Nfts
Documentary interview on the Nouns rose float
For many, the term “NFT” now evokes little more than a neon haze of pandemic-era memories about easily deceived online speculators who lost millions buying drawings of monkeys and stick figures. But a new documentary implores cryptocurrency newbies to give the a highly criticized technology a second chance.
“Shark, Pickle, Cone” follows the team Stoopid Buddythe animation studio and production company best known for “Robot chicken” as it designed and built a float for the 134th Rose Parade in partnership with Nouns, a decentralized autonomous organization (commonly known as DAO) that auctions NFTs and uses the proceeds to fund art projects.
Translated into simple terms, Nouns works as a form of crowdfunding with a few extra steps. The decentralized company uses an automated system to produce a new AI-generated artwork and auction it every day. The images, which all feature a character wearing pixelated glasses, are sold as non-fungible tokens that allow buyers to track ownership of a unique digital asset. But while jokes about how sole “ownership” of the digital image can be negated by a simple screenshot are inevitable, buyers understand that they’re not actually spending thousands of dollars on an image.
The real value proposition that continues to drive Nouns prices higher is the ability to participate in the governance of the decentralized company. All profits from Nouns NFT sales go directly into a treasury containing tens of millions of dollars. Money from the treasury can only be spent on creative projects, and a wide range of designers, filmmakers and other artists can submit proposals to have their projects funded. Anyone with a name is allowed to vote for or against each proposal, and any approved project automatically receives its funding through a blockchain algorithm without any interaction with human gatekeepers.
In a recent conversation with IndieWire, “Shark, Pickle, Cone” director Neil Berkeley, Stoopid Buddy co-founder and executive producer Eric Towner, and executive producer Chris Waters (who is now Playground’s chief product officer Pictures but developed the movie as an executive at Stoopid Buddy) spoke about navigating the NFT roller coaster ride while filming his film and why the many controversies surrounding cryptocurrency haven’t dampened their optimism towards blockchain technologies.
The Stoopid Buddy team is the first to admit they didn’t fully understand the appeal of NFTs when they approached Nouns to fund their float, but they weren’t about to turn down a new one source of financing in an increasingly hostile Hollywood landscape. to creators. While the company had tried its hand at NFTs in the past (co-founder Seth Greene had his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT stolen in 2022), its founders claim that the real reason for their collaboration with Nouns was the opportunity to receive what appeared to be free money to pursue a creative enterprise. They decided to present the collective with the most ambitious project they could think of: building a float out of flower petals for the legendary parade and capturing the experience in a documentary.
“I was really fascinated by this community that had a treasury but didn’t have a boss, that was funding interesting projects,” Waters said. “I was head of development at Stoopid Buddy, and this seemed like an interesting opportunity for us to do what we do best – which is create weird, strange, and kind of sticky content – and ask someone ‘one to finance it. And that was purely my fascination. It was, “Whoa, there’s treasure, and can we get some funding to do something weird?” Let’s do it!”
The float and “Shark, Pickle, Cone” were funded by Nouns’ treasury, and the team emphasized that the freewheeling project was only possible because the online community was willing to take ambitious creative initiatives without worrying about profit margins.
“We knew what Nouns wanted was attention and absurdity, two things we trade in,” Waters said. “We thought that the juxtaposition of this new technology and this new brand, which was less than a year old at the time, with one of the oldest institutions in America (the Rose Parade), we found that really funny.”
Having tackled projects as varied as producing “Robot Chicken” and making costumes for “The Masked Singer,” Stoopid Buddy was no stranger to working with talented craftsmen on complex builds. The float design they settled on — which featured an anthropomorphized shark, a pickle, and an ice cream cone wearing the pixelated glasses that adorn every Nouns NFT — struck a balance between the digital aesthetic of NFTs and the analog roots of the studio.
But of course, no story about NFT culture in the early 2020s ends entirely with a happy ending. After the massive crypto boom at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, hot money flowing into the NFT market quickly dried up. Prices of major cryptocurrencies fell amid high-profile scandals like the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, and countless NFT holders realized that the digital art they had spent thousands of dollars on now had no value.
“There was obviously a lot of good that came from it, like discovering artists. There was sort of a renaissance of art,” Towner said. “At the same time, as is always the case with new technologies and as this is a new frontier, it was also riddled with scams. And I think that’s where the polarization comes from.
Crypto enthusiasts who take a long-term view of the technology can now look back with a laugh at the Wild West environment that formed in those early years. But watching an industry collapse amid billions of lost dollars is not a fun experience when you’re in the process of producing a positive documentary about it.
“Shark, Pickle, Cone” stands out as one of the most nuanced cinematic depictions of blockchain to date, devoting as much time to the artistic potential created by the technology as it does to the bad actors it enables. But the team isn’t afraid to laugh at the sadness they felt when everything collapsed around them.
“I know I did it,” Waters said when asked if the team ever worried about being dragged into something unfortunate. “Because I wasn’t someone who really followed the trajectory of crypto in its early days, from 2010 to 2022, that was my first experience of a bear market. And it was so disastrous. And it wasn’t just a bear market, it was a bear market driven by some really bad headlines around FTX. Lots of scams, lots of people doing it for the wrong reasons. And it was really scary to think, “We’re making a movie about an industry that’s getting bludgeoned by the media.” »
Media coverage of the crypto crash has prompted the Stoopid Buddy team to re-examine its anonymous backers with fresh scrutiny. But the deeper they dug into the name structure, the more convinced they became that they had found a positive corner of the crypto community that wasn’t a scam. The structure of Nouns’ business ensured that the owners made no profit on their NFT sales and that the money had to be spent on creative projects. The funds were distributed digitally without any type of centralized decision maker, making it effectively impossible for an individual to take the money for themselves and run.
“I think what carried us through was that throughout this time we had access to the founders of Nouns, who are all anonymous. And we had seen the structure of the DAO and saw that they weren’t making money. So there was no rug to pull! » Waters said with a laugh. “It was truly an experience. 100% of the proceeds go into a treasury, and the only way to spend that money is to vote for Noun holders. So everything is very transparent and open.
“It felt like the basis of the Nouns experience was pure,” Towner said, echoing Waters’ sentiments. “The cool thing is that when greed wasn’t the driving factor, people who had the resources chose to have fun. They would choose to have a parade and build a float. And for us, it was cool.
Looking back on the NFT bubble of 2021, the team agreed that it’s easy to use hindsight to connect the dots that led to the massive crash. But they attribute the initial rise and fall of NFT culture to the low quality of the first products sold, not the underlying technology itself. Now that some time has passed, they hope that increased consumer awareness of scams will lead to a second renaissance of more promising blockchain art projects.
“Once this started, people rushed in and started trying to sell all these overpriced JPEGs and saying, ‘Oh my God, you can’t lose on any of this!’ So it was not surprising that a lot of these items were very thin on substance,” Towner said. “There was a lot of promise and a lot of hype with no legitimacy behind it. But much of that has been eliminated.
But for all the talk about cryptocurrency and NFTs, entertainment enthusiasts don’t need to be interested in either topic to take note of the opportunities that organizations like Nouns can create. Stoopid Buddy is already planning to partner with the DAO on future projects, and the team emphasized that the ultimate legacy of the NFT community could be to provide a source of funding for the types of ambitious films and TV shows which are increasingly difficult to achieve through conventional channels.
“For us, what’s interesting is finding alternative forms of financing creative projects,” Towner said. “A lot of the sources for doing these cool projects have disappeared, or people have become more timid about spending money on what could be really cool or interesting projects. So it’s positive, it opens other doors to achieve things. Interesting stuff that maybe couldn’t be done any other way.
“Shark, Pickle, Cone” is currently available for purchase in NFT form. The film will be available to stream for free on X (formerly Twitter) in mid-June.