What is Wonder Unit?
Wonder Unit is a movie studio that develops stories into movies and innovates on how those movies are made.
Problem
Most people watch movies on streaming platforms. Streaming companies are forced to buy their movies from old movie production studios that are resistant to change and innovation, resulting in incredibly expensive production and baseline stories.
Solution
Our objective is to make meaningful, important movies at a fraction of the cost without sacrificing story or production quality.
What kind of stories?
We develop stories with the philosophical theme of childlike wonder versus cynicism. We focus on fantastic worlds hidden in plain site, with beautiful human narratives at the center. Think: 80s Spielberg sense of wonder movies like E.T., Never Ending Story, Goonies, coming of age movies like Stand by Me, The Breakfast Club, Amelie for people of today.
Our first movie, EXPLORERS (More Info) , is about a group of young adults that get stuck in the underground tunnels of New York City. In their struggle to find a way out, they uncover an old forgotten secret.
How will we make meaningful, important movies at a fraction of the cost?
We believe a great movie is built on a great story.
Therefore, we place our primary focus on story. We develop and iterate on story.
Story Teams
Contrary to a singular writer, we have story teams of about 6 people that work together as a group, lead by a director, to develop stories.
We don’t buy or adapt outside stories, we grow them from an original seed.
The idea is that at the core of a story is the kernel of something great. But there is a lot of work to iterate on the story - changing it over time, cutting away things that don’t work, bringing many different points of view to the table, testing, etc.
Many of the storytellers in the group use many different tools to develop story: conversation, improvisation, writing, and imaging.
Because movies are visual stories, we visualize iterations of the story by storyboarding. We storyboard by creating sequential images. We can do this through drawing, but also by creating and manipulating virtual scenes.
This allows us to show versions of the movie to other story teams and advisors for feedback, and substantial change. You can imagine that this results in a story being torn down and built up multiple times, with minimal cost.
The development process can take up to two years.
Production
In order to be successful, we need to produce our movies for at least one order of magnitude less than visually comparable large studio productions.
We will do this by applying an agile development process to production. This simply means that we will apply the iterative process to production as well.
We will shoot Story Tests (More Info) before going into very costly principal photography. This means that we will shoot the fully developed and boarded story with cast actors, but no crew. This allows us to shoot quickly, and cheaply, testing if the test edited movie makes for a compelling story. If the Story Test isn’t compelling, we will rework the story. If it does, we will move on to principal photography.
Principal Photography -
VFX - heavy use of matte painting, virtual sets and economic invisible effects.
Engineering / R&D
We have an engineering team that builds creative tools designed in concert with our story development and production. For example, we’ve created a Storyboarding tool called Storyboarder (More Info) . It allows storytellers to storyboard without needing to draw. We use it to develop our stories, but is also used by 200,000 other creators.
As we’ve been continuously developing it, we have really changed how people will develop stories in the future by allowing anyone to set up a virtual set anywhere:
The Endgame?
To create a beautiful creative lead studio of multiple story teams and innovative production house that produces those stories into movies. Based on the quality of our work, we will attract the most creative, curious, and iconoclastic talent. Think: Pixar, only for live action.
Location
We are currently in NYC. But due to cost of living, NYC is creatively dying and we are thinking about other places like Atlanta (More Info) .
Current Capitalization
Wonder Unit is exclusively financed by Charles Forman, the founder. At some point we were entertaining the idea of raising money, but based on our process, we don’t currently need growth capital.
The Founder
Charles Forman (More Info) - I make things that I want to exist in the world. I take pride in them. I try to put love into those things, with the idea that other people will feel that love on the other side. I also put my phone number all around so people can text me: 917-696-5465. See I just did it again.