The independent publishing economy has been subject to many disruptions in modern times, from the introduction of the Kindle to Brandon Sanderson’s record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. In recent years, generative AI has stolen the spotlight, giving creators the opportunity, with a click, to generate hundreds of thousands of words’ worth of text, a lifelike picture for their next ad, or a musical score for their book trailer. Even short-form video is possible, with some services generating up to fifteen seconds of lifelike video for free.

The tools have been seen both as a boon and as a challenge to the industry, depending on how they’re used. But Michael Evans, founder of Creatorwood.TV, views his platform as an expansion of the publishing opportunities currently available to authors. “It’s author or creator first,” he says. “You own your customers. You own what you create. You can take your movie anywhere, and we are non-exclusive. Keep your movie on our platform or not; it’s whatever the creator wants.”

Already a recognized name in the industry, Evans is a serial software entrepreneur dedicated to creating software for storytellers. He is an author himself with over twelve Sci-Fi books he published in high school. He’s a Harvard graduate and worked closely with YouTube celebrity Mr. Beast. Evans designed Creatorwood to disrupt the generative AI community by offering other publishing options for authors, publishers and creators. On Creatorwood’s platform, anyone can create a professionally produced, full-length movie. From there, where it goes is entirely up to them.

Creatorwood is still brand new—the program beta-launched earlier this year and launches publicly December 1, following a mastermind hosted by Evans the week of Author Nation. It isn’t only a generative platform; once fully launched, it also will serve as a streaming platform to allow creators to sell their movies directly to their fans.

Evans believes that at the core, authors are storytellers, and the medium they choose to tell their stories is words on paper. But he wants to give them the option to expand their storytelling into another medium. “Previously, authors have been limited to a small market: ebooks, print, audio, and maybe comics. … But the market for film is about ten times that,” he says. “We can go after that market as storytellers. We’re creating a new industry—indie storytellers.”

How to Use Creatorwood

Like most generative AI applications, Creatorwood relies on the creativity and vision of the user to direct its output. Creatorwood uses an internal generative AI application called The Movie Machine, also created by Evans. When given a book or piece of text, The Movie Machine will first output a script and a production bible. Once the creator reads through the script and story bible and approves it, The Movie Machine outputs director’s notes and storyboards.

Director’s notes are all the details of each scene: the music, camera direction, characters, setting, and props. Storyboards are the first snapshots of each scene. Users will have to approve both before The Movie Machine actually generates any video. Once the director’s notes and storyboards are approved, the program will begin video generation. The Movie Machine will automatically stitch together every scene and output the movie.

“This is technology built by authors for authors,” Evans says. “We designed it to be easy to use but also fun. Consider yourself a director, able to dictate the movie’s look and feel on the fly. Our users report they love spending time editing their movies because it’s fun.”

Movies can be as long or as short as the author would like, depending on how many hours they’d like to commit to the project’s creation. Using Creatorwood’s cost estimator, to generate 107 minutes of movie from an eighty-thousand-word book would cost roughly $2,065. Users only pay as they go, and the price also reflects some amount of “regenerations,” or edits made to the video within the program.

Time Investment

“A movie from Hollywood takes hundreds of thousands of hours and costs an average of $8 million to produce,” Evans says. “There are only one thousand scripted productions per year, and that includes TV and movies.” However, with Creatorwood, he says, authors can spend a few hundred hours to create a full, ninety-minute movie for about the cost of an audiobook.

“It’s easy; it’s fun,” Evans says. “You can take your ideas and see what can be done. You can type your thoughts into existence, and the movie changes at will in seconds. You’re a director calling your shots.”

Creatorwood was designed to give its users as much control as possible over the final product. To that end, authors own their generated content forever and can upload and distribute it as they wish: to a streaming service, to social media, or to Creatorwood’s own streaming platform once it launches. Authors will receive 80 percent of the total revenue regardless of price; of the remaining 20 percent, 10 percent will go to payment fees and processing and 10 percent will go toward server costs. Creatorwood’s platform will require no exclusivity, and authors will be able to set their own prices for the films they create. Users could even make a few episodes free and charge for the rest of a series.

For those who don’t want to invest hundreds of hours into film creation, Creatorwood also offers a VIP service, where the company will produce the content for you at a cost of $100 per finished minute.

“Kindle made it possible to distribute ebooks without having to print twenty thousand print books. The bottleneck was in the distribution, and the Kindle changed that,” Evans says. “The bottleneck in film is not distribution but the cost of creation. Creatorwood brings that cost down by one thousand and the time down by one thousand, [to a place] where there’s no gatekeepers. A new industry for self-publishing film is being born today, and it’s going to grow the pie for storytellers by ten times.” Evans’s plans for Creatorwood expand beyond its current feature list to include a mobile-streaming app and television-streaming app, where viewers can watch shows from their favorite devices.

Information about current features, future updates, and common questions can be found on the platform’s website, https://creatorwood.tv.

Tools of the Trade

Like any AI application, Creatorwood is a tool, and indie authors will have to make the best decision for their business when deciding whether to use it. Producing a movie and investing hundreds of hours may not be right for you at this stage, and AI applications may not align with your business goals and principles. For those who are interested in the platform, however, Evans hopes Creatorwood can be a tool for indie authors to expand their stories into new mediums and allow them creative control in the process.

By David Viergutz

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