Leo Matchett and Michael Musante, co-founders (with American Zoetrope) of the LA-based non-profit Decentralized Pictures (DCP), explained during IDFA 2021 the rationale behind their ‘democratic’ film fund whose blockchain support of projects will be based on consensus approval among an online community of creatives, film fans, and industry professionals alike.
“We are using blockchain technology to leverage the wisdom of the crowd to identify and select talent and content for support from our film fund and from our network of industry support,” explained DCP’s Michael Musante during IDFA’s The Future of Financing? session.
“We have built the platform, it’s all the ready to go,” added Musante. “We look to launch it early next year, but there’s also the underlying blockchain that supports the application and that we are looking to launch in the next couple of weeks.”
What is particularly laudable about the DCP model is that the target beneficiaries of fund support are burgeoning independent filmmakers and filmmakers from underserved and underprivileged communities. Competitions with varying levels of financial awards will initially be offered for proposed documentaries with social impact, but DCP intends to expand to narrative filmmaking proposal submissions shortly, they say.
“So what does that mean? Leveraging the wisdom of the crowd using blockchain technology?” Musante mused in Amsterdam. “So what we will do is offer financing awards and other support on the website…It will be a competition. And so filmmakers, for whom that award can be helpful, will submit their film projects to the platform. In order to do that, they have to pay a submission fee in our native cryptocurrency – the film credit – and those film credits get put into what’s called a smart contract that then pays out other members of the community for reading, reviewing, and rating those projects.
“So the users that come to the website aren’t being asked to give money, to support a project there, they’re just being asked for their opinion. And in fact, they’re getting paid to give that opinion. So we use the blockchain technology and the cryptocurrency to incentivize that review. And through that review process, certain projects rise to the top and will win and get selected for financing and production support.”
The monies paid out in funding is not soft finance, Musante underlined. Decentralized will be looking to recoup and to share in the profits, but as a 501c(3) non-profit organization, the net revenue will be re-invested within the film fund to finance future artists. “So through our sources of revenue, which include the films that we invest in, our sale of the film credits and donations as a 501c(3), we are hoping to create an evergreen self-sustaining film fund that can support artists and filmmakers.”
“Submit your idea, and if the world agrees with you, we’ll help you make it. We’ll help finance it, and introduce you to the people who will help you execute it in a professional way,” the Decentralized pair clarify on the company website of their blockchain-based initiative.
So why Blockchain? Co-founder Leo Matchett explains the three main reasons. The first is fairness. “We can prove that every single person that voted on a project to identify the winners of our support was a real human, because every vote is recorded on the blockchain and has a signature to validate it. So we wanted the ability to prove that it’s a fair process. That wouldn’t necessarily be possible with the database that’s controlled by a central authority that can be edited or changed.”
“The second thing is rareness,” Matchett added. “We wanted the incentive model to work and have value…You can change an entry. You can create infinite numbers of the tokens, or the film credits as we call them on blockchain. You can validate how many exist at any time. And in order to truly incentivize the review process that we’re trying to use to get this great data and help us decide which filmmakers get the support, there needed to be a true incentive to have that review process work.”
“And then the last thing is efficiency. We [the industry] had the problem of ‘the stamp could be worth more than the check inside the envelope’,” he continued. “With blockchain we can very efficiently pay thousands of people dynamically for little to no cost.”
DCP is co-founded by American Zoetrope, the independent film company launched by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas in 1969 and now run by Roman, Sofia and Gia Coppola. AZ has a wide network of film industry luminaries who can help guide and support the projects that DCP finances and supports, the company website underlines.
