The name HALLSONG draws inspiration from Heorot, the famous mead-hall in the epic of Beowulf.
Heorot is a gathering place for heroes. In the mead-hall, gifts are given, oaths are sworn, and friendships are strengthened.
Heorot is a bastion of civility in a violent world. Haunted by the monstrous Grendel, the mead-hall cannot be abandoned without abandoning the cause of society itself.
HALLSONG invokes the songs and poems recited in places like Heorot since the early days of man's history, reminding us of the role of stories and mythology in readying the soul for great and challenging deeds.
Principles
1. Great stories have deep roots
The greatest stories are grounded in the fundamental questions of the human experience. But modern media often takes the opposite approach, producing a content mill more impressive for its volume than its product.
From Aristotle to Shakespeare to Simone de Beauvoir, we’re the inheritors of a grand tradition—a dialogue of eons, on topics as broad as freedom, beauty, love, virtue, justice, and change.
Hallsong intends to source stories and inspiration from humanity’s greatest works, and the most dramatic true stories ever told.
2. Find the right funding
Hallsong has a consequential mission, and intends to produce great profits. We don’t see these values as incompatible.
Profit orientation can helpfully incentivize financial discipline, scalability, and appeal to profit-oriented funders and partners.
On the other hand, the profit motive can be dangerous. Many early-stage founders try to ‘hack the market’ by exploiting fads or flipping projects on short time-frames, resulting in products that no investor, team, or customer really believes in. Hunger for financial survival or a huge series A can distract from the fundamentals needed for staying power.
For this reason, we’re starting by seeking mission-aligned funders, some of whom will want to see Hallsong become a business. Once a profit model is discovered and implemented, profit-oriented funders will be able to assess us on different criteria.
3. Experimentation
In its early stages, Hallsong will experiment with a wide variety of collaborators, opportunities, technologies, partnerships, and approaches to production.
This approach will be exploratory, but must never be vague. It aims to measure progress by the completion and testing of real prototypes, each generated by a specific thesis about what we’re building and why.
This engineering mindset means not just thinking to discover, but building; enhancing capabilities and vision by using current capacities in real situations to learn lessons about storytelling, distribution, and audience appeal.
4. To enlighten and entertain
Some believe that things like history or philosophy are essentially boring, and that entertainment is always mindless. We reject this dichotomy.
Plenty of media is boring because it is mindless. And stuffy intellectualism represents a complementary failure to let great ideas and stories sing.
Shakespeare, Homer or the Bible can be dense, but they’re equally full of human drama, astounding scenes, and thought-provoking lessons. In the right hands, they’re captivating. Those who are exasperated by lists of battles on Wikipedia may still grip their seats during Braveheart (1995) or HBO’s Rome (2005).
We want to see what’s possible here.