Movies in the Metaverse, and Film NFTs in Web3 with DAOs
You may have heard that cult directors like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith are selling NFTs for their popular films, as collectibles and ticket packages with all sorts of cool things to own. How can new movie tech help you and indie filmmakers alike? Read on to find out!
Getting a film made is similar to founding a tech start-up, and while ecosystems are in place to help (like Hollywood and Silicon Valley), both are on the verge of being democratized. They overlapped in recent years with the rise of crowdfunding platforms, but it’s still hard for many creators to hire the people and raise the money they need. A chicken-and-egg problem exists, with those breaking in once finding it much easier to remain in the industry and try again.
Blockchain technology and the creator economy, including NFTs, DAOs, web3, AR/VR, and the metaverse, will change everything in the next 3 years. Below I’ll discuss a few ideas floating around the technosphere, notably:
- Shared Canon Ownership
- Interactive Experiences
- Camera Tech For The Masses
Shared Canon Ownership
Fictional worlds like Star Wars and Dune have long-extended series in to the dozens of works, with multiple authors over decades and several films on different platforms. However, even for a long series of feature films like the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition were only able to tell a portion of the tales from the canon. The Foundation by Isaac Asimov has 10 books spanning hundreds of thousands of fictional years, and would benefit from cinephiles helping the studios make more works after the first few are done by Hollywood studios.
Collectibles like toys and other merchandise have sometimes been bigger revenue generators after the theatrical release, for a franchise (see: Disney). NFTs expand this in to the digital world, for use and bragging rights in the metaverse for rare and cherished items. Film releases (old and new) can sell NFT content with some ownership rights, allowing people to “remix” the film’s scenes, events, characters (including 2D/3D animation rigging), settings, and sequels. Fan fiction and collaborative stories were a hit for novels on communities like Reddit, and TikTok remixing is wildly popular and entertaining for song and video.
Remember the days of “choose-your-own-adventure” books? The problem is the authors had to write every path in advance, limited by page count. Imagine a community crowd-voting system which dictates the plot direction of every story chapter for a new movie idea, and a generative AI-powered tool (leveraging GANs and a game engine like UE5) could “film” the scenes just-in-time as the community decides on the plot points. DAOs are similar, in that it’s a decentralized organization that runs autonomously, based on an agreed process. NFTs and Blockchain can have programmable contracts that pay out agreed royalties to a long-tail of owners with guaranteed, never-ending payout for the actors and filmmakers involved.
With all the new streaming services there’s probably room for one more, so this DAO Community could launch their own and keep all group-made films on their own private streaming service. Every time a film is watched, like the never-ending YouTube counter tracking billions of views over decades for popular videos, everyone who bought in to the NFT Film and helped it get made could get paid a little (from here to eternity, leaving a legacy as iron-clad contract in a blockchain with no “bad deals” or “losing ownership of the masters”).
But what about the true purpose of cinema, to enjoy and watch new films?
Interactive Experiences
Movie theaters were great because of the shared experience, groups dedicating time and money with like-minded people, watching something for the first time together and hearing laughter and screams shout out in the room. The lockdown put this on hold, with some experiences moving to “shared viewing” on platforms like Xbox Live and Netflix Party Mode (with mixed results).
Recently in the metaverse, films have screened watched on VR-Headset or screen as a form of meta-AR. This “screen-within-screen” experience was not found to be enjoyable — as it’s a cramped, noisy, distracting experience and you might as well watch fullscreen. This probably isn’t the future of movie tech, but a form of it might be.
Another way, imagine going inside your favorite movies, and even casting yourself as a character (with a recording to watch later and share with others). I’d love to dive in to the historical world of my favorite movie Gladiator, telling off Joaquin Phoenix to his face as my own version of Maximus. Maybe I put on an Oculus Quest headset of the future and watch the dramatic movie scenes play out from any angle I’m in the mood for, then grab a controller and play the fight scenes as one of the gladiators in the virtual Colosseum. With Unreal Engine 5 we see cinematic game cut-scenes and digital films merging like in The Matrix. I’d love to walk around Denis Villeneuve’s expansive new Dune universe for hours at a time, across all the planets and generations and virtually trying out some spice in an AR/VR virtual trip (picture the CGI visuals painted inside your goggles).
Can technology help bring more creators in to the industry, producing an explosion of great content and more films for us all to enjoy every day?
Camera Tech For The Masses
With RED cameras and then iPhones, it become accessible and affordable to film high quality digital video. With YouTube and now TikTok, it’s easy to share short video content with the world, and even make a professional salary and career out of it. People stream themselves gaming on Twitch, and now can paint their persona with a digital mask of any character they feel like while doing so (aka VTubing). Apps like Snap made AR filters fun and popular, and now you can find them on productivity business apps like Zoom and Skype.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will soon be able to scan reams of digital characters, and with tools like DALL-E 2 generate almost any likeness you can imagine, for any film world setting you can think of. So can Metahuman Creator (though these are starting to be recognizable with so much re-use). Props and sets can be purchased on the Unreal Marketplace, and acting can be performed by the same few creators with mo-cap suits and facial markers. With AI, CGI will get taken to the next level, all the way from simple images to animated cartoons and some day full Feature Films.
Our studio is filming an original work titled “Awake” this year, using the techniques described above, for a fraction of a major studio production. Watch out for it on YouTube in 2023!
To Be Concluded
Thanks for reading — we at CyberFilm AI and Synapz Productions hope to see many of these ideas and creators flourish in the next few years, and can’t wait to collaborate with you talented artists. Stay tuned for our first product release, which helps screenwriters and filmmakers direct and produce their own indie films for YouTube and TikTok. Finally, we’re happy to announce that CyberFilm AI is raising a pre-seed investment round. For interest please contact me on LinkedIn.
Further Reading
Top picture purchased from iStock (metamorworks)
Middle picture from PUREXBOX
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