The following Article was written for the Australian Writer’s Guild (AWG) ‘Storyline’ Magazine which is currently available through the AWG.

Foreword: Since Steve Jobs ‘retirement of sorts’ pretty much every Mac-Head has had the desire to write about the great man. I thought I would add to that with a recent article which was published ‘pre-announcement’ which highlighted just how his innovation has directly affected myself as a creative, and my company as a whole.

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Galvin Scott Davis discusses how advances in Digital Media Platforms and Steve Jobs saved his Story:
(From ‘Storyline’ Magazine 2011)

I can vividly remember the phone conversation as I waited for the delay to kick in from Los Angeles. “I’m sorry – the deal fell through… your script is dead”. The words that every writer dreads, words designed to destroy your ambition, your will. It took a few seconds to register what my agent was telling me.

Forget the three years of drafting, the twelve months of polishing on the final submission. Come again? – “What do you mean, it’s dead? How can a story be dead?”, I heard myself mumbling back down the line.

“We’re sorry. That’s just the way it is. You should just forget about it”.

As all writers can attest, forgetting about your labour of love is an implausibility. It doesn’t work like that – you don’t incubate, give birth and nurture a script only to be told that it should be farmed off to the nearest orphanage.

To put some context around the phone-call that I had received – 12 months earlier I had the good grace and fortune to have had my short film ‘Brother’ (NSWFTO YFF Funded) win two US film festivals (Beverly Hills Film Festival and The Los Angeles Silver Lake Film Festival) back-to-back. Call it lucky timing, kismet or plain jam buggery – but they both landed in the same week, and I’d spent my hard-earned to be in attendance.

Within hours of the award ceremony I had secured a Hollywood agent and began the rickety climb to the top of the first peak in a very bumpy roller coaster ride. Within months I had returned to Los Angeles on a whirlwind trip of spec meetings for my feature film screenplay – “Stricken”. A supernatural gumshoe detective thriller – a modernised Raymond Chandler fable with horror undertones (or “Lethal Weapon meets Constantine” as my unyielding agent liked to pitch it).

To cut a long story – the pitches went really well, a deal was set up and a mini-major came onboard the project. I was flabbergasted that this, my dream, could actually happen so damn fast. But then two weeks is a lifetime in Hollywood phone-calls. Ironically, as with all Hollywood stories – they rarely have a Hollywood ending. And so we need only skip forward a mere two weeks and we return to that fateful phone-call that changed the way I looked at producing content forever.

The deal had fallen through – one key person had left the studio and that had put in place a chain of events that would result in the script being shelved. The script was hot; Now, it was not. It seemed to me to be as callous and as simple as that. I took a moment to consider the lead character that I’d developed for ‘Stricken’ – Connor Mew, a pugilist anti-hero that never quits, refuses to stay down. What would he do? Would he let his story die? Or would he dust himself off and go back for more punishment?

CONNOR V/O: “The heavy head of the vintage phone handle rattled on its cradle like a deathwatch beetle foraging for food. Let it ring… ignore the call. It’s bad news. It’s always bad news…”

Okay – so Connor lives in movie-land and talks like he has a mouthful of quarters but I like his sentiment. As writers, we have to deal with rejection at many stages. This was the first time that I had actually found rejection to be the catalyst with which to keep moving forward.

Case in point – The rejection was obviously an oxymoron: how can a story be ‘dead’? A story doesn’t die, does not wither – it simply isn’t read. A story is ‘alive’ the second it meets the page, and lives on from the moment one person absorbs it and commits it to memory.

The defining moment from that phone-call actually came when I hung up the phone and placed it on the table in front of me. As I sat and stared down at my iPhone for the next ten minutes – I realised that the key to taking control of my Story had been in the palm of my hand all along.

Everything about the iPhone screamed “Let it Live”. This was a device that refused to work within the boundaries of normal thinking. It wasn’t a phone, it was determined to be so much more than that. I’d already had some experience with iPhone’s (I am also Director of Protein, a Sydney Digital Agency), having developed some successful Apps, and was accustomed to the thrill of releasing digital products.

So why not “Stricken”?

I stared at the heavy, uneven stack of scripts that wobbled on my shelves which were destined to a life of dust and wanton glances. And I began to look at them in a different light. Were these simply cursory diversions on the way to selling ‘the one’. Or were they actually just waiting for someone to resuscitate them in a different format? The dormant tower of unloved manuscripts on my shelf suddenly began to look like products on a purveyors window display.

CONNOR V/O: “Pick yourself up. Better shift gears, work the angles before I drag you kicking and screaming into the new century”.

It was time to start thinking about my writing in the same way that I approached my business – move with the times, keep ahead of the trends. What the iPhone (and iPad to come) has presented to us as Creators, Authors, Illustrators et al, is a window of opportunity. A digital platform with which to bring our stories to life, to our audiences as we intended them. And more importantly, without prejudice. I’m not stating for one moment that every Tom, Dick and Harry should start releasing digital Apps with their back catalogue – more-so, that at least now, there is the option to invest in ones own work should you feel that passionate about it.

There is a significant investment to be had, I won’t kid you. Partnerships, resources, late nights and cold hard cash. Yet with every fleeting pang of regret along the process I simply reminded myself that I had already invested more than three years of my time in something that would mean nothing to anybody unless it saw the light of day. I would never get that time back, but then that was never the point in the first place, was it? We write for others, not for ourselves. And if there is no channel for others to read our work then we are simply hobbyists with ‘one more great idea’. Lost in a sea of ambitious scribes.

CONNOR V/O: Wake up. Time is running out for you my friend – shadows weigh heavy in your midst tonight. Listless cloaks of nothingness that cling to your limbs  – pulling you down into uncertainty”.

Why is it that our Characters always speak up when we least expect it? That inner voice which manifests itself on paper, only to be heard late at night amidst ‘the noise’ of lost sleep. Listen up – they usually have some rather good advice…

I had found the platform – now I needed to compromise. I had to let the Feature Film Script ‘sleep’ (Not die) and concentrate on building an audience in a different medium. Create a bigger monster – and then bring it back to life with a larger heart than it ever had before.

I had already toyed with creating ‘Stricken’ as a Graphic Novel (the world was written to be firmly set within a comic book world). And had already been exposed to some of the pitfalls of trying to compete in the traditional print world. The biggest hurdle to overcome was the Publishers.

I joined forces with an illustrator (Alexis Hall), formerly of Rising Sun Pictures, with whom I have a strong relationship. He initially mocked up some character sketches which ignited a fervent flame to task. I cannot place enough importance on the impact of seeing those initial drawings. It was the first sign that we had taken something that others had told us was buried, and we had resurrected it beyond their expectations.

Alexis and I worked back and forth over the next year (Across continents as he traveled from one VFX house to other) – often parlaying over late-night emails, drafting reviews of his sketches and colourings. We would work one page of the script at a time, converting it to ‘frames’ for each beat and compiling single pages. The process seemed to take forever, but it was never anything less than compelling for both of us.

His work was so impressive that we decided to have a stab at the traditional route – and presented his crafted illustrations to the major print comic-book publishers. Yet we were met with derision – “Beautiful Graphic Novel… but we’re not interested in finished properties. We need to develop internally and own them ourselves”. Initiative, it seems, is not for sale.

CONNOR V/O: “Three years of wasted blood. The frays of my fingertips are wasted and spent like those of a vagrant, and for what? The toss of a dime and a ‘have-a-nice-day’ from passers-by in privilege and power”.

Fortunately for us – in the interim, the goalposts had changed. Along with the iPhone, Apple had just announced the launch of the iPad. The perfect platform for our Graphic Novel. This was it, we could now take full control of the potential and revenue stream of our story. No publisher commission, credit card fees, print production costs, warehouse storage fees, distribution fees and postage to be taken from our chunk of change. Only one fee – a percentage to Apple Inc. for helping us realize our dream, (and one that was still 20% less than traditional publishers).

The iPhone and iPad also offered a way of delivering my Graphic Novel in a much more cinematic way than traditional print. The story was born as a movie – so I made the decision to work once again with renowned Composer, Hylton Mowday to develop an original Soundtrack for the pages that immerses the reader in the world of ‘Stricken’.

By creating a soundtrack, we could immediately establish that the format offered more for the reader than traditional print. We had the opportunity to let the music and sound FX become a part of the storytelling process – by designing ‘themes’ for each scene in the script. Hylton, a most eclectic composer, drew on the dark setting of ‘Moss Town’ and created music that peaks and troughs as the pages move from one scene to another. The experience is enhanced when the reader wears headphones – as the frame-by-frame mode introduces synced sound FX with the scenario in-frame.

CONNOR V/O: “The sounds of Moss Town haunt me in my dreams. Sirens, gunshots and the occasional cry for mercy are commonplace here. Their desperate voices are a part of me now, buried beneath the constant ache of my eyelids”.

Writing for the screen can be an arduous process at the best of times, fraught with paranoia, self-doubt and the constant quest for ‘that perfect draft’. By revisiting the story in Graphic Novel format – it was almost a cleansing of the soul. A rare second-chance to strip the story down and cherry-pick instances for a talented artist to draw from.

We referenced other comic-book publication platforms that had dabbled with the iPad – all of which had created comprehensive renditions of the print versions to digital. Yet none of which appeared to have captured the heart of the media with which they were being displayed. Rather than simply mimic a page-turner of a comic-book, we emulated the storyboard style of a movie animatic. This afforded the reader of the novel the option to read in full-screen mode, or switch to storyboard mode and truly enter the world we had created.

As we developed the Graphic Novel into the actual Application platform, it occurred to me that we were storyboarding each scene and every shot as if we had moved ahead into preproduction on the very feature film itself. The blending of one media platform into another had never been so tangible or apparent. We were creating, by osmosis, a cinematic bridge between the words on the script and the intended feature film.

As a Director, this was a dream come true. When a script languishes in the final draft and spec pitch period, the writer can often feel as though the story is becoming stale (as other, more assertive ideas spring to mind for the next script to write). In this case – I could visualise each of the boards as they came to life and reacquaint myself with the story.

Once the App was complete I was left with at least two options open to me: Create a property and release it through digital media streams as both a sales tool for the end product (the Feature Film), and secondly, as a standalone marketable revenue stream (the Graphic Novel).

I now had two avenues with which to explore the interest in the Story. I could leverage the App purely as a sales tool to take to production companies and talk them through the complete storyboards of the film. Or, I could remain an independent publisher and author – and simply market the story as a product. With some savvy marketing, this is something that is both viable to a writer’s investment and a clever way to scale the product. Finally putting the story in a win-win situation out of what was originally a terrible position.

The experience for me has been enlightening in many ways. We Writers toil away and peddle our wares only to face the inevitable reality that many of our stories will be still-born at the hands of others. With digital media, we have a choice to give life to many of our disregarded tales and “drag them kicking and screaming into the new century”, as my old friend Detective Mew would put it. Will it bring us the financial return that we hope to see? Who knows? But it will at the very least keep us rich in heart that our labours of love have not gone unnoticed.

For now, we have adapted the first act of the feature film screenplay as ‘Chapter One’ of the world of Stricken. And we hope to release the following chapters as interest dictates (There’s that savvy marketing strategy I spoke of).

CONNOR V/O: The road that I took seemed to last an eternity. The scent of bitumen burns my throat. I finish this journey a shell of the man that I used to be. Yet there is one last thing that I ask of you… Let me live.

Thankfully for me, the noir genre is accepting of (welcoming even) melodrama and angst. My character’s voice making the most of every situation I threw at him – his overwrought answers keeping me up at night until I silenced him.

The future is here. By embracing digital platforms, unencumbered content can live a life less ordinary. If the content is good and the audience speaks up, who knows where we will be in another ten years from now.

Will writers have the ability to reverse-engineer the audience through iTunes. Build a loyal following for their material online (much like bands such as The Arctic Monkeys did for their music) and provoke interest from studios in already proven properties?

Writers often need to know when it’s the right time to let their story go. But for now, at least, it can be on our own terms.

In January 2011, our Graphic Novel ‘Stricken’ was re-born in beautiful retina display and available as an amazing immersive experience for a new audience. And we are now fielding interest in the movie rights.

Stricken is available exclusive to iPhone and iPad – http://www.strickenapp.com or search ‘Stricken’ in the iTunes store.