Vinny Bruzzese charges up to $20,000 to analyze and make recommendations on Hollywood scripts. He is also catching hate in the comment section of NYTimes.com, mostly from people who didn’t seem to read the entire article about his script evaluation company.
The tone of online commenters seems to suggest they think Mr. Bruzzese is taking the proverbial “room of monkeys writing Shakespeare on typewriters”, and distilling that into script writing software.
Wrong.
With Mr. Bruzzese’s methods, computers write exactly 0% of scripts. His business is highly consultative and contextual while adding years of compiled audience research into consideration. All this to save studios money at the most critical juncture, before it is spent.
Nothing uncreative about that.
Nonetheless, many leading indicators are pointing to the fact that video creative – whether it’s a movie, TV pilot, advertisement or video blog – will be shaped more and more by “big data” in the future. In contrast to Netflix’s shotgun approach, Amazon Studios has begun split-testing new TV pilots by promoting and distributing them freely on the web in order to gather audience reviews and viewer data, while over here at ZoomTilt we’re bring video creators the first self-service software tool to A/B test videos. But, in both cases, rather than using data to take away from the creative magic of screenwriters, directors and filmmakers, the goal is to make production more merit-driven based on true information, not somebody’s opinion or connections.
Welcoming to the new era of data-driven video – we happen to be pretty optimistic about it.
