Tokenomics of Film: SingularDTV’s Kim Jackson on Decentralized Entertainment
We sat down with SingularDTV’s President of Entertainment Kim Jackson to learn more about her vision of a decentralized entertainment industry.
Whether it’s through music, film, or even non-profit philanthropy, tokenomics offers a new way to approach the funding, creation, and distribution of media and art. This month, when SingularDTV launched token creation platform Tokit and decentralized exchange SingularX, it did so with a suite of progressive, provocative, and challenging media projects in tow. These far-ranging projects are leading by example in proving the potential of a decentralized entertainment industry.
SingularDTV is proud to confirm that all of our launch projects — the GRMTK Token, film projects Detained and Ye Ma Fen Zong, docu-series Dark Rainbow, artist consortium Liga De Artistas, and cherished non-profit endeavors Dancing Classrooms and ACE — have reached their fundraising goals, and can now move on to creating remarkable art and building the decentralized entertainment ecosystems of the future…
We sat down with SingularDTV’s President of Entertainment Kim Jackson to learn more about her vision of a decentralized entertainment industry.
SingularDTV has launched 8 projects. What ties them all together?
This November, SingularDTV launched its first round of technology applications: Tokit and SingularX. In order to ensure the success of those and lead this tokenized revolution by example, we hand-selected projects by artists who intrinsically have a decentralized mind and attitude. It was less about the genre of their stories at this juncture, and more about who they are as artists. The projects that we’ve launched with were selected because of who the artists are, and their inherent understanding of decentralized thinking. They also happen to have good track records and are wonderful creative minds!
Can you tell us about some of the launch film projects?
Yuting Zheng’s project Dark Rainbow is a docuseries about gay dating in China, which we thought was interesting and important to share with audiences everywhere. Khushnuda Shukurova’s Detained is about two siblings who land at an airport in the US to find Donald Trump’s “Muslim Ban” blocking their path. Puc Wei, a hotly tipped Chinese filmmaker that we’re really glad to be working with, is doing a love story between a boy and his car, a Jeep, and all the different adventures they go on together called Ye Ma Fen Zong. Through tokenization, all of these film projects will be funded and later released through EtherVision, our VOD application. We choose filmmakers not content. We’re not interested promoting storytelling, rather than selling content.
This new model of funding opens a lot of doors for filmmakers to make relevant and challenging work…
With tokenized ecosystems, you can tokenize your project and launch it on Tokit and Launchpad much more efficiently than the way things are done now. Because of the nature of being able to raise funds in a quicker and efficient way, you can jump on topics that are relevant now and not have to wait two or three years. If a story is trending and somebody is creative and organized enough to get their assets and story together and launch it, the community will respond quickly, and someone can get their funds and get going immediately. Hopefully, they’ll be efficient enough in post-production as well! It’s not all about the funding. You have to be an efficient filmmaker as well.
What’s the role that you take on with these films?
Certain projects that we’re doing at SingularDTV, we take on an executive producer role, providing an infrastructure and financing through tokenized ecosystems for film, TV, documentaries, etc. As a creative producer, I’ll be intimately involved in producing original content for the SingularDTV channel.
Are the tokenomics for every project the same?
The tokenization process, the economic models, are different for every kind of project — musicians, filmmakers, non-profits. The projects we’ve selected to launch with are examples of different tokenized ecosystems. For example, Gramatik is tokenizing himself, a la Bowie Bonds, giving his fans an opportunity to participate in everything he produces. A film project — like Puc Wei’s Ye Ma Fen Zong and Khushnuda Shukurova’s Detained — are focused on funding one particular project. Non-profits can tokenize their whole organization, and use the platform as a continuous avenue for funding their endeavors.
So it’s not just music and film projects that are being tokenized during the SingularDTV launch…
The other two projects we’re launching with are non-profit organizations, to show how you can tokenize the endeavors of non-profits. One is a dancing program for children called Dancing Classrooms, that teaches social and emotional learning through dance. It’s worldwide and there have been some wonderful films made about them in the past: Mad Hot Ballroom is an award-winning documentary, and then came the feature film Take the Lead starring Antonio Banderas and another documentary Dancing in Jaffa, which were both produced by Diane Nabatoff, a notable Hollywood producer, and really well received. Their program is so incredibly important, and as funding is getting cut all the time for public after-school programs, they constantly have to reinvent their story to raise funds to be able to help these kids.
ACE Programs for the Homeless, which is in its 20th year, is a New York company that develops amazing programs to put homeless people back into the workforce by teaching them work skills, giving them a paycheck, and lifting people permanently out of the perpetual poverty system in which they can help themselves. It’s an amazing program. And we’re very excited to offer them an opportunity to have a sustainable system of giving — tokenization — which we feel is a much more effective than the current standards for philanthropy.
What kind of projects are lined up further down the line?
We have lots of other projects that we’re working on that will populate Ethervision when it launches in early 2018. There is the Alex Winter documentary film about blockchain technology that’s currently in production, and a very exciting sci-fi TV series that we can’t say too much about right now. We have an animated feature, and several feature film scripts we’re developing. I’m constantly looking for seminal stories and projects and we’re also acquiring existing projects looking for a viable return on investment while tapping into their audiences in a new way. We’re constantly in contact with distributors and sales agents who are looking for a new and innovative ways to distribute and raise funding. Artists and production companies will be able to launch their own stuff on their own channels too — it’s an exciting new frontier, thanks to blockchain technology
A centerpoint of the SingularDTV content spectrum from the beginning has been science fiction. How do you see that playing out?
From an original content perspective, my goal is to produce sci-fi content that leaves us in a better place than where we started. Promising, uplifting sci-fi rather than apocalyptic, dystopian stuff. I think we have a responsibility to our collective consciousness to start depicting earth and humans in a more prosperous, positive place of being. If we keep showing ourselves as destructive and dying, then that’s where we’ll end up! As filmmakers, we have a responsibility to leave people in a place of possibility…
Read all about the various SingularDTV launch projects on the SingularDTV Blog…
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