Now you can ‘read’ your favourite shows and movies

Olyvia Rakshit loves good stories and wanted her kids to read more. She had this idea — what if all their favourite Netflix shows were converted ‘quickly’ into readable picture books? She wanted to create a technology that would inspire children to read more and started a startup called ComicFlix.

“While it started with children, ComicFlix evolved into a much bigger idea and enabled fans to re-engage with their favourite content, movies and TV shows. I was excited about re-telling popular stories in this new format using automation. The goal was to build a scalable platform that could generate lots of content for popular fan-based properties —and that’s how it all began,” Olyvia starts the conversation.

After collaborating with interesting customers and partners across the world, the team realised that most films or shows render well in the ComicFlix format. “There’s no question really about ‘which’ content to do. We are doing diverse work and are very excited about that — from political parties telling their supporters of the great work they are doing using our format, to corporate brands using this as an advertising medium to sports channels wanting to explore sports clips in this format. The use cases are diverse and beyond movies which are great. Our process is simple — based on the customer’s needs and vision, we either do an original content version or an abridged replica of the existing content (be it a movie, documentary or a TV episode),” she says.

There were various pivots when she launched ComicFlix. Building the technology that has never been done before was the most significant challenge. “We overcame the technology hurdles after a few false starts. Next big hurdle was educating the market and finding the product market fit. With a new technology, there are always questions about how to monetise this and whether users will consume this new form of content. There’s also the challenges of distribution rights, IP of the content owner, etc..While we have been fortunate with some early customers, we are still in the process of addressing these challenges,” says the tech expert.

Generally, the team takes two weeks to convert a feature-length film (two-hour duration) into a finished graphic novel ready for market launch. They usually come out as two issues of a comic book series — a total of 50+ pages. “We work closely with the content owners to ensure that the narrative and the flow of the story are to their liking. If it’s an original story, we storyboard the whole narrative and upon their approval, we gather the right images or video clips that go into the comic book pages. If it’s a replica of a fan-based-content (movie or TV), we run it through our summarisation platform and ComicFlix editors further edit the story as needed. Oftentimes, we change the dialogues and the sequence of the original story arc to give the graphic novel a different feel. This is all done after discussing with the content owner,” she tells us.