Why we sell the story separately from the film

The usual sequence: budget gets approved, a production company gets hired, a kickoff call happens, and somewhere in that call a story gets improvised by six people who disagree. Then a crew spends four days making that improvisation permanent.

The film comes back polished. It tests fine internally. It does very little, because it is a beautifully shot version of a message that was never right.

Production is where the money goes, and the story decides whether that money buys anything. Selling the two together hides that, in the direction that costs the client.

So we sell them separately and in the other order. Two weeks and $5,000 to decide what the thing says, delivered as a document you own whether or not we ever shoot it. If the answer is that there is no film worth making yet, that is a good outcome and a cheap one.