Today, we couldn’t be more stoked to announce the latest model in the TITLES ecosystem: Galverse Anime ママ AI. Trained on the illustrations of storied anime artist Ayaka Ohira, the Galverse model was brought to allow anyone to expand the lore and universe behind the Galverse. Along with the model launch, we’re excited to bring you a detailed interview about the evolution, team, and future of Shinsei Galverse. Finally, we’re putting on a Galverse Anime ママ AI competition with $2750 USDC and 10 Gals to be given away as prizes to lucky winners!

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OUR INTERVIEW WITH TEAM GALVERSE

Team Galverse has a typical web3 origin story. Some of the team knew each other, but we mostly met up in a DAO. That was back when NFTs were kicking off in a big way and we felt that culture and art was starting to make its mark on the crypto space.

Web3 looked like a new way to fund creative works, bypassing all the middlemen and traditional publishing power structures. That’s really interesting for the anime industry, which has been making headlines in recent years for being unsustainable and inequitable.

Ayaka was trained as an old school cel animator and had made a career as an independent anime music video director, and she always dreamed of making an original IP drawing on her influences of cyberpunk and sci-fi, but with badass, fashionable Gals as the main characters.

Putting together the original NFT collection and launch was a bit over six months of work, and then it all came together on launch night and sold out in five hours. It’s still one of the biggest Japanese NFT projects to ever launch.

Galverse is something that could never exist without web3. No traditional publisher would back our team or the concept behind Galverse. But the core team - Ayaka, Devin, Jack - have spent over two years working on the anime production and all our tech projects since launch day.

Since we’re inspired by the same stuff - we all grew up watching mostly the same anime in our different corners of the world - it gives us a common base to work from together, to understand Ayaka’s vision, and it helped form that layer of trust before we had all met IRL.

As a starting point, having an international team was really important for reaching global fans. Japan has heaps of amazing creators and amazing IP, but many of them have a hard time reaching beyond the domestic market due to language and cultural barriers.

The NFT scene in Japan is vibrant and cool, but it is relatively small, so there aren’t many big ’10k’ collections like Galverse. Being able to take Ayaka’s awesome creative work and expose it to a global English-speaking audience was really key to the launch of Galverse.

Two years on, and we’ve all settled into our roles on a very flat team. Ayaka handles the creative work behind the world of Galverse and the anime, Devin handles most of the tech projects and design work, and Jack is the team degen, community manager and commercial guy. We all help each other out, but the basis is that we all trust each other to get the work done.

Since day one, it has to be the support from industry legends. We weren’t sure how anime people would take us, since we were newcomers to the industry. Galverse faced some resistance of course.

But even right after we launched, legendary producers and creatives who worked on anime like Cowboy Bebop, AKIRA, Hunter x Hunter and more, they were taking meetings with us, they were excited about Galverse. You have to remember that, at the time, a lot of those productions were quite radical and ahead of the curve, and they see Galverse in the same vein.

That’s carried through to the production team we’ve put together as well. One example, our background artist Ogura-san is also responsible for the cyberpunk look and feel of Ghost in the Shell which is a major fan-gal moment for us.

We can’t reveal the voice actors just yet, but our team was in the recording studio just a couple of weeks ago, and everyone in the room was blown away by the talent involved. More than one of the anime producers described it as a ‘dream team’ with new and old legends.

There’s a second answer to that question - which is the talent in the Galverse community that has developed. We’ve hired and worked with lots of people who started out just as fans of the project, because they turn out to be experts in their fields like AI or VTubing. And of course we’re just blown away by the creative stuff that people make in their own time too.

There’s an obvious advantage to the project, that we’re going to launch our anime with a dedicated audience of fans and community members who have been through the whole journey of creating it with us. That’s not so different from crowdfunding although the mechanics of being a Gal NFT owner are different.

For Ayaka, as the anime director, she has a team of ‘interns’ ready to help her on the creative side whenever she needs. She often gets past creative roadblocks by throwing out assignments and questions to the community, which we know has been a big help. It also helps us on the production and marketing side, since we’re a small team and bandwidth is our biggest issue. We can always use more ideas and experience.

The flipside is the additional complexity and difficulty doing things this way. The Japanese anime industry is very closed doors, and they aren’t comfortable sharing any work in progress during the production. We had to start off with contracts that let us share work as it was completed in the studio, which is unheard of. Even after those contracts were signed, it took a lot of time and work to build trust and make that functional.

Then you face the internal questions - we have all this awesome material like layouts and keyframes and scripts, how do we share it? What’s interesting for anime fans? Do we drop it all, or do we hold back material that contains story spoilers for the pilot episode? There’s no right answer, you have to decide on the fly and also throw it back to the community for their opinion.

We take the approach that the core of the Galverse IP has to be super high quality and engaging creative work from Ayaka’s mind. If the story isn’t interesting, or the art isn’t amazing, it won’t resonate with people. Luckily Ayaka has never let us down, with her original PFP art, with the music video, and soon the anime premiere.

Then, that inspirational core IP, together with all the creative tools and additional lore we release, provide a really flexible framework for fans and community members to build on.

Big anime publishers tend to be really protective of IP - any fan manga or artwork that gets sold is one less bit of official merchandise that doesn’t, in their mind. And we find our Japanese community are very wary of what they’re allowed to do or not because it’s strictly enforced in Japan.

We are not a big publisher though - we aren’t even a huge IP yet. We see Galverse as a new type of IP, launching for a modern generation of tech and fans, and we want to leverage whatever we can to grow and reach new fans.

So, we don’t punish people for making fan art or fan works. Instead, the story and world of Galverse was purposefully created as one that you can build your own stories around. The tools we make let you create and share those stories and artworks, sell them, and grow your own following from them. Whatever’s good for a Galverse fan at this point is also good for us as the team behind Galverse and the IP in general.

Each Gal comes with a name and a backstory that we created with early generative tools and some custom writing. All of the upgrades we’ve offered for Gals since then provide more ways for personifying and more depth for building those characters.

The VTuber model upgrade allows people to livestream or join Zoom calls as an animated version of their Gals. The ERC-6551 upgrade gives every Gal their own wallet, so they can create, collect and share onchain. And more recently, we’ve allowed Gals to mint their own Lens social account directly into their ERC-6551 wallet so they can build their own social timeline and following.

Last year, we held the Galverse Legacy: Origin Story contest, where Gals had to use their VTubers and our ママ Mama AI model to create or expand on their characters’ background stories with a short video.

The results were incredible - people were stringing together work flows with all sorts of different AI tools beyond what we could offer - making animated masterpieces combining Mama AI with Runway, creating their own music and songs. The overall winner from RIS_707 was an animated music video followed by a VTuber interview with her Gal - a really amazing and original creative idea with great execution.

Generative models were a huge unlock for us early on and are really part of the project’s DNA. When creating the collection, we used early large language models (LLMs) to help us write all of the 8,888 unique backstories for each Gal - it would have been impossible to do it in time otherwise.

We also knew back then, that we were going to ask a lot from our community on the creative side when pre-production on the anime kicked off. There were lots of activities to get their help on - like help us design characters - but that’s a pretty big ask when not everyone is an artist.

Luckily, early generative image models became publicly available right at that time, and Midjourney V1 helped everyone in the community become a concept artist using prompting. Since then, we developed ママ Mama AI as our first custom in-house generative model trained on Ayaka’s art.

We see generative tools like ママ Mama as a way to lower the barrier to entry for fans to create content about Galverse and to use that to connect with other fans.

Mid-term, we see AI models allowing community members to share rich stories in all sorts of formats about their own Gal, and to share that and even monetize it on web2 and web3 socials.

Longer term, we’re sure that people will use our generative models to make entire episodes of Galverse anime, or their own chapters of Galverse manga featuring their favourite Gals.

Ayaka is probably the first anime artist in the world with an officially endorsed AI model of her style out there. We told her that recently, and she effortlessly said, “Oh yeah? Cool.”

All eyes are on the OVA launch, which is essentially the pilot episode of Galverse. We’ve spent a long time working on it, with the anime dream team we mentioned, and it’s going to be great. You can expect that later this year.

Because we hate sleeping, you can also be sure that there are more generative tools and better AI models coming down the pipeline soon too. Galverse is never quiet - we are always running a million miles an hour and always have more planned, so stay tuned! Drop into the Discord or sign up to our newsletter to keep up!

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GALVERSE ANIME ママ AI COMPETITION

Along with this launch of this model, we’re running a competition to pull out the best Galverse creations from our community using the Galverse Anime ママ AI.

Your mission? Take us back to the 90s by creating a nostalgic anime gal character. Prompt her with amazing style, a dynamic pose, or even show us her cosmic powers in action!

Start creating with Galverse Anime ママ AI, here.

What's in it for you? The top 3 best Gal submissions picked by our judge will win...

1. 2000 $USDC

2. 500 $USDC

3. 250 $USDC

4. If you're not selected, you can still win your very own Gal by having one of the top ten most minted creations!

It’s simple, create Galverse expanding lore, publish it onchain, and share to win! Unlimited submissions are allowed so start creating on TITLES, here. Remember, once you’ve published your creation, share it with us by tagging @galversenft and @titlesxyz on X, Lens, or Farcaster. Contest ends next Sunday.

Much love,

- TITLES