BPS 383: How to Raise $2 Million Using NFTs with Arel Avellino

categories micro budget, indie film, market, and studio film. There's no reason to get coverage from a reader that's used to reading tempole movies when your movie is going to be done for one hundred thousand dollars, and we wanted to focus on that. At Bulletproof Script Coverage, our readers have worked with Marvel Studios, CIA, WME, NBC, HBO, Disney, Scott Free, Warner Brothers, The Blacklist, and many many more. So if you need your screenplay or TV script covered

by professional readers, head on over to covermiscreenplay dot Com. Well, guys, today on the show, we have a very unique filmmaker, someone who is able to do almost the impossible. He has been able to raise two million dollars or actually over two million dollars using NFTs for a brand new IP or intellectual property. His name is Errol Avelino, and Ero reached out to me to tell me his story about how he was able to raise this money using NFTs.

And if you're not familiar with NFTs, please check out episode four seventy one where I go into a deep dive into what NFTs are and bitcoin and blockchain and the whole technology and how independent filmakers can make money with it. And when I heard Eryl's story, I said, I have to get these guys on the show. I

gotta let the tribe know how he did it. And what he did is pretty ingenious and a lot of the things that he was able to do for his new IP, we can translate that for independent filmmakers, and he wants to bring more independent filmmakers into his blockchain, into the blockchain that he has been working on. And if just all sounds a little Greek to you, just hang out for a little bit longer. Take a listen. We're gonna explain everything in our conversation, so let's without

any further ado, let's jump into it. Please enjoy my conversation with Errol Avelino. I'd like to welcome to the show, Eryl Evelina.

You come from the indie film world. So tell me how you got involved in the indie film world. And whin gott screen earth did you were you in?

be a filmmaker. I didn't even know that there was like a different classification filmmaker called an indie filmmaker. I only learned that trying to just find out what the path was at all. Right, and it's a very clear path, right, you know, you have you know, you go to school for four years and you do the you know, uh, work on on on set for for free, for free or nothing.

Like I would talk to people on sets and I was like, everyone kind of just invented how they, you know, made this sustainable. So talking to enough people, I know started interviewing people who are in just different cities and stuff like that give them excuse to talk to me.

And after talking with enough people, I just started to realize that the path is essentially just go do enough things, continue to offer yourself up to enough people, and you'll you'll start to develop what starts to look like a career, but it's always going to kind of be this like freelance lifestyle. And so that kind of actually started me on a journey in business, which ultimately kind of led me to where I'm at right now. But we can kind of break the story up a little bit too.

making a movie. I'm like, hey, i might still make a movie in there, But at the same time, it's not going to be like, you know, somebody else is gonna have to go make that movie. I'm going to just help that person out with that movie, help with

script whatever. But anyway, so punk being is is Yeah, I followed your work followed a lot of the guys who have been in the indie space, just trying to speak to people who are up and coming, just because the thing that was most interesting to me about indie filmmaking is it was an art form that had to in some way be a business because it requires collaboration, perhaps more than most other art forms, you know, save a few others that are kind of like in the

media space, this is one of the like art forms that requires the most collaboration. So you have to have it be a business otherwise, you know, you can't, you can't do it. You know, you think about how many times a painter punches out at painting. It's so many times. But a director, how many movies does he punch out?

as opposed to a paiter or a musician or a writer. Uh, it's it's a pretty brutal excess, but we love it. But we love it.

just you know, trying to sell widgets. You know. Oh, we're you know, trying to do some type of other service other than you know, creating things for people.

fungible existed before. But we just, you know, call this thing a non fungible token because some developer said, you know, this makes the most sense to call it this, because that's great, right, It is a non fungible token that basically you've probably explained it before in other episode. Yeah, for anyone who's hearing us for the first time. Fungibility is literally just if I have a dollar, that dollar is always the same dollar, Like, it doesn't change in

value from one dollar to another. You can have any dollar and it will always be worth the exact same.

was minted matters. You know what the what the card's overall value in the marketplace matters, So the the almost the serialization of it is what really matters. So you see this a lot with collector stuff, and it probably collectors are some of the most familiar with non fungible assets because they've literally been dealing with these, you know,

from the get go. Shoes to one person might be a fungible asset, but shoes to another person might be a non fungible asset because you know, uh, the the shoe collector is looking at, well, which print was the shoe? Did the shoe come from? You know, what is the you know, basically going into the specs from every single shoe, not just you know this particular uh, not just this particular brand or even that it's a shoe, this specifically the manufacturing line that this thing came out of.

Now in the collectibles world, if it's a printed for if it's a printed baseball of a baseball card of a guy you've never heard of who batted you know, one hundred and fifty, it costs the same to make him as it did to make a Mickey Mantle rookie card. It's the exact same cost, but the values associated with that non fungibility into it, which is the collectible aspect of it. And that's the difference between us. So that

brings us to NFTs. So now we've actually brought in baseball cards and comic book ideas into a digital space. So the cost to mint as they say a non fungible token. Argue, listay to argue, We'll say, still five cents, but the value of what has been minted is in the eye of the beholder, based on the collectible market. Fairware of saying that.

a DVD, yes, I'll go down that rabbit hole. If I buy a DVD, which very few people do anymore, we have moved mostly digital. I can sell that DVD to in a yard sale, I could sell it on Amazon, I could sell it on eBay, like I truly own that DVD. But if I were to buy a digital copy of that and now it's on my Amazon library, I can't sell it back to Amazon like I now have that stuck in my library. I couldn't sell it

to another person. I couldn't give it to a friend, like it is stuck in my library and it's trapped there. And NFTs actually give us the way to make that function more like an item, so rather than it being about you know, essentially just you know, you let you have this digital thing and you got from that guy. Yeah, now it has to stay on that guy's website and you can only go to it when you go essentially

to that guy's house. That's kind of a bad deal, right, right, So now we're treating these like real items that you really own, which is you own it. So now now as you own it, you can go sell it to you know, one of your buddies, you can sell it to somebody online, or you can give it to them, doesn't matter, it's yours. You do with it what you want.

educated myself. I watched every movie I could, get my documentary on as I could, so I became, you know, fairly well versed in this world. And yet it didn't click for me until I said, oh, this is a digital baseball card.

it's a digital baseball card. And and the NBA is literally made digital Eclipse now with NFTs, and they're doing they're doing, Okay, they're doing and major League major League Baseball is starting to get into it. It's a whole it's a whole new world. And for people who don't understand why, because if they if they're if you're holding onto a book or a DVD, I hold on this like Okay, this is something I can hold on to.

This is a product. But to mentally think about that book as a digital item, it's hard for certain people to grasp that concept because it's it's beyond their ability. Whereas the new generation growing up who's been playing Roadblocks, who has been playing all these role player games, who are literally paying sometimes thousands of dollars for a digital acts that they now own that makes them more powerful

inside of the game. That's a digital item that there's So it makes sense to that generation, but not so much to the baby boomers, if that makes sense.

the most here is that the innovation itself. There's a ton of hype, there's a ton of hype, right, but the innovation itself that this is a digital item is the massive part of the innovation, not just the you know, you know, if we're trying to get all technical, like the non fungibility asked, like, if we try to talk about what NFTs are, I think if we keep the conversation on that, hey, these are digital items, it starts to simplify it for everyone else, and then they can

start to understand the implifications or the implications of that.

Because again, like I think, what made it click for even people who I know who have been in the cryptospace a long time, very educated in blockchain more than I am, when I told them that what I'm trying to make is a game that when somebody buys it online, Like let's say that Steam is selling it, which by the way, they said they won't they won't sell it, but we'll come to that whatever versia Steam sells this game, somebody, somebody, the person who buys it should also be able to

sell it themselves. And what's even more is me, as the developer of that game, or any indie developer who makes a game, should also get a cut of every single sale of that of that item, that digital item, which is something you cannot do with a physical item. Correct Well, at the same time, it's now possible with the digital stuff, but every other rule of what's possible

would be physical stuff. As far as being able to do a secondary marketplace is also now finally true a digital stuff, which has been a huge user experience problem with the digital space and also held back a lot of indies from being able to really take advantage of their community, essentially helping to market this thing. Because sometimes you get a movie because somebody recommended to you or gave it to you or sold it to you, or you get a game because somebody gave it to you,

sold it to you. Blah blah blah.

yours and you can resell it. And it's just like if you bought a refrigerator, you can resell a refrigerator, A CD or a movie is no different. But in the digital space, we haven't been given that option up into this time. Like when you buy a movie on iTunes. I've got movies on iTunes. I can't resell it. I can't sell that same movie that I bought for ten bucks for two bucks later if I want to in a garage sale or in a digital version, or in

a metaverse garage sale or something like that, which will happen. Yeah, you know, imagine if there will be eventually metaverse metaverse to garage sales. Because there's metaverse real estate. Dude, there's people buying so much metaverse real estate since and that's another thing you can't even comprehend, Like how much did

you just spend? I just saw this whole thing. Was it on I think it was in sixty minutes or CBS or something like that, where they're doing metaverse sale real estate deals and Snoop Snoop Dogg bought a big piece of real estate and then the value of the space is next to him just blew up. And then people bought it because why because they want to be neighbors with Snoop Dogg in the metaverse it was just like, it's hard. It's really hard to grasp because it's so

new and so revolutionary that people can grab it. But we can go down the NFT and blockchain rabbit hole for at least another fifteen days. So the reason I wanted to bring you on is what you've been able to do with an IP. So can you tell me how you used NFTs to launch your new IP strange clan.

has been creative for other people. So when we were watching kind of like the development of n f t s and you know, how people were using them, one of the things I kept telling him and I couldn't commit. I felt like I couldn't convince other creators of this.

But one of the things I was telling was like, hey, this is like a launch pad for intellectual property, because I'm seeing board apes now all over the place, So why like, that's that's brand new intellectual property that if somebody were to then take that and now make a board a TV show now make like now, people will recognize it, right, and the value of that asset's going

to go up. Similar to Snoop Dogg, We've been next door, Like, the more the more things you begin to attach to these brand new pieces of intellectual property, the more it starts to get really interesting. But I wasn't seeing Pride do that. I was just essentially seeing a ton of like, you know, spammy looking uh uh. You know, images come out with no vision of like where it was supposed

to go after this. So we started talking about what would it looked like if we did an NFT launch and where we do it and and all that stuff. Because ethereum uh, the too many problems with the ethereum uh, it thought the there's a there's lots of different reason why there's a problem with ethereum, but one of them being that you if you bought something for one hundred bucks, you might spend two hundred dollars in fees, so that's

kind of an issue. Plus also the that area is very saturated, so we looked at several places to to try to do this and that was a huge factor into it, and I'll get into that, but basically what we wanted to do is we wanted to create something brand new, completely unique, and we wanted to be something that was unique the second you saw it. So we came with this idea for strange plan because we had

a guy on our team. He's a concept artist for us and he really leaves art for for our team as a whole, and we've started to really grow out our art team underneath of him. And he we just said, hey, man, like where this is totally exploratory, Like we really want to try to do something here. Come up with some images and we want to do like animals, We want to do animals that look like people, and we want this to be like kind of a fantasy esque thing, but we also wanted to look really uh like lots

of different styles present in it. And me and my brother did a we did a talk together just essentially like every single day we kind of have this where we're bouncing ideas back and forth, and one of the big conversations was what's the name going to be? And because we kept talking about having like, well lots of different uh, lots of different looks and styles and feels kind of at the start of it it, uh, we we had this feeling of like, well, it's really it's

really just a strange group of people. Because originally the idea was, actually, we're going to pull in more artists, So we wanted this style of our characters to look really wild for a second, so that other strange looking

styles that came in would also match up. And the more we looked at the idea of actually collaborating with other artists, the more we realized we were it was it was mainly for us to do kind of a community thing where all of our ips started all come up and maybe we do something where we try to make sense of why they're all connected. But it actually turned out that our IP took off and we really didn't need to like pull in other i ps to make that work. So, uh, going back to it, we

came with this idea of strange plan. We said, hey, it's a clan, it's a family, it's a it's a it's a tight knit group of people, and there's kind

of a strange environment about the world. And the more that we let that idea play, the more the So you'll see over the last several months of like art development on our social channels, that idea has grown into a much more mature I p. At the very beginning, at the launch of these n f ts, this looks like really raw, like the beginning development of what even

this IP is supposed to supposed to be. And that's what's strange about the the ed FT world and the way that people are treating these because it's almost as if they are looking to the future of what it's supposed to be, very similar to how people treat kickstarters, but instead of it being you know, all about getting a T shirt or you know, getting a hat or

getting a copy of the movie. Instead they're they're taking the messy artwork that you're producing or or the things that you're producing, and eventually they'll have to eat more mature over time as as people get used to seeing a lot of the same styles, right, But they're looking at that and they're looking ahead and saying, Okay, how important is it going to be that this with the vision of where the creators are going. How important is it going to be that I own a piece of

this intellectual property. I own a piece of the starting launch point, like the first Pokemon card, as it were, like if Pokemon cards came first and launched that IP, it certainly launched it in the US. But if Pokemon came first, Pokemon cards came first and really launched that IP.

This is like the Pokemon card and owning the first Pokemon card, especially if projects do it right, because that's kind of what we're trying to say is we're only ever going to do ten thousand of these, only ever going to do ten thousand of these, So immediately that sets the value of right, if we're successful with making a great looking game, then the collector's cards that we're making at this side of things will always be very

rare and always have value on a secondary marketplace you regress.

massive ip that the Star Wars so similar? You're doing that similar for a game, but easily this can be translated into a film as well. It's properly so okay, So you also told me that you raised a substantial amount of money. How much did you raise with this NFT and launching this ip?

any space, under any circumstances. But for an independent game from unknowns is the equivalent of trying to raise two million dollars for an independent film with unknown actors, with unknown filmmakers, with unknown producers, and everybody else involved as well. So that is a feat that caught my eye when you when you reached out to me, how did you? Well, first of all, how did you because look, man, I could,

I could tomorrow. Tomorrow, I can come up with some strange pictures and some cool characters, which there are billions of out there right now and especially in the NFT space. How did you target the audience and convince the audience on your vision. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. That was you were able to do this fairly quickly. This was not like over five years.

started some of the art. We opened up the Twitter in September, and I believe one of our first posts on the Strange cater was September like early September, September one, September second like with literally within the first week, and then uh September, October, October, October fifteenth. It was when we launched. We launched the first time, and we actually broke our website, so we actually had to launch again. We were open for less than an hour, probably thirty minutes.

We broke the website. We we took a week to fix a lot of problems.

a lot about, and then the IP came important. Okay, so let me just get specific. So the the place that we chose to build on is Cosmos. So what for people who don't know you know, you have Bitcoin, you have Ethereum, you have Polka Dot, you have Cardano. Well, Cosmos is within like the top twenty five blockchains. In the reason nobody was doing at ats on Cosmos. The reason why we said that we needed to go to Cosmos was one It was actually it was the blue ocean.

And I think you've talked about blue oceans with oh yeah, yep, yep, it's a blue ocean. There's not there's not a lot

of people who are over there. But then also very different from other uh blockchains, was Cosmos reminded me of where the ball is going versus where everybody is paying attention to the ball right now, because Cosmos is not all these all these blockchains, Bitcoin, Ethereum, there what are called layer ones where basically this is the blockchain, like if you want to build on it, you're basically saying, Okay, I'm gonna try to take a piece of this, I do a little copy code and try to make a

weird little copy of it that borrows security, borrows a lot of different features from this thing. But it's also kind of like a Franken sign off of the original blockchain, because blockchains were not meant to build these Frankenstein blockchains off of them. So what Cosmos is is it's basically the Internet of blockchains. It's not really a layer one blockchain. It is a thing that you build blockchains on because

it was meant for that. If you think about Bluetooth and how your phone can connect so seamlessly to your Bluetooth headphones, even though they were made by completely different people, the reason is because there's a standard that says, oh, every time Bluetooth, every time we're trying to enable Bluetooth, this is the standard for Bluetooth, and this is how we're gonna make this connection. So where I saw the ball going and where my brother like, honestly, here, I'm

gonna actually give all the credits to Lex says. Lex easily proved the idea to me, he said. Errol I thinks is the place to pay attention to because of interoperability. There's a lot of smart people over there who are doing some really cool stuff. And he was basically telling me,

like this concept of bluetooth. I got it really quick because I was like, the way that this is going reminds me a lot of the dot com boom, and the way that we saw the Internet develop was you had all these disconnected websites, but even before that, just creating the standard of you know, the Internet as a whole, it was important to even get to that place. And then things have become a lot more connected as we have progressed, so so that I can log into a

website using my Facebook login. Right. So as we develop these standards, the standard is going to be what's really important. So I saw Cosmos as hey, they're setting the standard, and so if we build here, we actually should be able to connect to anybody else in the in the blockchain world. So we build here, we might not ever have to build anywhere else. Again, the people who are in the Cosmos space there they are. And also it's green, like I, and this is important too. I think a

lot of people it's green. We're not dealing with a lot of high energy usage. You uh, you also have uh the uh, the community as a whole is actually very positive. I like that about them right away. But anyway, so the community that's there, they believe in this idea that this is going to be the Internet of the blockchains. Everybody, all the blockchains are out there are going to try to conform to the standard because they're talking about it now,

and ultimately that standard has to happen. And this is the only blockchain that's really said, hey, we're setting the standard. This is what the standard is. You know, go out and make your blockchains.

not terribly hard. And the people who are coming into the Cosmo space now, including us, are helping, you know, essentially set up marketplaces so it's easy for people to make make NFTs and mid fts without having to go and build you know, essentially your own blockchains, stuff like Juno, stuff like star Gays and then us.

your IP. He was like, let's put it over here, and they're just like, oh my god, you're over. You're over our party. We're going to support you purely because you decided not to go to the cool kids party. You came over to us because we're we're cool, but nobody really knows that we're cool. And that's how and and you kind of leveraged that, and that's what built the speed up so fast, as opposed to you going to a general marketplace.

And that's exactly what that filmmaker did. They made over a million dollars in a weekend by selling rights to his movie. That's what you basically did with This is a fair analogy.

in the Cosmo space. We talked with the influencers, which is a big it's that that's a that's a word that's probably a little flexible here because literally they only had like two thousand followers or three thousand followers, but that starts to add up over time, and then you start to talk to more people or get to know more people who have actually a lot of influence in

the space. That seems actually pretty subtle because they don't necessarily have the follower count that makes you think that, but they know all the guys because they've been around for you know, years, and everybody respects them in the space and the second and they can give you an introduction to the guy who actually has you know, twenty thousand and thirty thousand or fifty thousand followers.

were very happy. They're like, dude, I'm just I want to support you because it's a school or did you have to like, hey, yeah, I want a piece of the action. How's how does that work?

the white list it. So white list, by the way, within the n FT world is just essentially like hey, you you not everybody's going to get the chance to even buy this thing, and we're making sure that you're on the list to be able to even get into buy it. There's a lot of exclusivity there, so we can make sure we get them on the white list and certain things like that. But at the same time, there isn't a there isn't an agreement essentially that like hey, you know, you do this for me, I do this

for you. It's really trying to develop that relationship with them because when we talk to a lot of these guys, it was you know, hey, we love what cause US is doing. We want to make sure that we are supporting that ecosystem and adding a lot of value to it.

So they're all about that, because you know, when you're an influencer in a very tight arena, it feels like pulling teeth to get people to even notice this space that you're talking a ton of out whereas you know, somebody just comes to you and says, hey, already love what you guys are doing. I want to come in and support that. I want to bring my project into that. That gets people really excited. And it just so you guys know, this isn't a ship that's like saled, like

if you're listening to this, oh it's sore. You know we're so we're extremely early. Even you don't have to go find your own cosmos if you were to bring a project into Cosmos right now, the community within Causes is extremely hungry. You can't be a prick, So don't go in and be like, all right, guys, I thought there was a lot of money in here, so fork it up. But at the same time, there's way more opportunity than you're probably used to in most other avenues.

Because I've tried to launch projects on Kickstarter like Indiegogo, I've had to ask for investment money. I raised a one hundred grand on Kickstarter, and I felt really good about that one time, and I raised uh or I was a part of the raised for two hundred grand on a but it was all investment money. It was coming into this film and it was just like pulling teeth.

It was an absolute nightmare. Launching Strange Plan was one of the easiest things I've ever done, and that was the most amount of money that we have ever seen, especially for a brand new IP.

stuff like that. But they Freddie and those guys they started in like twenty eleven, two thousand and ten, and even then they they were like, oh yeah, man, we figured out how to hack the front page. So we would do stuff to get ourselves on the front page. And that's how they got to like eleven million followers over the right. But you can't do that now, like that's that's gone, you know. But but that's kind of like what you're able to do here because it's just so.

it was still new for the platform. So if you even add the space within Cosmos or any one of these marketplaces starts to fill up, there's a lot of new things that you can bring into these spaces, especially when you think about, you know, well, who is it that I'm that I'm talking to that that needs to buy into this and I would just start that exploration because we had no idea whether or not this was

going to do well. It was all exploration, all trying to say, you know, all right, let's just have this conversation with them, you know, let's continue to pay our vision. But our vision it was always for that for that

U two three months. Our vision was always kind of like only about a month out really for what we were like really trying to plan and so everything was you know, making decisions on the spot, really trying to cultivate, you know, what is it that we're we're ultimately trying to bring to this and listen to people when they said, hey, I love what you're doing. I think that if you

just did this over here. So for example, we didn't even consider the idea of trying to launch our own token because none of us were like particularly blockchain developers. We just happened to have some people who had a gist of it. We had no I caused to launched

our token. People convinced us to do it, and now we're about to do it, and that's a much bigger money raise for the stuff that we're trying to build because now we're getting way more ambitious as far as like the types of things that we're trying to take on.

I don't know, that's a great place to start. I would say if you, if you're wanting to do that project, think more like the uh the toys that made us, or like brand like ips that actually have you know, a longevy to them, because when you think about the toys that made us, that's something that could go on for a long time and continue to go on have a life of its own.

twenty ten before any of the staff appened. Now it is not. It is a pretty it's pretty bad ass. Is a pretty bad ass idea. But if I would bring this to them and go, looks, I want to make a feature film of this, I need two million dollars to generate revenue. I've got this person involved in, this person involved in, this person involved, and I've already packaged a nice you know. I've got this actor who's thinking,

this actor's committed, this actor's committed. I've got this Oscar winning producer on, I've got this Oscar winning screenwriter on, you know, and I create a really cool package and go, how would you approach that. I'm not doing this, by the way, so no one emailed me, But I'm just using it as a nice Yeah.

brands from the past. That's cool, there's something about that, right, But for yours, it's that's easy to talk about, right. Okay, So step one, you got to be on Twitter. If you're not on Twitter, then you're not talking to the community, especially when we talk about cosmos, but really all of crypto uh talk and discussion and and where the real influences are like, that's Twitter. I was not a Twitter guy for the longest time because I freaking hate like the tweeting.

got this plan for where this is going. So mine is valuable because mine has all these things versus yours, which is just a copy of mine. That's it. Okay, So I would say that step one is go on Twitter. Step two is people got to start asking you, okay, discord, what's the discord? You want to go follow the people who are following influencers within the blockchain and try and build on I would obviously push towards Cosmos because I think that's one of the greatest communities that's out there

as far as crypto goes. And you want to go follow the people who are talking about projects, especially ones that are in the NFT world, because the people who are looking at those they not only want to support the ecosystem, but they also believe in the power of NFTs and what that technology is bringing to the ecosystem, which is most of the guys, to be honest, you

rarely gonna miss. Then from there it's all about one continuing the dialogue with the community as far as like you know, uh, this is what we're doing to lead up to the launch. Uh, these are the conversations that we're having. I have. We have somebody hired on our team who literally her only job is to every single day have coffee in the morning with our community answer questions and then uh tweet out updates and uh, you know,

post discord updates, you know all that stuff. So there's a whole process of engaging with community while you're going through this development process, but then leading up to the launch of just the n f TS that first like two months, let's say, it's you know, make the artwork, uh, be posting little bits of the artwork. Uh, find ways to collaborate with the influencers, doing giveaways, potentially giving people

whitelist spots on onto your n f T launch. And I mean all these are very like community engagement oriented things. But that's that's that's where, that's where I would lay the groundwork. That's where I would say that that's the that's the foundation point of it.

We called it a virtual event platform, and uh. We wanted something that we could show like, hey, this is the power and the complexity of what this thing could actually do. But we wanted to be very like, uh uh customer focus. So we're like, let's build a game on this thing, because if we build a game on this thing, I think that people will people come to the game not knowing all we're doing, and then they'll be attracted to what is that we're doing with this platform.

So the game itself was kind of like always part of the plan. So when we priced out what our NFTs were going to cost, one we knew they were going to be the playable characters, So that was always from the can. We made a ton of artwork around what the playable characters were. And then I've been by I've been mentoring another guy who mentorings. A mentoring is

a big word. I would I would say that I've been talking with a good friend of mine who has a pretty big audience that he wants to launch an NFT collection too, And I've been giving him this same council, like, you know, these should be playable characters, or these should be access points, you know, into a community, depending on whether or not he wants to go down the route of makes game or whether or not he wants to give people access to just a community.

card into a private community. And if you don't have that access card, you don't get in. It doesn't matter how many times you try to copy that n f T and mint it yourself, it does not matter. You cannot get into this community unless you had that n FT.

unknown ip. But because I've seen this, I've talked to other filmmakers who've you've gone on to the main NFT platforms and they made a little bit of money with it, and some of them have sold their distribution rights through n f T s and you know, all of that wow, all of that world. But it's so early on it's hard to even fathom how that it's gonna work.

At least have that. And then when you do your agreements and stuff with actors and stuff, you know, I would say, try to pull those guys into the private community at least for you know that's on period Q and a stuff like that like that should be part of the agreement. The second thing is is you have to watch out for language that insinuates unless you're ready to do this, insinuates that this is going to be a security. So this is what we're dealing with right now.

Be real careful. Yeah, this is what we're dealing with right now, because we're now talking about our our NFTs are totally safe. Now we're talking about I mean it's all that we're offered any like uh profits and stuff if you own the n f T s or anything like that. The h The main thing that we told people was this is what we're building. This is going to be the starting price. You know, the we never speculate on what the future price could be. We let

other people speculate on that. And but the second you say that, hey, you're going to have the profits from X, which a lot of people, even Gary Vee has been like, you know, hey, if you if you're a music guy, if you make an nf if you make your song into an n f T and then just share all your profits from that, you know, uh, you could make you can make a ton of money doing that. Yes, if you're also ready to you know, make it, agree with the SEC and label this as a security, which

you can totally do. They're down with it. They'll let you do that. The only issue is is are you ready to go hire that lawyer? You can and you can do it. In the verse and you get and by the way, this is not legal advice. It's not financial advice. Yeah, of course not of course, yeah, one

hundred hundred pcent entertainment is just my opinion. But what you can do is you can say, I'm going to launch this project, we are going to share the profits, and you build into your pricing and your budget, like whatever the prices that you gotta sell each individual at TAT with the understanding that you're going to pay for the lawyer who's going to help set you up with the sec to be able to do this legally.

Back in ninety seven, but unfortunately my server bills were six thousand dollars a months. I really yeah, yeah, that didn't really cost.

cents an acre. Wow, he owns I think about like ten or twenty thousand acres on the ocean in northern California.

And so like the Internet, for example, the Internet, like, yeah, you have things like regulators, I mean literally, So this is what we're dealing with is we talk to our lawyer probably three times a week, and every time we do a conversation with him, not only do we get an update on how things are going with us setting up some of the regulatory needs, because there's very there's a reality in which we if in order for us to launch the token that we're applying to launch, we

will have to be uh, we will have to be a security there's a reality in which that happens. And so the crazy part is though is that every single week we have a new update about what the government is still figuring out about whether they want to treat it as a security or what they even consider to be a security when it comes to crypto and there's constant pushback. So we're literally at the bleeding edge of a lot of this stuff, like you're saying. And so when it comes to when it comes to some of

the unknown unknowns, there's a lot of potential upside. You just also have to prepare for the very worst case scenario. And that's something that we just knew going in was Yes, we're gonna we're gonna have a lot of money suddenly come in, But then how do we also protect our butts when while the government is still trying to decide how things are supposed to go. So always back to that stuffing it.

in a secondary marketplace. That will become a thing in the future, no question, because it's just people will start demanding it, and then films will start, you know, a studio will one studio will do it. The studio that's the scrappy one in the corner, like Canon films back in the day. I don't know if anyone listening. I just did an episode with one of the founding guys

from Canon who was one of the directors there. He basically he directed American Ninja so back in the day, and he was telling me, is like, the reason why Cannon blew up in the eighties was because the studios were scared to get into VHS. So because no studio wanted to put their movies up on VHS. There were all these video stores opening up across the country that needed content, needed product, So all the independents started coming in and that's when you had you know, not The Terminator,

but The Exterminator and all these other b movies. But they made so much money. I mean, the American Ninja ip was massive around the world. And then after the studios like well wait, wait, wait a bit, Well, we can't let these guys make all this money. And then the studio showed up and then started throwing their weight around. So that's what's gonna happen here too. Right now, everyone's dipping their toes. Look, Quinn, Tarantino just dipped his stoes

into NFTs and and got his hands slapped. I do. I'm on, I'm on team Tarantino on this because I think he does have the right to do whatever the hell he wants to do with that. But yeah, yeah, it's but I even said it on the show. I'm like, imagine if Tarantin or bust out an NFT.

whole thing. So it's a really interesting conversation to be had. But like I always said, imagine if you know, if George Lucas busted out an NFT for Star Wars back in the day, or Rags of the Lost Arc or any of the Spielberg's movies or any of Cameron's movies or any of that kind of stuff. You know, it's it's only a matter of time before we have the avatar n f T s. You know that, you know James talking through it and there's two of them. Yeah,

is that gonna be valuable? Same way Mickey Mann l Rookie cars valuable, man or a Babe Ruth card is valuable. Is because there's there's there's a scarcity of it, and so on and so forth. But again, dude, we could keep talking for hours. Brother, I really appreciate you coming on the show and explaining your process on how you were able to raise two million dollars for a brand

new WIEP. It is a really interesting way of looking at how to raise money for independent films, especially in a world that it is getting tougher and tough for independent films to get financed. Is this going to be for every project? Probably not? But can it be? But can it be? Can it be you know, framed in a way like that could sell in a Cosmos earn ethereum or in another community, another blockchain community.

much the builders. The builders became a very small percentage. There's a massive amount of builders within the Cosas community and not quite as many hype guys. So the people who The people who are talking right now are people who they're very level headed. It's a very cooperative community because they just need more people present in order for

mass adoption to kick in. So the more you find communities that have that kind of sweet spot where they they're in this collaboration mode, they want to be able to connect with you know, other audiences, get more attention all that stuff. That's a that's a massive sweet spot for a filmmaker to come in and say, you know, I want to do this documentary or I want to do I want to actually launch an IP because that's

the other thing. Two is there's lots of people out there who are trying to be the person who's gonna launch that first major n FT documentary, and I've seen quite a few raise their hand and say yep, we're gonna jump in, We're gonna be once to do it.

of tropes he was trying to bring together. But Grand Budapest Hotel, it's a whole other lab. Love to Anderson, I love Grand out of this Hotel.