The Cinema Ritual, reimagined.
We launched on Product Hunt today. CONTRABAND is a social cinema experiment for people who love the ritual but not the hassle.
Vijay Anand
Where Does Narrative Structure Fit in the Business of Film?
Stephen Follows recently published one of the most clear-eyed pieces I have read about the economics of the film industry. In it, he analyses 49,834 films and forty years of academic research to answer a deceptively simple question: how do people actually make money in film?
How Musicians use Quanten Arc
It is always a pleasant surprise when a feature you built, finds a use by a different target audience and it somehow makes perfect sense.
Screenplay Analysis : Backrooms
Crisis Dominant siege, correct archetype match. Strong kitchen centrepiece. Three fixable issues: Act 3 sags, Clark's deterioration is off-page, Mary's threshold motivation is underwritten. Strong first draft.
Your product deserves a better story.
Most startups I know have the same problem. The product works. The team is sharp. The roadmap is clear. But ask them to explain what they do in a way that actually lands with a customer, an investor, or a journalist, and they go blank.
That is not a communication
Screenplay Analysis : Obsession
Bear wishes for love. It works. That's the problem. Obsession has sharp dialogue, a clean premise, and it works. The bones are right. The problem is one layer deeper.
The Black List 2025: A Narrative Archetype Analysis
Every December, the Black List gives the industry a snapshot of what development executives are responding to. 74 scripts. 86 writers. Nearly 500 executives voting.
What it does not tell you is what kind of stories they are responding to. Genre does some of that work. But genre is surface.
The Shapes of Founder Stories
Every founder story is the same. That's the problem.
I've sat through enough pitch days to know the shape before the founder opens their mouth. There's a problem in the world. They saw it. Nobody else was solving it. So they built something. Now
The Grammar We Found
In the last post we asked whether narrative has a formal grammar the way music does. Whether there are discoverable parent structures underlying the thousands of story shapes we see across cinema.
We have been working on that question for the past year. This post is what we found.
AI Filmmaking Is Not Cheap as you think.
I keep seeing the same tweet. Some variation of: one prompt, one movie, zero budget. The future of cinema is here. The studios are dead.
I get it. The tools are genuinely remarkable. But I have been looking at some numbers this week and I want to share them with