Top Secret - Ppl Pleasr

hi [Music] everyone i'm just gonna play a quick trailer so that we can all get situated and i'll start my talk wait is there a sound oh wait oh it's over here sorry let's try that again [Music] okay i'm gonna talk about it now um sorry it's like i'm just trying to like close this or like exit full screen why can't i exit full i thought you said it screen a mirror it came here can we mirror it instead okay that's better we're mirroring now cool okay so hi everyone i'm people pleaser or i go by the artist's name people pleaser i dabble a little bit in nfts crypto dows and web3 in general for those of you who aren't familiar with my work i used to work in visual effects and feature animation and i was working on the blizzard cinematics team before jumping into making short little animations to promote d5 protocols during the magical summer that we all remember as defy summer so let's go back to the beginning where my love for all things storytelling and art began i've loved drawing basically as young as i can remember and like many other kids in my generation i grew up watching like anime and disney and pixar movies and just as starry-eyed as wally is here on the screen my love for animation and good storytelling reached new heights when i was in college and i watched wall-e for the first time and i realized this could actually be a career and so then i taught myself basically how to make 3d animations and i worked at various visual effects studios applied to pixar like 20 times and got rejected but still i wasn't totally satisfied it wasn't until i worked on the diablo 4 cinematic and i watched its premiere at blizzcon in 2019 and saw the audience's reaction that i realized what i was what i really wanted wasn't to work on like the biggest hollywood movie or um you know animated film but more importantly what mattered was how this art form and storytelling made people feel it didn't matter if it was like two hours long or 30 seconds long it just mattered if it made people feel something another thing that i learned that people love is easter eggs and symbolism and so did i so flash forward to 2020 i lost my job and i was casually browsing crypto twitter and then i realized there were so many interesting narratives and culture around crypto and defy but none of which were being told in the form of animation and so thus i started using this as my canvas and then i made a bunch of short little 30 second animations with basically every d5 protocol and each telling its own story never forgetting to include easter eggs in each one flash forward ending so then last year in march i made the infamous unisop v3 animation and it tells the story of how uniswap brought life to defy and i obviously filled it with a bunch of symbolism and easter eggs of crypto and injected it with visual inspiration from anime and the art of mobius and more and then i auctioned it off as an nft and um i mean i i guess i must have made people feel something because it went viral and sold for a lot of eth um but um you know i can still remember actually logging onto twitter that day and reading everyone's comments and reactions to it as if like i was teleported right back to that room in blizzcon with the audiences it was probably one of the most memorable moments of my life except that back then they were cheering for something that i was just a small part of but this time they were cheering for something that i directed and uh it also became the genesis of pleaser dow and kicked off a whole movement of like crowdfunding and dowse that summer speaking of crowdfunding my second drop that year was a series of nfts that were used to crowdfund the ethereum documentary which is currently being produced right now the crowdfund was a huge success and we raised over a thousand eth in 48 hours and actually inspired many others to crowdfund for films in a similar fashion uh and then later i put all of crypto twitter on the cover fortune magazine made forbes 30 under 30. collaborated with steve aoki and sold art at sotheby's yadda yadda i guess you could say that it was a really busy and lucky and eventful year for me and so that has led a lot of people to ask me the question what's next for you or what are you working on now so in the attention economy where attention is the only scarce resource i often think about how incredible it is that despite our shortening attention spans and busy lives we still dedicate our undivided attention to watch movies tv shows longer form content basically the problem is that making this kind of content is extremely expensive and time-consuming and even i can't guarantee that anything i make is always going to sell as a 101 nft and be as successful as the unisop animation so currently when you make a short film you have to spend all this time and money and effort into making it and the best you can do is either go through find traditional ways of funding it or you just bite the bullet and throw it out in the universe um put it into film festivals and hope that some something picks it up basically and so um i'm always like trying to innovate and like push boundaries and it definitely felt like the nft market was sort of getting over saturated with just like profile picture projects and also just like four second loop animations that you know you can call art and so you know i've been spending a lot of time thinking about this problem and this is where the idea of shibuya came to me so it's basically a web 3 experiment where longer form content is free to watch but monetized on the blockchain to incentivize further development as well as viewer participation so shibuya is basically the culmination of everything i've learned in my career thus far from crowdfunding to monetizing engagement to empowering creators so shibuya is a decentralized video platform that hopes to change the way films and longer form content is funded and created named after the crossing the concept is that shibuya is a place where everyone can come and watch all kinds of different content on the screens but if you want to decide what goes on the screens you have to pay in order for this to work the content itself must also be good and in my mind there was only one person in this world that i would have wanted to collaborate with on this and his name is mache kuchiara he's a super renowned artist digital artist and director he's produced concept art for the last of us game series um avengers live action ghost in the shell he's like literally a living legend and having been a long time admirer of his his work actually has largely influenced and inspired my own and luckily for me he was crazy enough to be into my idea and thus we began building the vision that is shibuya the first film or series that we're launching on shibuya is called white rabbit it's a web 3 interactive series that tells the tale of going down the crypto rabbit hole it pays homage to many themes in our industry and it's going to be full of easter eggs and symbolism which is on brand with people pleaser and it's basically like anime meets black mirror meets love death and robots meets crypto the concept is simple the pilot episode will come to a point where the main character is faced with two choices behind each door is an alternate ending to the episode in order to watch one the viewer will be able to mint what we're calling producer passes which are nfts that you stake to cast your vote so after you stake your producer pass you're rewarded with some white rabbit token which are fractional ownership tokens of the final film series then you can continue watching the alternate ending that you picked the white rabbit tokens are distributed on a bonding curve so for example somebody who participates in episode 1 will be rewarded more tokens than someone who participates in a later episode and an on an episodic scale to incentivize early voting somebody who votes at an earlier time will also get more tokens than somebody who votes later voting will conclude once the reserve pool of fractional tokens has been sufficiently distributed for that episode meaning that a certain level of engagement has been met for that episode so when voting concludes everyone who voted on the popular side can unstake their producer pass and get the nft back as a souvenir and most importantly you know anybody who voted will get the fractional tokens and the people who voted on the winning side can get a little bonus of a little bit more fractional token the design of the producer passes for white rabbit are inspired by traditional japanese wood block prints and there will be a different one for each episode the idea is for them to be like a movie ticket stub so that there can be a paper trail in your wallet of all the episodes that you participated in and it can be useful in the future when people are seeking out taste makers for example so what we're trying to do here is something that engages community to be involved and interested in the project direction but are also rewarded for participating beyond just being entertained you can rally your friends to vote in you know the outcome of your favor and there can be many different ways to gamify the voting mechanics and how it will affect the plot and each creator can come up with their own ways to do this in fact the ips don't even necessarily have to be a choose choose-your-own-adventure model but it can be purely linear and episodic as well so on the roadmap is obviously you know when we launch which is not yet soon when we launch we'll cont you know based on the reactions the first episode if the engagement has been met then we will continue to develop white rabbit and work on the next episode and so forth um we're also going to collaborate with the gen score because those guys are building um wallet history and wallet like on chain identity stuff so you know you can imagine in a future episode where based on your on-chain identity you're actually viewing a slightly different version of the tv show than somebody else and obviously you know we hope to get more ips on shibuya and maybe it could not be limited to just videos but you know this model could work for like comic books as well and each ip on shibuya will be like sort of like their own little dao or community because of the fractional tokens and so you know there can be like token gated discords for episode discussion and things like that and then lastly we have the um what we're calling dynamic credits which also is basically like a leaderboard and it's going to look a little something like this where we just it's always going to be like um updating in real time based on who has like the most producer passes and things like that we obviously couldn't have done this without our phenomenal team one of which is actually in the audience with us right now so we have jackie who's a former developer at instagram and also an artist himself and we have gif a former engineer across different big tech and is also an nft degen and then we have alex who's a former stripe engineer and yc founder so together we're building shibuya which is a place where cultures and ideas can meet in one a collecting and exciting place and the ips built by creatives and artists will empower them to freely build their creative visions with the support of their fans and allows them to bypass complex and often impossible ways of funding film projects traditionally and last but not least i'm gonna show you guys a sneak peek of the pilot episode of white rabbit [Applause] it's pretty short [Music] um okay so literally that's the first time i've ever shown people this to watch more you have to buy a producer pass um so that's all for my presentation um i guess we have like a little bit of extra time like just in case there were any questions uh yeah well i mean obviously the dream is for it to be permissionless you know we are a very small team right now and you know we haven't taken any investment so you know like i've not taken any like vc funding or anything we're gonna like hopefully self-fund with the first sale of producer passes um but the hope is that you know as our funding grows like we can hire more people and then so that you know multiple ips can be developed in tandem um so that's like you know the goal right now but obviously yeah the goal is for it to be a permissionless platform kind of like vimeo or something like anybody can just like go and upload their creations and then you know if your content is good people are going to want to like support it any other questions um our target launch date is march 1st um so yeah we're hopefully going to launch the site on that date and then that's when we're going to sell our producer passes as well anything else okay well that was my talk i hope you guys enjoyed it