Breaking down a script and scheduling scenes can take time away from being creative.
This week Ruslan K joins us to talk about his new software, Filmustage, that uses AI to help filmmakers save time breaking down scripts and scheduling scenes. In this episode, Ruslan talks about his software, Filmustage, and how is using AI to help filmmakers save time.
Watch to see if FIlmustage would work for you and get a discount code.
Key Points:
1:24 – How he got started
3:02 – Replacing Movie Magic
8:25 – Studio Binder integration
10:06 – Fixing issues
11:49 – Testing software
13:09 – Something going wrong
16:39 – Favorite Gear
20:20 – Upcoming changes
20:57 – Pricing
23:07 – Starting a startup
Links
YouTube Channel
Matt Hadley Episode
Filmustage use Discount Code Practicalfilmmaker30
Transcript
Ruslan K. (00:00):
As I started to fall asleep, I was leaning back on my bus seat and I just started to notice he’s getting super nervous.
Tanya Musgrave (00:07):
Oh no.
Ruslan K. (00:08):
He’s looking at all possible directions, checking his email and super, super nervous and then I understood. Okay. Thing are getting funny. Okay, let’s see.
Tanya Musgrave (00:20):
Something’s wrong.
Ruslan K. (00:22):
Something’s definitely wrong.
Tanya Musgrave (00:23):
Very wrong.
Tanya Musgrave (00:24):
Welcome to The Practical Filmmaker. An educational podcast brought to you by The Filmmaker Institute and Sunscreen Film Festival, where industry professionals talk nuts and bolts in the steps they took to find their success today. On today’s show, we actually dive into the tech side of film a bit and talk with Ruslan K., who used neural network technology to develop the automatic script breakdown and scheduling service, Filmustage. Find the full transcripts and more at thepracticalfilmmaker.com.
Tanya Musgrave (00:50):
I’m your host, Tanya Musgrave, and today we have Ruslan K., chief technology officer and co-founder of Filmustage, a technology company that is streamlining the film production process by using neural network technology that automates the script breakdown process. So, be sure to stay tuned to the end for a discount code so you can try it out for yourself. Ruslan, how did you end up here?
Ruslan K. (01:17):
Hello.
Tanya Musgrave (01:18):
Hi.
Ruslan K. (01:18):
Thank you for the invitation, Tanya.
Tanya Musgrave (01:19):
Yeah.
Ruslan K. (01:20):
Better to be here and talk to you.
Tanya Musgrave (01:21):
Welcome.
Ruslan K. (01:21):
Thank you.
Tanya Musgrave (01:22):
Yes.
Ruslan K. (01:23):
We started back to 2019. I was quite bored and my friend and CEO of Filmustage, and co-founder as well, Egor Dubrovsky. He’s a filmmaker, 10 years plus of filmmaking and everything. It was his journey supported by the US embassy to the US to see how things work on filming sets, some film sets in the US.
Tanya Musgrave (01:44):
Oh, wow.
Ruslan K. (01:46):
And accidentally, he was robbed in a very strange way. They went to see some blues or jazz musicians playing in the pub and they left all their stuff at the car, documents, equipment, money, literally everything.
Tanya Musgrave (02:04):
Oh no.
Ruslan K. (02:05):
After 15 minutes you can imagine what happened. They found the car broken, no glasses, no nothing. So everything was stolen. And that’s why he got stuck in the United States for half a year more.
Tanya Musgrave (02:20):
Oh, my gosh.
Ruslan K. (02:22):
Yeah. Trying to get new documents and find the way back home. Literally working, filming stuff for food, sort of, not really for food, for money obviously, but kind of trying to maintain…
Tanya Musgrave (02:35):
Got to eat.
Ruslan K. (02:40):
Yeah. You need to manage to buy some food, really. So, he got enough time to understand how processes works in the reality, and it became quite clear that you guys love to do it in a very old school way. Really, I don’t know, conservative. You guys like to use spreadsheets a lot, like to use software, like movie magic, which makes absolutely no sense to us. It’s nonsense. It came to us and changed little since 1987 or something like that.
Tanya Musgrave (03:15):
Wait, wait, wait, wait. So, what do you use instead of that?
Ruslan K. (03:18):
We decided we can do way better. We have a very advanced technologies nowadays called neural networks, and the thing called natural language processing. Basically there are software systems, programmable stuff, which are super good at understanding human language. And screenplay is a human language, right? So, what we did, we trained a neural network on a bunch of screenplays. And now what we can do, we can feed the machine with a screenplay in a couple of minutes, sometimes even seconds, we get it carefully broken down into pieces. This thing called script breakdown, basically. So, we can extract all the valuable, necessary information out of the text, like location details, actor names, where they’re mentioned, descriptions of them, perhaps more than 20 categories of everything. And presented to you in a very user friendly interface, online 24/7, accessible to everyone. So, our mission, let’s call it, to democratize the way of production movies and in particular, the pre-production step of it. So, we started with the very beginning script breakdown, and we have more to come.
Tanya Musgrave (04:35):
So neural network technology, you’re going to have to explain a little bit more to me.
Ruslan K. (04:41):
Okay, I’ll try to. Basically the idea is super simple, using very simple mathematical functions and calculations. You can approximate with a good accuracy, probably every possible system, not dependent on it complexity. So if you have enough independent functions in your model, if you have like millions of functions, so you can approximate literally everything. So for instance, you can simulate human voice. This is also part of which task, what problems, what neural networks helps to solve. You can generate images. It’s all digital information, and with powerful enough model, you can do all this and many, many more approaches. The very same works with human languages. They understand a lot about human language, how it’s constructed, how the structure of sentences, the meaning of words and you can generate new stuff. And the process exist in text with that knowledge. So the idea of neural networks is, comes from the description.
Ruslan K. (05:50):
Basically this, it’s a way to simulate the behavior of human brain because yeah, on the physiological level, it’s super simple. You got neurons, which are basically cells, which get some kind of electrical inputs. And dependent on the level of this input and on the state of the cell itself it able to generate the output. And this output goes to the next cell and all of them has thousands of connections everywhere. And this system behaves in a really complex way. You can understand smell, taste and everything. And all of them is basically electrical signal. So neural networks is the way to simulate human brain behavior.
Tanya Musgrave (06:35):
So Filmustage, it’s an automatic script breakdown and scheduling service that would break down, on your site, it says 100 scenes in one minute. And it would have a free export in movie magic and PDF and spreadsheets. And, it’s designed to save you time on routine tasks and streamline your production by using the scheduling feature. So automatic stuff, it’s getting, it’s getting there most definitely, but I’m kind of wondering what the accuracy is like for instance, Rev, for transcribing. Rev, has a human feature to it and then there’s kind of the automatic transcribe in Premier, which has some room to improve, honestly. You still need a human component within there. So I’m, I’m kind of curious what the accuracy is.
Ruslan K. (07:30):
If you want to hear the numbers, the accuracy is like 85% for the best category. And the point is you probably will have at a certain point, human being at the other side, because you are the final decision maker. Okay, we can extract a fireplace for you out of the text and mark it as a special effect and you might decide to do it with [inaudible 00:08:00] probably. So you are the final decision maker in this. So the whole point, the whole idea to get rid of [inaudible 00:08:07], like copy page never sent to somewhere and clicking through 100 page document. It’s not super fun. Definitely. And we are solving this issue.
Tanya Musgrave (08:18):
This is the first I’ve really heard of AI in script breakdown. Kind of like, maybe there’s a bit of it in StudioBinder, but I actually had a question about StudioBinder.
Ruslan K. (08:26):
Okay. Go ahead.
Tanya Musgrave (08:28):
Particularly for the indie filmmakers who are more in that camp than movie magic, are there potentials for any integration within StudioBinder?
Ruslan K. (08:39):
Probably. Yes. Because we have a really good, well established API. We would like to have contract with anyone interested. The StudioBinder approach, their way of breaking down the script, lacks actually this smart approach because they go very simple. Our solution is a few steps…
Tanya Musgrave (08:58):
Beyond.
Ruslan K. (08:59):
Well we are competitor to some degree. Definitely. We just build a really nice scheduling functionality. Also we are going to cover a bit, the budgeting side of your project. Our idea is to connect all sorts of markets. For instance, actor agencies, [inaudible 00:09:22] warehouses, equipment rentals, as well as location management or agencies for you to be able to prototype your movie at the very early stage. So it should work like this. You upload this, can play, break it down, do a few edits and we suggest you the things and locations and actors, you would like to use it to make your project real. Cause you basically the bigger picture.
Tanya Musgrave (09:54):
So do you see any particular quirks or any kind of problems or weaknesses that you’ve seen users come across, but then, actually that is being worked on right now. Like that kind of thing.
Ruslan K. (10:12):
Well what we need to work with, usually it’s a PDF file. And the internal structure of these beautiful format is super stupid. It’s so unreliable. So, we got all sorts of person troubles and the coordinate on our platform, well, it’s gets super funny with the very first page of the screenplay, whereas the name’s written or titles or something that it’s always random. There was a sometime ago. It was a trouble when there’s a image in screenplay, which usually you should see no images there, but sometimes they get there. So, our bag list and fixes list was quite long and it grows every day. S.
Ruslan K. (10:58):
O believe me, it’s really painful to maintain this, but we are trying really hard and I hope without all possible kind of errors on our end, but this should be accessible and fully functional right now, if any, one of our listeners and our customers find something unusual, please feel free to contact that support. We have a really nice small box on the corner of your screen. You can start your communication instantly right there or just write us if you like, if you got any trouble. Please. We are always open to criticism or feedback.
Tanya Musgrave (11:34):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean it’s important. It’s important for any, any kind of technology or even like, I mean, in we’re in film we’re used to critique.
Ruslan K. (11:41):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Affirmative]
Tanya Musgrave (11:43):
I’m actually curious if you’ve had a test group of, I don’t know, however many filmmakers who just like run this through and just give you all of their feedback. You know?
Ruslan K. (11:54):
Well. We are actively selling. We have like 3000 plus registrations since 2020, we constantly getting feedback from them.
Tanya Musgrave (12:04):
Okay, good.
Ruslan K. (12:04):
So we can constantly talking to our users, we execute a series of interviews with our users to understand their own experience. One of them was quite noticeable. We had an event during Berlin film festival. We had a panel discussion about our platform and one of our guests, Roger Christian, who was a Set Dresser of original Star Wars Trilogy.
Tanya Musgrave (12:30):
Oh wow.
Ruslan K. (12:30):
You can see the recording on YouTube on our channel. There is like 15 minutes long speech from Roger and he kind of validates our whole idea. He tells how cool is that, to be able to understand and break down your script in a couple of minutes instead of weeks.
Tanya Musgrave (12:51):
Okay. Awesome. That’s incredible. What is your YouTube channel title?
Ruslan K. (12:57):
Exactly the same, Filmustage.
Tanya Musgrave (13:00):
Filmustage. All right. Awesome. Well, we will definitely check it out. I’m always curious to know things that went wrong. You know, like a story of when something went wrong.
Ruslan K. (13:10):
You want to hear a cool story. Okay. Yeah. I got some for you. I got one really nice for you. So, we are a startup. So a big chunk of our life is fundraising. So we constantly approaching different angel investor funds and everything. Going to events, hackathons, how they call it.
Ruslan K. (13:29):
Conferences, all sorts of events. So it was back to 2020 actually we were on the way to Tallinn, Estonia to present the whole working machine, the project for the very first time we just launched it in Google Cloud. Everything was super nice. We are super proud of our work. Everything was working. So anyone could register, upload their screenplay. Basically it was ready to be presented to the audience. And on our way to Tallinn from Vilnius, we were just, relaxing, chatting to each other and my friend, the CEO of our company, Egor, he decided to do a really small fix to his Google account.
Tanya Musgrave (14:14):
Oh no.
Ruslan K. (14:15):
And it was his personal Google account and the project was created on top of that. And he did just a little small fix to his account and everything just vanished. Everything vanished. So the whole system just died. The website become inaccessible. And we started to instantly write to Google support service and were telling us, okay, we are investigating your issue we’ll reach back to you in two days. Okay, we have our presentation tomorrow. What are we supposed to do? So the lesson learned, never changed nothing before your presentation or when you have something really important. Just relax. Just drink some beer, just put your hands somewhere. That’s the point?
Tanya Musgrave (15:11):
Oh no.
Ruslan K. (15:13):
So, long story short, we got everything fixed in a week actually. But, we were able to win the event, actually get all the possible awards from there because we…
Tanya Musgrave (15:25):
Oh, that’s awesome.
Ruslan K. (15:26):
Used our soft skills where we’re telling stories, showing nice pictures during our presentation. We prepared some offline running application on our own computer. So kind of found the solution for this horrible situation. You should see that guy during our bus trip. He was just literally shaking after, after he…
Tanya Musgrave (15:51):
Yes, yes, yes!
Ruslan K. (15:52):
After he Understood what he just done. So he literally ruined the result of our yearlong work.
Tanya Musgrave (15:59):
Oh my gosh. Yeah. And I’m sure that him breaking the news that was a fun conversation to have. You’re like guys just let you know…
Ruslan K. (16:09):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just started to fall asleep. I was like leaning back on my, on my bus seat and I just started to notice, like he’s getting super nervous. Like he’s looking at all possible directions, checking his email and super, super nervous. And then I understood, okay, things are getting funny. Okay. Let’s see.
Tanya Musgrave (16:30):
Something’s wrong. Something
Ruslan K. (16:31):
Something’s definitely wrong.
Tanya Musgrave (16:32):
Very wrong. Oh my gosh. You know, we have a segment called gear and gadgets. Is there something that you can think of that is at kind of an intersection besides Filmustage that you would recommend?
Ruslan K. (16:46):
Well, good question, actually. Well, as a developer, I recommend everyone to use MacBook Pro for development. Cause it’s super reliable. Literally all kind of gadgets made by Apple. Not advisement here, sorry, I just love it. They get really nice cameras and iPhones. I use Universal Audio equipment actually. Universal Audio Arrow series and Apollo Twin is super nice and their audio plugins sound just so good. I love it.
Tanya Musgrave (17:21):
Okay. All right. I’ve got a little bit of an existential question for you. Since we’re talking about AI in general, looking forward into the future. A friend of mine, we have a lot of random conversations about AI, like in general and like whether or not it’s good for humanity or like if it’s bad and technology that could potentially replace jobs. For instance, I remember talking to a friend here on the podcast, it was Matt Hadley, he’s specifically entering the world of gaffing. And we were talking about stagecraft. It’s basically the technology that through unreal engine that the Mandalorian was shot. There’s a guy on set who, when they need a 12 by reflector, he’ll literally just draw a white square on one of the sides of the screens and boom, you’ve got a reflector. Which usually would’ve been the job of his role. It effectively downgrades his role on set.
Tanya Musgrave (18:10):
And I guess my question is, where do you see yourself on the spectrum? More AI is better because it lowers the barrier of entry, like what you were saying, democratizing filmmaking, or is it the converse of that which creates a complete barrage of content. Even along the lines of is more media better like TikTok and, everybody has a phone, everybody has a camera. Or is it that better media is better? I don’t know. I’m just curious.
Ruslan K. (18:37):
Good question. So talking about that guy, who’s responsible for lights on the set, I believe. So his job to maintain the light and… So the question is, does he really like to drag like real physical reflectors on the filming set? Probably not. So you can do something better, like creative, virtual one, and you still need someone who knows how to operate with this system with this stagecraft, right? So we are not kind of firing that person, I guess. We are just making his profession a bit more convenient. This is the transition I see in the real world. We have a bunch of [Unknown word 00:19:18] not super fun jobs. For instance, accounting, no, maybe some lawyer stuff. Maybe we can just automate something. Maybe we can help a person to spend more time on creativity, less time on routine.
Ruslan K. (19:34):
Answering your question, if AI is good for humanity. I think the question is yes, because it helps you to do more interesting things. Definitely some kind of professionals will probably lose their jobs and the whole world of opportunities opens for them. They can learn how to operate with the systems. That’s it? Because, doesn’t matter how advanced this technology, you need to have someone who takes the decisions. So you need someone to knows how to operate that. After all it just a machine, it might be super complex, super smart machine, but it cannot create. That’s the point.
Tanya Musgrave (20:16):
That is very true. What do we have to look forward to from Filmustage?
Ruslan K. (20:21):
We are going to present marketplaces. I hope really soon. Hopefully this summer or might be early autumn. So we are going to build the whole platform, the whole system for you to make your project happen as soon as possible with as much fun as possible. Save your time, save your money, save your efforts. That’s it. That’s our mission.
Tanya Musgrave (20:48):
Oh, producers will love that. So for independent filmmakers who are looking to try out Filmustage, what could they expect financially to have to invest?
Ruslan K. (20:58):
So we are trying to make it accessible to everyone. We have different kind of plans or tiers suitable for any kind of productions and level. So you can start as cheap as $39 per month. If you need a bit more, you can switch to studio plan it’s $119 US Dollars per month. And we also have a special plans for bigger productions, which we would like to discuss personally. If you are well established studio or you have some special needs, we’re more than open for say customization or fine tuning everything for you. We can even fine tune the neural network or the model. Better for your needs. Tweak this tweak that create a standalone application, never connected to internet. If you want to do that. We can discuss everything because I know filmmakers, especially when they work with sometimes at [inaudible 00:22:00] information screenplay of something you can and they would like to make sure it won’t ever leak from someone’s computer.
Ruslan K. (22:12):
The point is we can create solution hosted on your own computers for instance, or we can create an offline application for you. That’s it?
Tanya Musgrave (22:25):
Since it’s a monthly subscription, you had mentioned that it was kind of on the Google Cloud and wondering whether or not there was a desktop version where you wouldn’t have to be connected to internet.
Ruslan K. (22:35):
Now we have online platform, but if you need something special, let’s talk.
Tanya Musgrave (22:40):
Oh, okay. Awesome. Well, for those who want to try out Filmustage’s breakdown services for yourself, you can get a 30% discount for the next year. If you use practical filmmaker 30, that’s three zero. Again, that’s practical filmmaker 30 for the discount code. And to wrap up what questions should I have asked you?
Ruslan K. (23:01):
Ask me something about startups, how to, how to maintain a company, how to start and where to look. What’s the most important part. I love to answer these questions.
Tanya Musgrave (23:11):
Okay. Let’s consider the question asked
Ruslan K. (23:14):
So I can give an advice to entrepreneurs, how to start their own startup. And what they need to consider to begin. So, my idea is simple. Ideas cost nothing. Yeah. The execution this is what generates actual value. So your goal as an entrepreneur, as a startuper, if you want to become one of us, your mission is to create something really simple and show it to the market as soon as possible. Just collided with the reality. That’s the point. This the earlier you do this, the better it will be for you.
Tanya Musgrave (23:54):
You had mentioned like just entrepreneurs in general and honestly, for the most part, most filmmakers that I know would do well to take a business class or two, especially because they are sole proprietors or they start a film production company or something along those lines. Now what would your advice be to them? The particular resources that they need to look out for and have part of their team
Ruslan K. (24:20):
As a startuper, you need to start to raise money as soon as possible. Even if you don’t have nothing real, if you don’t have a functional product, doesn’t matter. You need to start raising funds as soon as possible. Get yourself ready for refusal. You’re going to get lots of nos, 100 nos for one or two years, and this is absolutely normal. They just, it doesn’t mean the investor don’t like you, it just mean they’re not suitable for you for industry you’re trying to survive in or maybe something else. There’s always a good fit for your startup. That’s the point? Just don’t stop.
Tanya Musgrave (25:01):
How do we find Filmustage?
Ruslan K. (25:02):
With our website, it’s super simple filmustage.com. That’s it.
Tanya Musgrave (25:09):
Ruslan, I really appreciated this because we don’t really talk to a lot of developers on this podcast, honestly, and this has been extremely enlightening and I can’t wait. I work as a producer as well. I can’t wait to try out Filmustage for myself. This is great.
Ruslan K. (25:26):
Thank you Tanya.
Tanya Musgrave (25:27):
We’ll See ya.
Ruslan K. (25:27):
See you. Thank you.
Ruslan K. (25:29):
If you enjoyed this interview, follow us right here and on Instagram. Ask us questions and check out more episodes at thepracticalfilmmaker.com. Be well and God bless. We’ll see you next time on The Practical Filmmaker.