# Transitioning into the unknown, rolling -into- the abyss. By [Cambalach.eth](https://paragraph.com/@cambalach) · 2022-07-24 --- **In an accelerated attempt, a group of people are working to decrypt the mysterious leviathan called Film3: This is the pitch**  The story of the Blockchain has already been told hundreds of times, going from the first anonymous writings of who (who?) has known to be Satoshi Nakamoto to the endless stories of DeFi summer 2020, the exponential growth of NFTs and the renewal of multiple industries such as finance, video games, art and community building.  And on the other hand, from the first minstrels and troubadours telling stories of heroes and dynasties to the Lumiere brothers projecting their first films, we humans are thirsty for stories that make our imagination run wild and challenge the reality in which we live. It is in this infinite scenario of uncertainty that I am writing to you. To begin with, let me introduce myself. My name is Portuno, and I am greeting you from the apathetic Bear Market. Rug pulls, scams and billion-dollar companies going bankrupt do nothing but occupy the front page of the crypto spaces, and a mere mention in the news of a world that is ravaged by wars, pestilence, recession and a climate that seems to be punishing us for the unholy sins of generations that still control the world.  But still, with the horsemen of the apocalypse looming at the sound of end of the world bells, I am a hopeful person for the future. A little bit because of that innocent innocence that I have been able to protect, but mainly because I have had the opportunity to meet hard-working people with an enviable ethic of doing things right. The good things. And of those people I want to talk to you now. **If you allow me to start the Pitch, have you ever heard of Film3?**  Blessed by the grace of the muses, the artist is the one who manages to capture an ephemeral expression of the soul, whose only limits are the known barriers of technology, and the unknown frontiers of the imagination. As for the second, I do not have much more to do than to wish you, from the bottom of my heart, the best of luck. But about the first one, I promise to expand -in an unnecessarily long way- on how new technologies are allowing to explore areas of creativity never seen before, with tools of which past generations could feel nothing but envy towards those who wish to embark on this today. Cinema is going to change. Technology will always be met with popular resistance of fear, it is inevitable. For those brave and courageous people who dare to try something new, know that animation has not replaced shadow play, just as there will be no image generated by Artificial Intelligence capable of eliminating the [Cave of Hands](https://www.timetravelturtle.com/cave-hands-patagonia-argentina/). Artificial Intelligence, Augmented/Virtual Reality and Blockchain are the triad of tools that artists have within our reach to know, learn and use. But as Jack the Reaper once said, “let's go by parts”. **I)              Artificial Intelligence:** Luckily I don't have a Skynet sending robots with Austrian accents from the future to kill me (or so I want to believe), and I didn't get to feel the affection that Joaquin Phoenix expressed for a code. But if there is one thing I am certain of, it is that the idea of creating something intelligent, capable of thinking for itself, has been somewhere hidden in our imagination for millennia, and what we could think of, we have built. We still do not have a Frankenstein walking among us, a Golem fulfilling our commands, and the few gargoyles I have seen in churches have remained immobile, denying me the dream of seeing them fly, but the ideas of great authors of the past are much closer than we think. IA is the oldest of the technologies we will look at in this article, with its first steps in the 1950s, with heavy investment by the U.S. Army for the purpose of creating... who knows what they wanted to accomplish. But the project died in less than a decade, with the idea that a program incapable of beating people in a game of Checkers would be of little use in the impending nuclear war against the Soviets. Fortunately, the atomic bombs never exploded, allowing us to be alive to see the rebirth of this technology. Now with exponentially more powerful computers than in its time, with a worldwide connection network, and with a marketing rebranding to Machine Learning. Back to our business. Art.  Artificial intelligence methods have opened up an endless number of new artistic experiences, most of which have not yet been thought of by any artist. From my limited memory, I remember how at the end of the last decade there was a proliferation of scripts written by code, where users provided specific content to it and it managed to recreate hilarious and bizarre scenes. This past year, 2022 for those who read me in the future, projects capable of creating self-generated images with the input of a description are seeing the light of day. A scene, an animal, something new. It can be a photo, a drawing, a painting or whatever we can think of, the biggest challenge is learning to communicate with the computer so that it can capture, in a matter of seconds, the idea we have in our minds. The growth of all these things has been tremendous. Not only is the output of the scripts and images going to be better, but the tools are not going to be limited to just that. Animations, video games, interactive stories, entire movies would be created with just a few commands from the new artist. The sky is no longer the limit, and I don't know how many are looking at the moon for anything other than its infinite beauty. We are aiming for the stars. **II)           Augmented/Virtual Reality** More than one billion. 1.000.000.000. That's how many times Pokemon Go was downloaded. With a frenzy of new users in its first quarter and saturating servers in the first few weeks, Pokemon Go managed to break record after record in terms of downloads, users, time spent and revenue. The popularity of the game helped a lot, but it was the great novelty in augmented reality that positioned it on the podium. In mid-2016, it was impossible to walk down the street without coming across someone in a hurry, looking at their cell phone, thinking about capturing some virtual specimen or group of friends trying to win a gym. And I won't deny it, possibly the year I walked the most, and I still talk to my friends from team Instict! Beyond the technical errors it had, and the delay in providing new content, the game was fun. Its fame faded and today its players are no longer a habitué of the cities, but the game is still there, at the top of the download rankings. But even more importantly, it paved the way for new games and projects to incorporate the idea that we, the users, can explore an alternative reality to the world we inhabit from our cell phones. Dinosaurs, monsters, zombies and magic now exist among us, in a sort of parallel reality unable to affect us unless we want it to.  Virtual reality is a step further. We are no longer transiting in our reality modified by the presence of computational beings, but it is the absolute immersion of our being in a new dimension. All our senses (or at least hearing and sight for now), are no longer attentive to the reality of the physical body but are in a new world. Although the term dates back to the late 1980s, it was in the early 2010s that the first commercially available device capable of transporting us to this new place was released. A new medium where the artist can create content with a level of immersion never seen before. **III)        Blockchain.** The most famous and misunderstood of the public ledger. Born in the hidden forums, under the idea of the most undoxed entity of our time, we have the Blockchain. Indispensable tool for the creation of virtual and decentralized money, it has managed to become the most important canvas of humanity since the renaissance. Falling into this Rabbit Hole, it is almost impossible not to think about the possibility of decentralizing absolutely all human social functionality. There is no organization that cannot become a DAO, and every problem is easily solvable with a Smart Contract. Then comes reality, when the limitations of technology and human creativity appear for the first time and our futuristic dreams of reality become science fiction. Web3 is a controversial term to date, let alone DAOs or NFTs. And it was at this moment of discontent with the countless acronyms that Film3 was born. More related to the Blockchain art niche than the others, but not limited to any possible solution to the problems plaguing modern filmmakers. The task of pinpointing a beginning for this whole new industry is nearly impossible. As the months went by, I kept discovering new projects that, autonomously and independently, began to work on ideas to incorporate these new Web3 tools to solve the problems that had become deeply ingrained in the creative process of filmmaking. Naming them will be an activity for another time. But if there is a place to keep in mind, a place to go whenever you are looking for information, contacts or a good chat, like an inn of yesteryear, it is NFT Film Squad.  It is still hard for me to define it, it is not a project with a product in sight, there is no funding or treasury, but all those characteristics that would make it an unfeasible project in the crypto space, is what ultimately makes NFT Film Squad the ideal place for everyone. Experienced filmmakers, animators, writers, investors. People with projects in creation or Blockchain experts. Lawyers and cinephiles, everyone has a place to learn and participate. **Problems.** The product, ultimately, is the community. And the only investment available is your time. If there's one thing that really interests you about the business, it's the right place. Personally, I am a lawyer from Latin America who had little experience and knowledge of the entire film industry. I love movies, yes, but it was in these months of exploring and talking to countless artists, producers and related people that I discovered the problems they had. I knew that filmmaking was an expensive and difficult enterprise, but I found a reality that made it unnecessarily difficult for those who work outside of the big, well-known companies. At the moment, unlike the vast majority of crypto spaces, Film3 is populated mostly by artists. Programmers, financiers, lawyers and people from any other field are more than welcome to contribute their own knowledge and perspectives. After countless hours of listening to these artists, there is a pentagram of problems that were repeated with alarming frequency when it came to turning an idea into a film. And these can be summarized as: Financing, Distributing, Networking, Royalties and Intellectual Property. **I)              Financing** The most repeated of all. There are three main methods for getting enough funding to move a script into pre-production. The first is self-financing, which occurs when the team in charge of the film manages, by its own means, to bear the operating costs of making a film. With this there is not much more to add, my congratulations to those who achieve it. The second usually works with Kickstarter tools, where the artist makes a presentation sufficient to expose it to the public and request donations to obtain the resources. The third is through producers. There are usually few with enough money to finance a film, and it is this advantage that positions them in a position of extreme advantage against the artist. Contracts with abusive clauses, decision-making power on multiple issues such as the hiring of actors, filming locations or even being able to modify the script. **II)           Distributing** The distribution of the work is the big problem that artists face once they have the finished product. The first comes from long before filming began, and it is the question of "where do we want our film to be seen?". It is very different to think and make a film with the idea of ​​seeing it on the big screen, with something ideal to be seen from the comfort of our home. Either way, for those whose film is not completely in the hands of the aforementioned large companies, the favorite place to exhibit the creation is at film festivals. Luxurious, glorious and full of opportunities to receive critics that many times we are not prepared to listen to, they will probably be the first people with no subjective interest to see the finished work. But it is not easy to get the opportunity to shoot our film in those places. On the other hand, it is very common to go to the big streaming platforms, which for some reason beyond my limited knowledge of economics, are more and more, and yet the idea that their monopoly is getting bigger and bigger is resented. We could talk about oligopoly instead, but this is not an evaluation. **III)        Networking** It costs a lot to do something. But sometimes the hardest thing is finding the right people to work with as a team. if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. When it comes to films, the geographic locations to go to have always been very limited. Los Angeles was always the iconic place to go if you wanted to have a career in the seventh art, and in a less US-centric view, Bollywood in India, Hallyowood in South Korea or Nollywood in Nigeria. However, there are two things in common in all of them. First, they are not locations per se but the term refers to the film industry as a whole. And secondly, more attuned to the idea I want to get across, it is a Hollywood-inspired name. Which is a place. And it's in Los Angeles. In short, unless you're targeting a local market, Los Angeles has always been the dream destination for filmmakers with aspirations of growth and fame.  And the festivals? Cannes Films Festival (France), Sundance Film Festival (USA), Venice Film Festival (Italy), Toronto International Film Festival (Canada), all events that take place in the first world. And access to them is the first of the problems, the costs of travel, per diem, lodging and even food in some cases exceeds the budget that an artist without resources can access. The Internet gave us the tools to eliminate those borders, and Film3 is giving us the communities so that we can communicate regardless of geographical distances. Within our reach are people working from all over the world, from whom we can not only learn and create links, but also collaborate with each other. There is nothing stopping a writer from Uruguay from writing scripts for a director from Portugal to direct his film. Animators from Nigeria and voice actors from Australia can work together on the same project. IV)          **Intellectual Property** We are entering the most complicated of problems. The legal ones. And intellectual property is precisely the film industry's most valuable asset. And there are several issues to analyze. The first one, probably the most important when it comes to the question of what it will be, is the location. The intellectual property laws in force will be the jurisdiction of the country, and each country has its own laws, with some countries (e.g., the United States) that, due to their federal nature, have different laws among their own states. A film from Argentina is not the same as a film from Pakistan, and a film from Chicago is not the same as a film from Texas. And we must also take into consideration that it is a broad term, since copyright, trademark, privacy rights and publicity rights fall under the umbrella of "intellectual property". In cases where the artist is hired by a production company to make a film (Work-Made-for-Hire), the issue is not a problem. The owner of the film is the company and there is no dispute. But when one is the creator. When you write the scripts, develop the story, invent the characters and put your effort into creating something, the ownership of it is a token of all the effort. A small token of pride at the conclusion of an adventure, the ultimate prize of a quest. And many times it must be guarded with suspicion, because there are ill-intentioned people everywhere. An abusive contract or an unscrupulous listener can take away the filmmaker's power over his work without it even realizing it. **V)            Royalties** Royalties are a separate issue. Within intellectual property, it is perhaps the most controversial area.  They are the right that a person has to charge on the income generated by the work. DVD sales, movie ticket sales, streaming platform sales. There are many ways of accounting for them and more and more, but the bottom line is the same. Who gets these royalties? As if it were a company paying dividends to its shareholders according to the amount of equity they have, there are many cases of artists who end up relegating the possibility of continuing to earn money with their works. **A final word** Based on all these problems, solutions have been created. Some of them are practical and others very fanciful. Some are already in operation and others are still an idea. But the important thing is that they are there. And for those unsolved problems, we need you. NFT Film Squad is an open community where you will be able to join, learn and collaborate from different approaches. On Twitter there are weekly spaces with an admirable frequency and in different languages (Spanish and English for now), where all these issues have already been addressed countless times by any project that appears. Directors, producers, lawyers, writers or animators are just some of the professions that have had the opportunity to express their doubts and concerns in this new space, of which we still do not know much, but we are willing to go into the depths of the unknown to have the chance to learn. We are all welcome. --- *Originally published on [Cambalach.eth](https://paragraph.com/@cambalach/transitioning-into-the-unknown-rolling-into-the-abyss)*