Creative Cake Batter: A dispatch from deep development – Project Update #1

In my last post, I wrote about resolve.

About what it looks like when people decide, quietly and without ceremony, to build something instead of surrender.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Mostly because I’ve been living a much smaller, much less visible version of it — holed up with my creative partners doing the thing that nobody in this industry talks about with any honesty.

Development.

Real development. The kind where you get out of town, turn your phones mostly off, drink more coffee than is medically advisable, and spend three days staring at whiteboards and each other’s faces trying to figure out what you actually want to make and whether you have any business making it.

It’s not glamorous. It’s also, if you’re doing it with the right people, one of the best things in the world.

We’re circling three projects right now. I’m not going to tell you much about them yet — not because I’m being coy, but because half-baked ideas are like soufflés. You open the oven too soon and they collapse into something embarrassing and flat.

What I will say: one is a YA horror-comedy that I’m convinced is going to terrify and delight in equal measure. One is a techno-thriller anthology that takes a blowtorch to internet culture. And one is the project that probably scares me the most — something that leans directly into my documentary & journalism background, a project about how news gets made, and the long, slow way that machine helped grease our slide into this authoritarian shit-sandwich we’re in.

Three very different animals. We’ll pick one to go first with.

The process of narrowing it down has been, I won’t lie, genuinely joyful. There’s a particular kind of energy that happens when you’re in a room with people you trust — people who will tell you when an idea is bad, who argue with you because they care, who also know when to shut up and let something breathe. That doesn’t happen by accident. You earn those rooms. And when you’re in one, you feel it.

Here’s the other side of that pancake, though.

The financial reality of making serious content right now is something, like most people, we’ve been staring directly in the face — not with dread, exactly, but with the particular sharpening focus of a chef who just realized there’s no cream and dinner’s in twenty-minutes.

The economics of the kind of projects we make are shifting fast. The windows are narrower. The buyers are spooked. The money that used to slosh around fairly freely has learned how to swim upstream.

And honestly? It’s been weirdly galvanizing.

Because when the conventional path closes, you start looking at the terrain differently. You stop asking “how do we get the system to fund us” and start asking “what can we build ourselves.”

Which is a much more interesting question.

Here’s where my particular career history starts paying unexpected dividends.

For a long time, I’ve been atom-smashing filmmaking and storytelling with digital platform development. Broadcast, studio, online — I’ve spent years living at the intersection of these things when most people in each camp thought the other was the enemy. That cross-wiring turns out to be useful in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

So, we’ve been quietly building tools. Real tools. Apps that help us with market research. AI agents that have automated tasks which used to eat weeks of our time, which now happen while we sleep, which means we get to spend our actual hours on the creative work — on the stories and the voices and the structure that no algorithm has figured out how to care about yet.

We have technology partners in San Francisco who are as genuinely good at this as anyone I’ve met, and between all of us, we’ve built things that have changed the way our little content shop operates. Things that make me think about what might be possible for other independent creators.

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I’m not going to say more than that right now. Again, not because I’m being precious — but, because it’s still cake batter. You’ll know when it’s done. And when it’s done or at least firmly outlined with some testing), I’ll share it widely and with enthusiasm, because I think there’s a real chance it’s actually useful to people trying to do what we’re trying to do.

Resolve doesn’t always show up with sirens and smoke.

Sometimes it shows up as three people in a rented house, arguing about story structure, building things nobody asked us to build, betting on ourselves with the particular stubbornness of people who have decided that the alternative is worse.

That’s where we are.

Stay close.

P.S. - Nothing I’m exploring with this new direction means I’m abandoning my mission of helping mid-career producers/directors/screenwriters in developing, packaging, pitching and selling their projects into this chaotic business… or helping them to find the escape path out.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, showrunner, journalist, and development executive. PitchCraft publishes dispatches from the intersection off storytelling, and the business of making things. Subscribe now and get updates and pitch playbooks in your inbox every week.