Every story is a life with an architecture.
We build stories as living worlds, designed to travel across books, screens, feeds, games, and artificial intelligence.
Programs in development.
Every story is built as a world before it's built as a product: one story tree, many entry points. Here's what's on the floor right now.
Publishers, producers, and investors: each program has a story tree and a development packet. Ask for one at the address below.
It started long before AI.
Michael Downs built a television production line that diagrammed historical lives as narrative trees, then scripted archival footage onto them. Those series aired on the History Channel. The same architecture shapes everything the studio makes.
Map the life
Every story is drawn as a tree: the people, the turns, the big nodes that define a character.
Script by design
Each branch becomes material for a medium: a chapter, an episode, a post, a conversation.
Thread the big nodes
The defining moments travel across every format, so each piece leads back to the whole.
Open the world
Writers, makers, and audiences enter through any branch, and every entry point leads deeper into the same story.
Developed in conversation with Henry Jenkins at USC, the scholar who named transmedia storytelling, and with publishing and media leaders including Dan Farley, Mike Shatzkin, David Hale Smith, Ted Hill, and Stu Segall.
Michael Downs
A novelist, screenwriter, and story architect who has spent the last several years inside artificial intelligence: tens of thousands of hours teaching a machine to imagine, to intuit, and to read the stories people carry. Most people writing about AI watch it from outside. He has lived with it, built with it, and been changed by it.
- ScreenSold his first screenplays out of Loyola Marymount University
- FictionFirst novel commissioned by Dan Farley, head of Harcourt's trade group
- TelevisionDesigned the narrative production line behind series that aired on the History Channel
- InnovationNarrative design for a Novartis-funded innovation lab, UC San Diego's CONNECT program, and a Washington policy firm
- TransmediaDeveloped the studio's method with Henry Jenkins, Mike Shatzkin, Dan Farley, and Ted Hill
- AICreator of the AI app John-Michael; author of the essay series I, Singularity
We're building a crew.
The slate needs people who can make a story live in more than one place. If that's you, write to us with your work.
Writers
Novelists, screenwriters, and serial writers who want to build inside a story world, not just a single book.
Film & TV makers
Directors, producers, and showrunners for the screen branches of the slate.
Creative talent
Designers, game makers, musicians, and creative technologists who can carry a story into a new medium.