In 2023, a project funded by the French National Center for Cinema (CNC) sought to improve transparency in revenue sharing within the film industry. With this goal, Kopek was created as a spin-off, with Titagone acting as the technical partner.
The team, including Denis Merigoux and Antoine Devulder, developed a prototype over one year, presenting a solution capable of handling the complex financial structures of film production.
Film financing and revenue distribution is notoriously intricate. Producers must manage contracts upstream (financing and agreements) and downstream (revenue redistribution over time). Multiple stakeholders are involved: co-producers, distributors, international sales agents, local authorities, private investors, and authors or performers.
Each contract defines a "cascade" of payments, with some partners recovering funds early while others wait, and distribution evolving over time according to thresholds and guarantees. The challenge was to formalize and understand this cascade: How can multiple bilateral contracts be combined into a coherent whole? Are all revenues correctly allocated over time? Does the cascade reflect contractual obligations accurately?
The Kopek team partnered with Titagone because of our specialized expertise in domain-specific languages (DSLs) and formal modeling. Our ability to transform complex real-world problems into mathematically rigorous, yet practical software solutions was essential for this project. With funding from the CNC (Centre National du Cinéma), our track record in creating languages that balance expressiveness with correctness, combined with our experience in financial modeling and verification, made us the ideal technical partner to bring transparency to the film industry's revenue distribution.
Titagone and the Kopek team approached this by creating a domain-specific language (DSL) to model all elements of the financial structure. Contracts could be expressed in a way that mirrored reality, yet generalized enough to cover various financing practices.
A calculation engine then executed the models, tracking distributions throughout the life of the film, checking for completeness, consistency, and correctness.
The result is a tool that empowers producers and financiers with clarity and control, enabling them to simulate revenue flows, verify contract compliance, and visualize complex cascades in a transparent manner. Kopek demonstrates how technical mastery, formal modeling, and a focus on usability can transform an opaque industry process into an understandable, auditable, and reliable system.
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