Case Study
Just Like the Movies
Sometimes it happens just like in the movies!
Businesses, too, can go that way, like a movie.
In the film My Fair Lady (1964), phonetics prof Henry Higgins teaches Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower seller girl, to speak English well enough to pass off as an aristocratic lady. In The Karate Kid (1983) Mr. Miyagi turns a gangly Italian-American teenager into a Kung Fu champ, beating up baddies, winning tournaments and true love. In Iqbal, and in Pixar’s Cars, the hero…
In countless movies, a mentor coaches and packages his ward to unlikely, spectacular success, usually against time pressure. It’s an inexhaustible, eternal storyline. Its emotional design guarantees that your descendants in 2325 AD will gather around the nuclear fireplace to hear it again with new characters and contexts.
In the venture capital world, these mentor-businesses are called accelerators. The mentor-mentee storyline reproduces itself: a company like Y-Combinator takes an idea, and a steely glint in someone’s eye, and packages, coaches, feeds this caterpillar as it becomes a butterfly.
…we met a business that accelerates scripts, transforming them to candidates for movie-dom. So often (always?) a story, too, is about a hero transformed. It’s like the movies.
Celerity is a cinema-tech accelerator which aims to do for Hollywood what Y-combinator did for Silicon Valley. Y-Combinator helped bring Dropbox, Airbnb into existence and thence to profit.
Our collaboration included branding the Celerity program and a website to enable the coordination of mentee projects from script to screen. So that Eliza and the Italian American kid and their Higgins/Miyagis could get on the same frame.
In twelve short weeks, Celerity would select promising scripts, improve them, and create a realistic, short Proof of Value (POV) film. A cinebiz team would simultaneously build a business and production plan, keeping audiences, story, and licensing in view. The POV film and the business plan would then be presented to a group of investors on Screening Day. This is like Demo Day for Y-Combinator batches.
It is also like the ball in My Fair Lady (or Ascot1, for those who know the story) or a pre-final matchup in Karate Kid. A vision of triumph is revealed, but also hints of a fatal weaknesses, and together they create the tension for the final leg of the story. We know the hero will win… but will he?
Hollywood is no different. Darkness envelopes the creative and the investment processes in Hollywood. Big studios control the capital and the technology. Investments are made on track record, instinct or a hormonally driven self belief, fuelled by a recent hit.
But in the words of the great scriptwriter William Goldman2 himself, “Nobody knows anything … in the entire motion picture field … Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.”
Celerity wants to take the guesswork out of the investment and make capital more accessible. And orchestrate the entire value chain.
Filmmakers would make the strongest pitch they could conceive; cinema capital gets a realistic way to judge. The doors are open for everyone, and Celerity wants to man the gate.
Celerity comes from the Latin word ‘celeritas’, which means the swiftness, or rapidity of motion. In the 19th century, physicists thus used c to stand for the speed of a wave. When Einstein wrote his blockbuster, E=mc2, he used c to denote the speed of light. Old VC Jungle saying: speed matters.
The Celerity logo (see the case study) expresses the charge, pace and character of the program.
We imagined the pixels hurtling through space, at the speed of light. Space, as the film Gravity reminds us, is dark. Accordingly, Celerity has Red, Green and Blue pixels on an endless black field. These colours combine to make all the colours we see on our screens.
The branding made Celerity all about the movies, referencing stills from iconic movies by the masters of cinema.
What will Celerity’s story be? It is its own mentor, but as a mentee, it is as much a comet or a falling star as any of its wards. Look at the sky after dark.
To infinity and beyond3.
