My general thesis of doing anything in life has been to define a goal, ship an intermediary, measure the outcome and iterate. Then to make this loop really really fast! So much so that I have realised, I might just love setting up this system more than running the iterations.
With this life philosophy, I wanted to make the same for storytelling. Text based storytelling almost already has this approach with writing. You think, you write, you read, you iterate. You never go out of the “zone” of the story to do this.
Lets think of slightly more complex storytelling setting? Like making a presentation. Now things get slightly more complex. You think of a story in your head and then start maybe putting headings in your slide and dump ideas. You do this for all slides and then come back to adding more details to the same and now maybe you have a version of “text representation” of slides ready. And this is when you have to switch context and now go and find/create images for your slides. So you go an abstraction level lower from your thought process to make/find an image. You do this n number of times and then you go through your slides again. You move around things and maybe do another round of image search/creation. After you do this is probably the first time you do a slide show view to see the slides in a wholistic view and then try to see if your story is coming across well. If not, you go and repeat the process. Another thing then you start doing is adding animation to parts if the storytelling needs it. But in all of this, you probably work between 3 layers of abstractions - the core story, the image/content detailing, high level vibes.
Now let’s make a 1-minute short story video for YouTube.
You start with an idea — maybe a scene that came to you in the shower. You open Google Docs to write a rough script, paste a few references from Pinterest, and maybe sketch a crude storyboard in PowerPoint or Figma. Then you rope in a couple of friends to act. Someone brings a DSLR, someone else uses their phone. You shoot in three different locations because one had bad lighting, one had background noise, and one just felt better.
Then you dump everything into your laptop — folders full of clips named final_final2.mov. You open Premiere Pro or Final Cut, start cutting. Add music from Epidemic Sound or some free YouTube track, adjust colour in Lightroom, fix audio in Audacity. You export your first cut, watch it, and something feels off — the pacing, the tone, maybe the acting.
So you go back. You reshoot a few lines. You replace a track. You re-edit. You export again. Then again. By the fifth cut, you’ve spent two weekends and twenty open tabs later, and the story that once felt alive now feels like a checklist of edits.
What started as a burst of imagination has turned into managing files, formats, and feedback loops across half a dozen worlds — writing, filming, editing, audio, colour, export. Every jump between them chips away at the original emotion that made you start.
Moving between so many abstraction levels takes you so far away from the core story that sometimes you even forget what is the real story. And this conceptual distance between the outcome and the thought is what I always try to bridge first. My brain intrinsically turns to process optimisation in everything I do to reduce this gap! And that is the thesis of Frameo — a product I’m building at Dashverse!
Reducing the gap between thought and the output in storytelling. Today I am chasing the video world because I think thats tractable to me based on resources I have today. Ideally, I want to be able to build any digital media - interactive media/games/AR/VR etc.
So here are a few core philosophies I am trying to chase in this product for me: 1. Always keep reducing the distance/time from thought to outcome. Keep trying to automate/hide intermediary steps and keep eyes on the prize. 2. Adjustable Controllability - Understand the control needs of the user at every step and adjust accordingly. If the user wants super fine grain control, give them that. If they dont, abstract it. Tool should move across abstractions as much as possible, not the user. 3. Composability - The tool should flow with the creator’s thought process and remember what’s been decided. If a scene is set in a café with violet curtains, it should stay that way — automatically. Every element — characters, scenes, styles, models — should be reusable and remixable. Creativity compounds only when the tool behaves like a system, not a silo.
That’s what I’m chasing with Frameo — a loop that keeps creators closer to the story than the software. It’s the same instinct that’s driven everything I’ve built: reduce the distance, hold the intent, keep the loop alive. The rest is just iterations.