Storytelling With An Entrepreneurial Mindset by Author Houston Howard
Film Courage: Houston, with your first book (Make Your Story Really Stinkin’ Big) is this sort of an entrepreneurial view of storytelling or do you also cover craft and technique?
Houston Howard: Both. I think that you need to approach storytelling from an entrepreneurial mindset. It’s just so that you can (as a writer and a producer and a creator) be empowered more rather than “I’m going to write something and then I’m going to push it out and I’m at the mercy of the entertainment gods to do whatever they want with my stuff.”
If you approach it from an entrepreneurial mindset you can now have more opportunity to take control of your work. But here’s the trick…if you don’t approach everything you do with craft and technique, then your products won’t be good.
And so in a transmedia business model we have a diversified product line, not just a film but a film plus this, plus this, plus this…all work together for one amazing experience. If you don’t perfect your craft and technique for all of them, then all of the sudden, nothing is going to work. And it doesn’t matter how good your business model is, if your stories aren’t good and people don’t care about them and people don’t engage with your characters and if your products aren’t good, the business isn’t good. And so it’s an interesting balance of understanding the entrepreneurial model and then being able to harness the craft and technique for the individual products within that model, that’s the sweet spot of how to make the whole thing work. Because a lot of people say “Do you think every movie needs transmedia? Can’t you just leave room for a film that doesn’t need it because did Hemingway really need to franchise Old Man in the Sea? Does MOONLIGHT really need transmedia extensions?” Because typically any offshoot that you have of an original work isn’t as good as the original….(Watch the video on Youtube here).
Special thanks to The LA Film School for allowing us to film this video interview on their campus.
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