Filmmaking is a highly collaborative artform involving hundreds of makers, with production budgets unlike any other creative profession. Worldwide, $250 billion gets spent yearly on film/tv production and licensing — a giant industry that requires a lot of human coordination and, therefore, an ideal candidate for DAO’s.
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Experiment
Part 3: Git for Film Making & Screenplays as NFT’s
Part 4: DAO, Payouts & Legal Structure
Part 5: The Future of Film MakingJoin our fresh Discord here: https://discord.gg/h3DYAZd8yP
Why is a film DAO interesting economically?
Only half of the produced movies turn a profit, but once created, they can be replicated with zero cost and resold many times with different licensing models. The production company and key talent usually receive residuals: a percentage of all profits when the content gets sold, televised, streamed, or shown on an airplane. For example, Seinfeld (the show) has been off the air for 20 years but pulls in about $90 million a year, just from residuals.
So there’s potential to win big — if you’re the star or producer. Anything else, and you’re just work-for-hire, meaning you don’t own anything.
So we have a $250B industry that requires a lot of human coordination, where craftspeople receive abysmal pay, clamoring for better incentives, shared ownership and permanent infrastructure.
Imagine we could run this process on-chain, creating the infrastructure to make movies, transparently and collaboratively, granting every creator a stake and an on-chain resume. Plus, a permanent record of how cultural artifacts are made — from idea to realization. A gold mine for film students and artists alike, a film museum of the future.
This image starts with a new dApp, a Git for filmmaking.
Screenplays & films as NFT’s
The cool thing about screenplays is that they are a semi-finished product that can be sold, sometimes fetching $2–3 million per sale. Not bad for a 90-page document that could have been created with a simple typewriter.
And they all just start with an idea. Let’s say we want to make a film called Little Satoshi’s. The plot is based on 16 orphans who’ve been secretly adopted by Satoshi Nakamoto. Their adoptive names are the seed phrase to unlocking the genesis bitcoin wallet, fearing their lives when the public finds out and giving rise to internal conflict when they meet each other.
Here’s how this can be made into a movie through a dApp
1) The idea, a piece of text, is minted as an NFT and the user is rewarded with a stake in the DAO, let’s call it $CREDIT.
2) Let’s say 10 other people mint other movie ideas, and all earn $CREDIT. These can be used to ‘stake’ a story, and with this, ‘remix’ the initial NFT to contribute more details to the story. A new branch in Git, where user 0xf1ilm remixes our story and writes a synopsis of 500 words, expanding the story to three acts:
TradFi executives conspire to kidnap all 16 orphans, but Anons all over the world act together to save them, invoking a giant mechanical Shiba dog with laser eyes, destroying Wall Street and flying of the Mars to create a new crypto colony
(A crypto colony on Mars? Excellent idea for another film, let’s fork it!)
3) Repeating this process, anyone can create a new branch, with new story elements, that earn $CREDIT for their contribution. And so, the story moves from 500 words towards a treatment and a finished script.
Every branch can be voted by other writers staking their $CREDIT. It’s their vote of confidence that this story will work out. In exchange, they receive entry to the subDAO that will be created when the screenplay is sold.
4) The finished screenplay is minted as an NFT, to be auctioned off and raise funds for production. As all changes and contributors are tracked, an ownership table can be made. The twist here is that when selling the NFT, all buyers+creators automatically form a subDAO, with the funds that they paid for the NFT. This is the production budget — making the creators, fans and financiers all part of the same DAO.
With this NFT sale, the original idea NFT would also appreciate in value. Just imagine you could buy George Lucas’s idea that led to Star Wars — in the same way you could buy Jack Dorsey’s first tweet.
5. Just like the screenplay, the movie can be developed in collaboration with many creators. For example, Directors or cinematographers can pitch their vision for the story by staking $CREDIT and submitting their pitch.
See part 2: The Experiment for an outline how a short film can be produced.
In the end, all contributors and subDAO members end up with a stake in the end product, that can be sold, distributed in any way shape or form, with the details of this deal being public too. A direct mainline that takes an idea and turns it into audiovisual art, for always visible by storing it on-chain.
Excited? Join our Discord and help build this: https://discord.gg/h3DYAZd8yP
