.” End of the week goes by and I’m like, “We can’t do it.” Now she’s flipped and she’s like, “We’re doing it.”

0:39 This is Jason Carman and he is the founder of Story Company and he is moments away from releasing his first short film, Planet, which is about a guy that builds a planet. I know that this is like years in the making. How are you feeling right now? Well, it’s about 56 hours of straight editing with maybe four hours of sleep. So, I feel alive. For now.

1:02 This is such a surreal feeling for so many reasons. I’ve been wanting to do this since I was nine and since I graduated high school and started working full-time. Been wanting to make a short film to prove that we could make like a big feature film one day since I was 18. I’m 25 now, so it’s a little behind schedule, but my god, I’m so happy with what we’ve made. We’ll release it online in a few days. It’s a big scope film and we have some other really exciting announcements tonight.

1:28 We sold out the theater which is nuts to me because it’s 900 people and I thought we would maybe be lucky to get 500. So, we’re incredibly excited. We’re here at the Palace of Fine Arts, the most beautiful building in San Francisco where the last scene of the movie was shot. The Palace of Fine Arts was built in 1917 for the World Fair. And is this just the most unique building in San Francisco, I think.

1:50 And we wanted it to have this for a sci-fi movie. There’s not a lot of locations you can use that you don’t have to build. Like for the next film we’re doing, we’re like getting ready to build physical sets. Like we’re literally renting out a bunch of warehouse space to start building a Millennium Falconized spaceship for. And normally we have to build it, but for this one, we wanted to use existing locations.

2:09 The whole film is about this man, Dr. Evan Khan, and his vision to build an artificial planet. When the government requests they build an orbital supercomputer, he says, “We can, but it’s pretty big.” And if you put a little extra effort, maybe more than a little extra effort, you could give it an atmosphere and then have a secondary planet near Earth. And so that’s what the film is about. And it’s about this big grand beautiful attempt to do great things.

2:38 For me, Dr. Khan and this film is the epitome of like what S3 was for me for the past two years. It’s like everything that S3 was, the combined sort of media and ethos I got from every founder, engineer, and scientist is in this movie. And I mean there’s actually people in S3 in the movie. There’s like five cameos. So to be premiering a film about building things for the sake of beauty and building the future in a building like this, it’s so special.

3:00 Why was this particular story the right one to start with? So I was filming S3. It was the most burnt out weekend of my life filming S3 in Montreal. We were filming with Fuse, Extropic, few other companies. I mean Fuse out there is just amazing. The facility that they built is nuts and how much they’ve done is nuts.

3:20 And I had some extra time. So I was walking around old Montreal looking at the sky. Literally I was like I’m here to film these startups and I’m here to come back home with the sci-fi story because I knew we have to make this sort of minimum viable product almost to show that we can make a feature film. And we could just go make a feature film and we thought about it. But what you can’t as easily do is make a feature film on the scale that we want to in terms of the amount of visual effects shots, the CGI, the cast, the wardrobe, but just the scale of the movie without a larger budget.

4:00 And we still think we can do it at like a 50th, 100th the cost. That’s kind of our whole economic argument for making movies better and more efficient. And I was there in Montreal and I was looking at the sky and the moon was particularly bigger in the sky that night. It was brighter. I was just so captivated by it. I was like emotional kind of standing around buildings in old Montreal that looked a lot like the Palace of Fine Arts. This sort of old stone look.

4:20 And I remember thinking I was like, man, it looks so cool if there was a second one right next to it, like a second larger planet. They would just be beautiful. I’m like, oh, what a beautiful sci-fi vision. Forgot about it. Came up with two other really bad short film ideas that weekend. One of them was like Intel commercial vibes. I had read something like I think I had reread the Mark Andreessen’s techno optimist manifesto and was like yeah yeah yeah and this could be a short film.

4:46 It was a cool idea but it just felt like a hype reel which hey we ended up making for Andreessen Horowitz anyway. They hired us later that year to make basically something similar. Although funny known lore, we had a much cooler video in the works for A16Z that at the last moment they canned because they wanted something that was more NASCAR, which I actually agree with cuz the final thing is a banger.

5:16 And then I was flying home and that image of the second planet in the sky was still in my mind. And this scene between the protagonist when he’s young, who’s the sort of Oppenheimer-esque engineer, likes metal, likes mega structures, he’s like a boy, you know, just boy core founder core awesome stuff. And but then he’s talking to a girl on the ship and they’re on like a mission.

5:46 The idea was like maybe his funding got cut and so it’s on this astrobiology mission to find other good homes for humanity. And the fundamental issue with this is without light speed travel, we’re not going to get to another home within millennia. So okay, we got Mars and the moon.

6:05 That core scene, the romance that the two of them had, I just fell in love with this sort of feminine version of what the boycore build build would look like is maybe more of like a similar build the future idea, but like maybe instead of just industrializing Mars, we’re also terraforming it and making it feel and trying to grow things and use biology.

6:30 I think I cried while I was riding on the plane like quietly. I don’t think I annoyed anyone near me because that’d be so weird. Crying on planes is tough cuz everyone around you is like oh god they’re crying. It wasn’t obvious. I hid the tears. I was like this is so good. And then that core story between the two of these people. And then I was like as we were landing I was like what if she died and what if that catalyzes him to kind of have the merger of their dream which is building an artificial planet.

7:18 It’s awesome to see you pick up the mantle on the interviews and do it so much better than me in terms of the energy you bring, the lighting quality. I love that. So, thank you. Well, all I could say is that Story’s non-fiction projects are only expanding and we have some really exciting announcements coming in the next few months. And YouTube and Twitter won’t be the only place that you get to watch our stuff in the very near future.

7:50 The motto is story inspires science, science makes story real. And that’s this idea that the sci-fi visions that people write that are potentially tractable on a scale one day eventually get built if they sort of win. And by win, like what does it mean to have that thing win? And I think it means that society and culture of a given time falls in love with the idea and wants to make it real.

8:28 The stories that we tell, the myths, storytelling was such a big part of culture back in the day. And I think up until maybe before mass media and the internet, it was even bigger. But then like maybe 50 or so years ago, technology, which is great, kind of came in and really took that away in many ways and has made it hard for us to have good unifying stories. Star Wars as an example, maybe the Avengers as an example, Harry Potter, but they’re far and few between.

9:00 What I wonder is what stories are we telling now that people are buying into about the future? And when I look around, I see really negative ones. I see very pessimistic ones, ones that put other people down and lift others up. And I see ones that paint a horrible dark vision of the future. The movies we make about the future in sci-fi, often times you think dark, you think Black Mirror.

9:30 I don’t dislike the show actually. I think it’s a great show, but the reason there’s so much more negative movies that are popular and are hits is because our negativity bias enables us to enjoy a horror movie or a negative film more easily. And as a filmmaker, let me tell you, making something negative and dark and bad is so much easier than making a bright, optimistic, aspiring film because then it’s just optimism slop.

10:00 So for us, we want to pioneer and innovate on that front of can we create large cultural stories that everybody loves that makes you want to go back to movie theaters again and see things on the big screen because you want to see what happens when Thanos snaps his finger, when Luke confronts his father. You want to be in that room with your people and like your society.

10:30 We have such little community today and I think movies are such a pillar part of that. At Story I think we just want to see the theater view rate which has just gone down of people attending theaters just tick back up again. Because it’s such an important thing. You can’t use your phone in a movie theater. You can’t be loud and obnoxious. You have to focus like your sensory overload, it’s dark and then movie screen. And the value of that I think is just so huge.

11:00 At the end of the day, we want to be the company that when you go to see one of our movies in theaters, you know that we’re the same people that are filming the real scientists and engineers and you can go online and watch their films and see the parallels and it directly inspires us. Planet literally the story would not be what it is had we not made S3 and done some of the other documentaries we’ve done the past year.

11:30 There’s a 20-page engineering document that we actually had made a long time ago, but we actually got it formalized this week. Shout out to Steven from SpaceX who helped put that together this past week. But like we want the boundary between the sci-fi and the reality to be minimal and to see the overlap and we want people to be excited about the future again.

11:50 Young people, I think on average, are very negative and pessimistic about the future for a good reason. The stories we’re telling and the reality we’re living in, it’s the best time ever to be alive. It’s also the most risky time ever to be alive. And I think to see us through that, we need better stories.

12:15 You can’t just go to a movie theater like once every year, every other year and kind of like change the cultural zeitgeist. How are you going to kind of scale up your teams and Story in order to put out multiple movies a year? I actually think that it’s better to do less and nail them every time than to just have a ton. I would love to personally make one movie a year for a while, which is an immense task. Most directors, I think, end up doing one movie every two to three years.

12:45 I want to get our core trilogy. Well, this will come out after the announcement tonight, but the big announcement tonight is that we are already moving into our next project, which is a full feature-length film, but it’s not one, it’s three. And it is the first film in a set, a trilogy set that is Story’s first cinematic universe which will be a universe that lasts for as long as the company, longer.

13:15 We’re writing outlines and kind of narrative plans like a scaffolding if you will for future people that will pick up the writing and storytelling so that the stories can kind of continue on. We just got to nail those first three films. And then from there we’ll do more. So, I’m pretty focused on that. And then we’ll have a lot of shows and documentaries on streaming and online that people can see, too.

13:45 And then the other big part of it, which sounds hilarious, is merchandising. One part is that George Lucas made most of his money through selling merchandising, and that’s part of what made Star Wars such a big thing. And I would like to have more money to make more movies, as Walt Disney says. But also, I think if you make something that people want to buy and wear on their body, there’s something there.

14:15 A huge part is that there’s no Nike for technology in science and engineering. Like if you like basketball, you can wear a Michael Jordan jersey or some ones. But if you like rockets, engineering, science, space, these sorts of things, there’s nothing that cool you can wear other than maybe a SpaceX shirt. And so we want to find ways to make stuff that people can wear that represents their interests in a cool way.

14:51 What happened after that plane ride? You’re writing the script and everything, what were the next steps on actually making this thing real? We have a really great behind the scenes coming out a few days after the film comes out and it doesn’t tell the full hell of production and the mistakes that I made that caused it but I think your show should get that story.

15:20 Something people don’t know about me who maybe have come to know me in the past few years for my science engineering filmmaking is I made like 20 short films in middle school, high school. One won best visual effects at the All-American High School Film Festival and got me a full ride to the University of Advancing Technology in Arizona.

15:45 I’d made a feature film and a half by the time I graduated high school. So I was like man narrative is easy. But I didn’t realize that my muscles had atrophied for doing narrative. Like I totally forgot a lot of the basic rules. Founded the company in July and the sole one-year goal of the company was create Planet and the goal was originally to create it and have it out by the end of 2024. Didn’t happen.

16:20 The issue is that I decided it would be a good idea to not raise money for Story and bootstrap it off of doing client work, ad revenue, partnerships and stuff. And so I’d say the first six months, 95% of my time was spent on just making sure we didn’t go bankrupt and getting our core team, which is mostly people I’ve been making movies with since I was in middle school, set up, onboarded, relocated.

16:50 Okay, we need an office. Okay, we need a printer. Wait, but we need Wi-Fi for the printer. And stupid things like this. We have supply chain issues as a film company, which is hilarious. I remember Steve Jobs talking about like you have to get the coffee maker and you have to get the pencil sharpener and everything. It’s just before you do it, it’s nothing. And like but it actually all of that in aggregate and also you’re going bankrupt is really really pushes the limit of it.

17:30 I remember the first day we signed our first big retainer contract with some folks that we’re making videos for and we thought it was like just the biggest thing ever and now we sign contracts like that all the time. But it’s just to say if you really lean in and focus on serving your customer really well and making them great stuff, how quickly the business can scale.

18:00 It was trying to keep S3 going and convert S3 away from being something that I made to that a team of people made, which was just really hard. And so as a result, I had very little time to write the script. At this time, how many employees do you even have to pull this all off? Four, five, six around that time. We ended up, we’ve ended up hiring about, we were hiring about once a month. Now I think we’re at two a month, which is terrifying.

18:30 The core team is doing such a good job managing and leading the new folks. And the new folks are coming in with all this excitement. They’re not burnt out yet. They don’t know how hard it’s going to be. It’s cool to watch as someone like you who studied company culture and building. To actually get to do it is like, wow.

19:00 It’s just life-changing and it’s awesome. And it’s awesome to be either the founder or just a member of the early team. It’s so special. And I feel like everybody in life should try it once. Maybe bigger companies are for you, but you should try being in a small company early days once because it is life-changing. And the amount of ownership, agency, and belief in yourself you get is huge. Unless you’re the founder, then you think you’re the dumbest person on the planet.

19:30 Couldn’t write the script. And then finally I was like, “Okay, I’m doing it.” And I kind of got a first draft done in November. I was like, “This is good.” But I knew my rule is like you want to write, forget about it for two months and come back to it with fresh eyes. And I knew that there wasn’t the time to do that. I’ve now learned that for me in my process, showing my writing to other people that I trust as a creative collaborator and getting their feedback on it is so important for me now.

20:00 I show like eight people a script now. Professional writers, script consultants, people on my team. And I really craft. You figure out who do you trust. It’s not about like oh this is the most credentialed writer in Hollywood and they liked it. No, it’s like I respect your work or your taste. Does this resonate with you? Or if it’s about a subject matter you need to talk to the people who you know are in the subject matter field.

20:30 On that level I felt covered because we had done S3 for a year and I was talking to engineers and scientists all the time. And then I remember going to my chief of staff, Maxi, one day and being like, “Okay, it’s end of November. What if we just said we were going to film the movie the last week of the year before Christmas in 3 weeks? Could we pull together the production stuff we need to do it in time?”

21:00 And she was like, “Fuck no. Absolutely not. Get out of here.” I was like, “No, no, we can do it. Just try. Just try it. Give it your all for a week, and if it’s not good, we can cancel it.” End of the week goes by and I’m like, “We can’t do it.” Now she’s flipped and she’s like, “We’re doing it.” And I was like, “Okay.”

21:30 And then I did a big rewrite, which threw off our production plans a little bit, and we filmed last week of December. The moment the film really was like, “Oh, we got it,” and this is always how it’s been for me with fiction, is the moment you cast the lead. And we went through, I think, 2,000 audition tapes.

22:00 Casting websites are awesome. You literally post the sides of the script pages and then you have people read for them and submit them. And when Steven Miller, our lead, who’s going to be here tonight, sent his side in, I was like, “Oh, this is obviously the right guy. This is Dr. Evan Khan.”

22:30 What was interesting is that Alex Platt, the other main character, also auditioned to be Dr. Evan Khan, but he wasn’t old enough. At the time, we thought we didn’t know how old he would be, but we realized he wasn’t quite old enough. And then we ended up casting him as the second character, Greece, who the movie really hinges on in a way.

23:00 Andrew, really talented filmmaker on my team who’s made three, four now awesome short films and is probably going to do a feature film soon, convinced me that we should hire a director of photography cuz I’d never done that. I normally DP and direct and first AD on my sets, which if you’re a run and gun filmmaker is normal, but if you’re a professional filmmaker is very strange.

23:30 I was trying to save money. We’re still very broke at that time. And I was like, “No, no, every hundred bucks we need right now. We have to do it by the end of the year.” And then we got to forget about the movie for a month or two, get back to client work to get our money back up.

24:00 Andrew convinced me that we should hire a really great DP. So, we hired this guy named Neil who’s done amazing work. He’s I think the best narrative DP in the Bay Area. And he came in like 4 days before the movie started filming and we toured the Jewish Contemporary Museum where we filmed a lot of the spaceship scenes, the Palace, all this stuff and planned it.

24:30 And it was awesome because it let me focus on the acting and directing of the actors while he handled the lighting. And the film just looks beautiful as a result of him and his work and our gaffer Matt Stoops and everyone. So we filmed intensively. The night before production, I got sick. And I got sick a lot during S3, but I hadn’t been sick since starting the company.

25:00 So, I was sick the entire time we were filming. I was literally, I had a bottle of Nyquil or Dayquil and I went through a bottle a day. I was just sipping it. Felt like a rapper. It was like dirty Sprite, but it was the orange Dayquil. It was powerful. Feeling on top of it, but also horrible at the same time.

25:30 And then that ended up making the lead sick on the second to last day of filming, which was tough. So I had to give the speech scene. Like half of the scenes of this movie Steven’s in, he’s sick. It was just so hard as an actor. I felt so horrible. We wrapped the movie and then I basically got the worst editor’s block of all time, which is weird because I’m a really good editor.

26:00 And it was because the story wasn’t baked all the way. And it just wasn’t there. There were very obvious things that were wrong about the script in retrospect. And I immediately was like, “Oh, I haven’t made a fiction film in years.” And I forgot a lot of the basic rules.

26:30 I couldn’t make meaningful progress. I did the initial assembly cut of the film in a week. So we went from all the footage to a 47 minute cut of the film in a week. But it wasn’t great. And I thought I was just going to edit front to back and it was going to be good and then that was going to be it. But that’s not what happened.

27:00 And then we were just trying to make the business survive. We basically were actually broke in January. Definitely one of those moments. So we focused on getting the business back on track and then we had some major contracts land that really secured our future for a few years. And so we’re like, okay, we’re back, but Planet. What are we doing there? We got to finish it.

27:30 So, we started making really good progress on the CGI. We hired Clay Welch, who worked at Pixar for 25 years, to come on as the concept director, which was a dream for me because ever since I was a little kid, I was like, “Man, one day…” Like last night, I was with Clay in the office at 4:00 a.m. as we were finishing the movie, looking at him and apologizing that we were there and thanking him.

28:00 And he’s like, “No, man. This is like the coolest thing ever.” And then I told him when I was a little kid making vacuum wars in my room and doing the rotoscoping for a week, I dreamed of one day getting to be able to work with artists as talented as him who were industry veterans. It was just such a full circle like 10 or 15 years later for me doing that, but now with a guy that worked at Pixar for 25 years responding to all my notes and comments about how we could make the movie better.

28:30 So it was really meaningful and special. Around March of 2025, he had kind of built the planet at this point. Which you think it’s like 3D, it’s easy, but there’s a lot of concept direction and art direction about how you want to build the thing and how you want to make it look for the way that you’re going to film it in CG. There’s over 200 visual effect shots in the movie, which for a 35-minute movie is a lot. And I’d say about a third of them are easy. The other two-thirds are not.

29:00 And by not easy, how much time per VFX shot? That’s a hard question. I would say the average is probably a few hours a shot maybe. So literally thousands of hours of VFX. Yeah. Like hundreds for sure. And a large team kind of came on to do it at the end.

29:30 So then I convinced Andrew to take over the edit for me so I could just think about it from a story perspective. And originally he was like we can fix the film without doing re-shoots. And I was like I think we need to do pickup shoots. Which to me I used to bully directors for doing pickup shoots. Like you guys are so stupid. What? You didn’t have your story planned?

30:00 And neither did I. Okay. Planet was a humbling experience for me. But we did it. We figured out the story. We did re-shoots two months ago, month and a half ago. Two of the scenes we shot, one of the scenes we shot that we thought was the ending got cut because a month ago, we showed the film for the first time in its rough state completion with no visual effects.

30:30 Maybe some temp animations from Clay to the team about five weeks, six weeks ago. And everybody was like, “This is really good,” except the ending is just strange. It just, it was wrong. The ending was never meant to be the ending that we had designed. It was kind of a patch fix.

31:00 So we thought really hard about it and then we went back to what the original script ending was supposed to really be and reworked from there. And we did another pickup shoot slightly after that, a quick one. And in total, if you laid out the scene in rough edit of every scene we did, we probably shot 70 minutes of scene over a 12-day production period, which if you multiply that by two, it’s a feature film.

31:30 And it felt like that, which was awesome. And as a team, everyone on the team doing their different job to make that happen was huge and really warmed us up for what’s next for us. So then about five weeks ago we picture locked it but not really. We had a lot of things to change and then basically the past four weeks was the visual effect sprint. Pretty much all 200 shots got done in the past four weeks.

32:00 And I just want to highlight that this is being exported right now an hour before the movie is on screen. Let me validate that this is true. It’s still exporting. So literally an hour before the movie goes out. Yes my editor Andrew said ETA on the final, we have so the entire movie is done but we were waiting on one visual effect shot from one contractor who’s actually great and they said 16 minutes ago 10 minutes, still exporting.

32:30 Wait so that one shot, do you still have to re-export the entire movie after that? Yeah, but ironically re-exporting the entire movie is really fast because we’ve baked it out so it’s really quick. It’ll take like 3 minutes and then they’ll drive here, put it on the projector and we’ll be good to go.

33:00 But yeah, so as we were doing this interview actually it got exported. That’s amazing. And then we’re going to premiere it tonight and then we’re going to do, we originally were going to release it tomorrow, but actually the story and the movie and the narrative is like 100% locked, but there’s maybe 20 visual effect shots that I’d like to just spruce up a little bit.

33:30 So I think we’ll take a few days to do that and then we’ll release it online because on the one hand I want to release it tomorrow morning and feel the excitement of it, but also this is going to last forever on the internet and you want to make sure you put it out the right way. The 20 visual effect shots that are almost there, eight and a half out of 10, and we have the opportunity to make them 10 out of 10. So we want to take it.

34:00 We’ve invested so much into getting here, time, money that it’s worth it to do it. So yeah, the cut that everybody’s going to watch tonight will never be seen again, which is really cool, I think. Although it’s basically going to be the same. Like I don’t think anybody in this theater will go and watch the movie again and be like, “It’s different.” But they might see a visual effect and be like, “Whoa, that’s better.”

34:30 But it’s in a good spot. It was a grind the past two days. But overall I wanted to have the whole film completed in 6 months and it ended up taking nine which isn’t that bad all things considered but we proved our production efficiency. We went from no pre-production plan to shot initial film in four weeks. Casting in two, initial post-production assembly in one week, full re-edit in three months and then visual effects in about a month and a half.

35:00 And I think the quality will speak for itself in that we’re a big part of Planet is proving to Hollywood financers that we can be trusted with a big boy budget to make a film like this at a bigger scale. Because it’s not like a normal short film. The rigor that you have to have with working with the CG team and the live action team in every department is totally different for a film of this visual scale and production scale than a not visual effects heavy film.

35:30 Do you think that you’re going to be able to work with George Lucas or Steven Spielberg or any of those other guys on a movie together? Well, we have some exciting news coming up pretty soon. I hope very soon. I’ve been studying a lot recently how directors end up collaborating through their careers because it’s different.

36:00 George Lucas had this really interesting relationship with Francis Ford Coppola and they tried to kind of build the new Hollywood mecca in San Francisco in the Bay Area to lesser or greater success. That whole time him and Spielberg were best friends. Spielberg ended up directing Indiana Jones that was George Lucas’s original concept.

36:30 And these guys are just going back and forth. George Lucas proved with ILM, you know, George Lucas built this company ILM to make Star Wars and then Steven Spielberg came around and made one of the best movies of all time, Jurassic Park with ILM. So the collaboration that happens with directors is really exciting.

37:00 One of my dreams is actually to do, well because I did a lot of interviews with engineers and documentaries and I really thought hard and I was like I don’t like interviewing. I’m not as good at it as you and I want to only do things I really enjoy and can excel at. But there’s one more interview series I want to do in my life.

37:30 And it will be with, we’re actually filming the first episode of it with a pretty big director next July cuz he’s filming a big movie right now. We think we’re gonna call it Masters of the Movies or Masters of Cinema and film like 4-hour interviews where it’ll be kind of like this, but I’ll have like an IMAX screen up and I’ll have their movies open and I’ll just go through the film and ask them questions about shots.

38:00 It’s going to be long and uncut and it’s really about the way I see it is that these people, these storytellers have changed the fabric of our society and there’s basically no good interviews with these people. Like find me a relentless quality interview with any of these great directors. It doesn’t exist.

38:28 I did S3 for a year and a half and I thought I knew how to run a company as a result. I was like oh man like I have more inside knowledge on how to build a deep tech engineering company than anyone in the world does. Which is probably true. I think I know more about how deep tech companies work than most investors do.

38:58 But the moment you step in actually doing the thing, turns out it’s actually hard to make decisions. Everything goes out the window. The second thing that was the biggest trip and took me like seven, eight months to figure out was that I’m not building a deep tech company. I’m building an art company. The rules of the game are different.

39:28 The way you push people and motivate people is different. The way that you compensate people is different. The way that you build a team and a culture is different. The way that you decide what you’re working on. There is no spreadsheet of optimizations for the rocket or for the nozzle or for the bearing that you’re designing for. There is no physics objective truth. It is a matter of the soul.

40:00 Are you creating art that resonates? And it’s a different recipe for every single different artist and you have to go through that journey and the only way you go through that journey is by starting and making things. So I think that was a big one.

40:18 I loved S3 for a lot of the time. By the end of it, I was like, “Oh, I’m sick of this.” Because it felt like I had created some monster that was part of the venture ecosystem and companies were trying to line up their releases to get fundraising or things like this and it just kind of became part of the startup industry in a bad way and I didn’t like that.

40:48 And I was burnt out by the end because I was the only one doing it for a week every year with a full-time job at Astronis which was like a startup job so it was insane. And then the interviews. I never liked doing the sit interviews as much because I never got to prep them the way that you do.

41:15 One of my tried and true rules that I deeply believe in for creative folks is you have to love or believe in what you’re making. And you have to figure out how to do that by whatever means necessary, whether you’re changing what you’re making or changing your perspective on things or just refining it like a sculpture or something.

41:45 For me with S3, I knew I loved the science and the engineering part of it. And it turns out what I really liked was getting into the concepts and the theoretical stuff with folks and unpacking that and learning about that. And I loved the process of learning that myself and sharing that learning with other folks by making these videos.

42:15 But I didn’t like the startup industry grind grind grind thing as much. How am I feeling overall? The biggest thing I’ve learned in the past year is the value of focus. Up until now, 15 months in for Story, we’ve been like an everything company. Like we’ve done so many different things and multiple projects at once.

42:45 But we can now afford in the next month basically, when I get back in the studio on Monday, it’s trilogy time. That’s all I’m focused on until that thing is out in theaters. And if it’s not that, it’s hiring people and building a great team to work on our other projects that I care about.

43:15 Because I want to see them in the world, but there has to be a line between what would you die for in terms of what you’re making. And it’s hard because if you’re a passionate person like me, you can get passionate about a lot of stuff, but then you have to pick what’s the one thing that will never be touched by that stuff.

43:45 This almost feels like a transition from S3 to this and now moving on to more timeless content. It feels like a march towards timelessness where you don’t want to make something that’s tied to a specific moment. Yeah, it sucks when you do an interview or documentary and then the company goes out of business a year later or something like that. Happened a lot for us and it was like oh that sucks and so you want to make timeless stuff 100%.

44:15 What I love about what you’re doing is you’re building this archive of people when what I want to be able to do is go find an early founder, like I want this but for an early Lucas or an early Elon or an early Jobs or whatever and it’s just this unfiltered thing. And it’s not about getting a ton of views all the time.

44:45 It’s sometimes just about capturing the authenticity and following your passion which you do so well. It’s been a lot. It’s not necessarily optimized for growth. If you go after much bigger names it’s significantly more growthy. Lots and lots of people want to listen to Sam Altman talk. But in the event that any one of these people goes and takes over the world, I would really like to have this document growth where in year one what do they look like? What do they think like? Year two, year three, year four, year five. And I think that’s really special.

45:15 Let’s end it on what are you most excited about? The trilogy. I’m excited about creating a cinematic universe which has been my dream since I was a kid. We’ve been working on it now for eight months actively. There’s art development. There’s 3D models, physical ones in our office. There’s a lot of writing.

45:45 One thing that was cool is while we were in editing hell for Planet, I was waking up the next morning and for four hours every morning writing and immediately remembering, ah, don’t make that mistake again because otherwise you’ll be in this hell times 100 because that’s how much bigger the budget and the scope and the risk will be.

46:15 And so that was an awesome way to write, was do it while you’re going through editing hell really because you get to escape like oh this will be so much better. Who knows maybe we’ll do this interview again in two years and I’ll be like Ty I did it again. It was the same mistake.

46:45 And now this time we’re sitting at a different theater for the world premiere of a theater release film and it’s being exported. Let’s get an update. Is it exported? Movie exporting render time 11 minutes. So in 1 minute the movie will be exported. Amazing. So actually it’s kind of crazy the ending of this interview. Yeah. Literally the second that this interview ends.

47:15 I want to do a quick prediction for Jason in 12 months and 24 months. What are the biggest challenges that you would expect to be in front of you so that when you do it you’ll be able to know? In 12 months it’s going to be, if I have it my way, it’s going to be convincing distributors and whoever finances this next movie to let us complete it and release it faster. Because normally movies take a long long time. I’d like to go a little faster.

47:45 Or more realistically, we’ll be in production hell and it’ll just be about making a great movie. And then also trying to, the biggest thing will be how can I be a full-time director making this film and the series and then also having Story working on its other productions and running really well. And the answer is simple, but I forget all the time. It’s just have the best people in the world working on these things.

48:15 Hire people that want to work on the things that they’re working on, which maybe doesn’t always matter for an engineering kind of company or role. But for art, I think it really does matter a lot that you have people who care about the subject matter or the thing as much as they can and they’re incredibly talented. And a really good executive team and leadership team to guide that as we go make these other shows and things.

48:42 Literally this morning for the first time ever, I think I’m like I think we’ve got like six months of runway. We are so back. That’s a powerful feeling. It’s a very good feeling.