NFTs in the Film Industry

NFTs and blockchain technology are the game changer in most industries dealing with intangible content. But there’s a lot of new exploring about how NFTs can shake up traditional intangibles like music or movies.

TL;DR

• Making a movie is a staged process: development, pre-production, production, post-production, and distribution.
• NFTs apply to several parts of movie development stages.
• What´s left to see is if there´s space for the smart contracts to formally deliver work-related arrangements within a movie production team.

Movies are… well, they aren’t new. Cinema is about a hundred years old. It saw the light toward the end of the 19th century and continued to grow, adapt, and take on new genres throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

To every new screen that suddenly appeared after the second half of the twentieth century “the moving picture” managed to adapt pretty well. Think about it: from the screen in the darkroom to the screen on your parents’ TV, to the screen on your computer, and now to the screens on your phone or tablet. Granted, Youtube videos don’t count for movies (or do they?) but the “moving picture” concept still holds.

Of course, making an excellent video on your smartphone isn´t the same as making a movie. Making a movie is a staged process that typically goes as follows: development, pre-production, production, post-production, and distribution. And throughout each of the stages, there’s a lot of signing-off going on.

From casting actors to play the part to working with the screenwriters that write the story, choosing wardrobes for the different scenes, scouting locations, buying (or renting) equipment, finding a team of assistants for the director, and finding assistants for the director´s assistants (yes, these exist) and, ultimately, getting the paperwork done for distribution. Oh, and don´t forget all the finance rounds with producers.

The point is, movie making is a lot and after the past couple of years, the NFT boomed a myriad of projects looking to converge the field of film and distributed technologies. This fusion sprouted new ideas for the movie-making process; from crypto-funded movies to DAOs looking to become the producers of the future.

“Using blockchain technology and smart contracts throughout the production and distribution process could allow companies to easily and transparently trace how funds move in and out of a project, “something the traditional film industry really struggles with.” — Goldfinch COO Phil McKenzie (Hollywood Reporter)

NFTs are applicable to several parts of the recently mentioned movie development stages. But the first appliance for NFTs in this field is for the production stage.

There are a number of projects making significant progress toward enabling movies financed mainly by the use of NFTs. In some cases, NFTs are collectibles of the movie looking to get produced; once sold, the money collected gets distributed for all the required expenses of the film. Crowdfunding is still the indie way to go about movie producing, but selling NFTs as sneak-peek collectibles to promote your project seriously disrupts the catch-all social media FOMO-posting.

The pinpoint for any NFTs project is an engaged community and community building is no easy task. Sure, there are a bunch of channels through which to connect with newcomers but you have to go much farther than merely onboarding users. What binds them together is a common vision and a narrative upon which to build.

That´s essentially how “The glue factory” made its way onto the headlines. Not only was it financed through NFT token holdings but through the show’s discord server, the community was tasked with writing assignments that were later integrated into the show itself. In other words, the community immediately became a part of the narrative.

A bit more daring approach to NFTs in the film industry is releasing a movie as an NFT and “Zero contact” was the first of its kind. Starring Anthony Hopkins, this film bet on the power of distributed ledger technologies in several stages of the movie-making process.

The funds collected for movie production came from 11 NFTs that amounted to a little over 90K USD. Rick Dugdale, director, and producer of the movie made clear that there is a runway for NFTs not only to fund movies but to distribute them as well. Zero Contact will be distributed through Vuele.io. Similar to Film.io DAO, Vuele is an NFT platform where viewers can collect, watch, and trade exclusive, limited edition feature-length films and collector NFT film content.

What´s left to see is if there´s space for the smart contracts to formally deliver work-related contracts within the movie production team. With all the signing-off mentioned above, smart contracts could potentially replace word-of-mouth agreements, common to traditional movie making.

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