🤷 What do we do?
We provide what is necessary for storytellers to thrive together and become successful with their projects.
Academia da Trama (AT) provides a world-class community (global network), transformational content, partnerships & discounts, tools, technology, online and offline events to creators with ambitious projects at an early stage to increase their chances of thriving. This is just the first stage of support that we offer to projects throughout their lives. They leverage you while you are starting.
Here our goal is to help you in the first phase of your project. This usually means: you will get to the point where you have built a project impressive enough to present you with investors to produce your story, eventual buyers, or even a team that will help you to be independent.
🧠 More than Money
We provide you everything
you need to help you thrive, and we don't ask for a % of
your projects in exchange.
All venture capitals, studios, streamings, producers, distributors provide you only money or some combination of money and help. In our case, money is by far the smallest component. In fact, many projects that will be born in this community will not need the money at all.
💡 What happens in 10-weeks?
The most important thing we will do is work with the storytellers/creators on their projects and ideas. We are Storytelling experts, and we spend much time figuring out how to create stories that people love.
So we can see quickly the direction that a small idea can be taken (until it becomes a great story and business), or we can see when a story that looks good is vague. The questions in this stage of life of the projects can vary from simple things like: "How should I call my project?", To frighteningly ambitious questions like: "How do we put together a long-term plan for world domination with a Star Wars-style franchise?". Over 10 weeks, we will help the storytellers/creators find initial answers to all these questions.
The second most important thing we will do is help the storytellers/creators to deal with investors, buyers, and their teams. Yes, we can make presentations to investors, but that part will be easy. We will spend much more time mentoring the creators to present their projects to investors and how to close a deal after generating interest.
We will provide not only advice but also protection; potential investors are likely to treat you well if you come from AT because the way they treat you will determine whether, in the future, we will direct business towards them or away from them.
We will also guide projects we invest in to open and properly manage their companies, with all the necessary legal and corporate documentation, avoiding legal time bombs that can cause serious annoyances and delays later. We will introduce storytellers/creators to lawyers we trust. We will regularly help projects find and hire their first employees and co-creators. We can help with intellectual property issues. We mediate disputes between storytellers/creators. No project starts with idealizing, believing they will need it, but most do at some point. The kind of advice that we will give you literally cannot be bought.
🤓 THE FORMAT
We believe that creators are more productive when they can spend most of their time immersed in their projects.
Four times a year, we will select several projects. To enroll in the Academia da Trama, fill out an application form. We will invite the most promising groups of storytellers/creators to meet online and make the selection decision immediately after the conversation. Most of the storytellers/creators in each project we accept should be 100% dedicated during the initial period of 08 weeks.
We organize weekly events online during the program, and we invite a specialist in some aspects of storytelling productions and businesses to speak. Typically, speakers include film professionals, book authors, venture capitalists, movie directors, journalists, and executives from TV, Studios, and Streaming companies.
Speakers usually end up advising or investing in projects they find at the events. About eight weeks later, we will hold Pitch your Story Day, where all creators can present their stories and projects to a special audience of investors and the press.
The Academiada Trama can occasionally be described as an “acceleration field,” but this is not really accurate. We don't want to accelerate, we want to help things happen. We can become an investor in a small number of projects. Academia da Trama is a community with a great network fellowship. There is a strong spirit of helping each other.
So, whatever your problem is, if you need people to test and criticize your story/project, or need a place to stay in another city, or advice on creating characters, or a connection with a specific professional, there's a good chance that someone on the community will help you.
🧐 Our Philosophy
We believe that creators are more productive when they can spend most of their time immersed in their projects.
We want to provide an environment where you can focus exclusively on developing your projects. We will know that we have managed to create a good environment when many storytellers/creators tell us that the first eight weeks of Academia da Trama were the most productive period of their lives.
We will try to interfere as little as possible in the projects we accept. We will offer much advice, but we will not force anyone to accept it. We know that independence is one reason why people want to start their own projects in the first place. And, frankly, it is also one of the reasons why projects are usually successful. Investors and creative labs who try to control the projects they invest money, time, and/or resources in often end up destroying them.
😇 Why are we so flexible?
Our goal is to be the preferred source of initial resources and investment for Storytelling projects and do what is right for everyone. All great storytellers/creators know each other.
Therefore, if the groups we accept and/or invest in feel that they are making a bad deal, no one will want anything from us in the future.
And investors at a later stage also tend to get to know each other, so if the projects we accept and/or invest in end up failing in any way, no one will want to invest in them in the future.