In my last post, I discussed my early tweets to the Tron community (starting the Summer of 2019) regarding the idea of a “dMovie” case-study for releasing tokenized media on BitTorrent, including a smart contract or dApplication that could receive and distribute BTT based on the “participation” of creators and seeds.

In this post I'd like to tackle two big elephants in the room…

1. The online community’s stigma and F.U.D. and;
2. The film community’s stigma toward torrent culture “ripping off” generations of creators by encouraging piracy.

We’ll take a deeper dive into film distribution later, but the TLDR is that torrents are traditionally the last place you want your content to end up because other buyers and platforms have zero incentive to pay for content that is globally available for free. Consider the film Avatar received over 21 Million illegal downloads within a few years of its release. You may personally feel, “Well, James Cameron is doing juuuuust fine.” But this ignores the thousands of day laborers who worked on the film and their royalties, health care, and pension earnings that are often based on ongoing revenues.

However, I want to be fair that there is also optimistic and historical precedent for uniting the artistic and digital communities…

1. John Mayer was one of several musicians who helped subvert the negative perception of early Napster file sharing by encouraging fans to share his music for free, and instead show their support through ticket sales and merchandising, “You can’t burn a t-shirt.”
2. In 2015, comedian David Cross offered a limited-release “BitTorrent Bundle” of his independent film, HITS, as part of his nationwide pay-what-you-want screenings.
3. Patreon has seen steady growth in active patrons and processed payments (50% year over year) so there is an audience who wish to directly transact with creatives to pay a fair price for new content.

This brings us back to my snarky tweets about tokenizing movies on BitTorrent. I have to be honest:

• There is a high probability that this first effort will fail.

• There a good chance this experience loses literally all potential revenues for the creators.

• It is likely two massive communities are waiting to say, “I told you so.”

But the upside is we have the opportunity to experiment with a revolutionary way to Release a movie and Recapture revenue for hardworking, everyday laborers...we just need a project that can risk everything.

What we need is a “Loss Leader.”

1. A brand new Title to exclusively premiere on BitTorrent.
2. Intellectual Property not beholden to a centralized entity/financier.
3. A micro-budget Title produced under contracts that would permit a non-traditional release.
4. A large enough cast & crew to test the smart contract, but not so large that it’s prohibitive to “onboard” everyone.
5. A filmmaker who doesn’t mind their work being labeled a “D” movie.
6. A filmmaker willing to risk all traditional revenue and awards consideration to negative stigma.
7. Acceptance of the distribution strategy overshadowing the film itself.

What we need is an idiot.

Allow me to introduce myself...

For 20 years, I’ve championed micro-budget, independent stories without traditional access to resources and audiences. Originally a presence in New York’s indie theater movement, I started creating branded content for the front page of early YouTube. I wrote and directed my first feature film by cold calling tourism boards to sponsor my team across three continents. Then I built a spaceship in a one-bedroom apartment to create an original sci-fi series and a VR Escape Room to announce the series at San Diego Comic Con.

Ashley Clements and I were approached to modernize Shakespeare’s Macbeth for the world of virtual reality gaming and crypto investing. Over the last 18-months, I have co-written, directed, co-produced, acted, edited, and taught myself 3D-animation and do-it-yourself motional capture to present the upcoming feature A Tale Told By An Idiot.

When the in-game characters begin predicting the future of a startup gaming company, an ambitious coder, Beth, sees an opportunity to seize control and escape the toxic "tech bro" culture.” Shakespeare's classic tale of tragic ambition reimagined in the e-world of Silicon Beach.

A Tale Told By An Idiot is the perfect case-study for tokenizing independent film:

1. An original Title that I control.
2. Public domain source material, adapted by myself and the star of a major digital franchise.
3. Produced for a micro-budget, mostly crowdfunded.
4. A roughly forty-person cast and crew (of mostly long-time friends and collaborators) who I can personally onboard.
5. I proposed the label “dMovie” and love the decentralized movement.
6. I have often released my work in untested markets.
7. My team supports my history of “fiascos” to invest in the “social currency” of the project.
8. The cast and crew of A Tale Told By An Idiot are mostly micro-influencers and creators with their own online communities who will (hopefully) be more reception to a new form of distribution.
9. If successful, I have interest from financiers for a slate of dMovies.

So who wants to join this idiot and tokenize Macbeth for a new generation of storytelling and distribution? I'm open to all collaborations to make this possible and welcome the community's efforts to truly make this a decentralized process!

What do we have to lose?
@brendanAbradley