Filmshape connects the world of filmmakers and improves their productivity so they can create the content we love. The launch has been a resounding success with interests from thousands of filmmakers across the globe eager to find crews and interact with the larger film community through the app. Oliver Efesopoulos the Co-Founder and CEO will be participating in panels, film festivals and discussions online as well as in-person disruptive tech conferences to further spread the word of Filmshape.

“We’re taking film production out of little black books”.

• Oliver Efesopoulos, Co-Founder and CEO.

Filmshape is moving the needle towards democratising the filmmaking landscape and empowering every filmmaker to be involved. The social app will enable the film community to easily bring their ideas to life and have fun while doing so. A good idea should be simple enough to understand in one sentence and so the idea behind the app is to ‘Find crews and make films’… that’s it. The deeper you dive, the more you’ll find from project management, talent recruitment, showcasing of work and general interaction with the wider community.

Contact Information:
Oliver Efesopoulos - olivere@filmshape.com Twitter - @efesopoulos Filmshape.com

It’s a vital aspect of many interfaces and experiences today. With the blend between 2D viewing experiences to a more 3D environment whether it be augmented or virtual I can only see this being a core tenet of the web going forward. I think gamification hasn't reached its full potential in our current traditional viewing experience on the web yet but we're starting to see more adoption through a web3 mental model. Heavy focus on community, decentralisation and participation all of which require gamification at some level. It will even introduce a shift in mindset towards an experience level focus on design as oppose to simply interfacing with a system, we'll feel as if we're inside, exploring a website as oppose to browsing it and gamification will be critical.

When have you used gamification in your design work before?

At a previous company we began strategising potential experience improvements using a competitive gamification approach amongst friends to be able to view each other's participation with the platform. The aim was to improve the efficiency in their learning whilst increasing user engagement. More often than not there was pushback on attempting something unconventional like this regardless of our efforts but we learnt a lot as a result about prioritisation and strategy. In retrospect I believe the company would still benefit massively from such an approach but I also now understand the limitations better after building a company of my own.

Do you think gamification is being misused by any digital products at the moment (don’t have to name names)?

I think gamification as a term can be broadly applied in so many instances but yes there are certainly platforms out there that utilise dark tactics to enhance certain KPI's without the consideration for data showing negative mental impact. I attended a talk for a globally known gaming platform which was given by a user experience manager in charge of keeping users engaged with specific games. The speaker told us of rooms of game testers that would be paid to sit for a certain number of hours, playing in order to define game difficulty and they'd be watched from a ‘central observation room’. All this is to keep players engaged for the maximum amount of time possible and when I asked if there are any health precautions in place to consider the players mental and physical health he mentioned he wasn't aware of any. Gamification has a core of good intentions but it's easy to lose those core principles along the way once monetary gain outweighs user experience.

Gamification can create quite strong habits and emotional reactions, are there any other design techniques/strategies you think are comparable?

So much of design today has been gamified from infinite scrolling to emoji's, likes and notifications. At its core it comes down to instant gratification and users seeking a sense of validation from a positive reinforcement loop. Design for me is a constant cycle of engagement, positive reinforcement and validation, it could be as simple as a hover effect. I move my cursor and see an element can be interacted with by its styling changing so now I want to click it. It also means I'm seeking similar interactions throughout the rest of my experience with the site, sort of like a game. We're seeing a growing trend of micro interactions now with animations and effects for 'correct behaviour'. This all ties back to positive reinforcement loops you see in games, do something correctly and get visually rewarded, don't and you'll be stuck in a motionless state of stasis for all eternity... or at least until you close the page :) .

How can we as designers make sure to use gamification healthily and responsibly?

I think a lot of responsibility is placed on design and for good reason but it should be shared from a company wide perspective. If the ethos is to benefit the user as much as possible and at times forfeit small amounts of profit in favour of the user, then I think designers can flourish in their roles gamifying experiences. But designers have a duty to ensure the people using your product are benefitting mentally and this can be done through talking with them. Processes will only get you so far but until you discuss your product with users you will never know the impact it has on them and how you can help.

What are some of your favourite examples of digital products using gamification?

As mentioned earlier I think a lot of platforms popping up in the Web3 space are excellent examples of community driven, open source and decentralised experiences that put you as the user in charge of your interactions and data as well as company outcomes. I've recently used Mirror.xyz which is a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) that enables people to publish content as NFTs and share it with the community. You can also participate in a weekly vote to decide which writer gets a DAO membership to the platform based on an article they have written, so thats fun.

Specifically thinking about fitness, finance and e-commerce, have you come across any particularly bad examples of gamification being utilised?

I come across bad gamification examples all the time whether it be a bank trying to get me to sign up to take out a loan by forcing me to complete app tours, or online stores giving out rewards points for certain purchases with minimal return if any at all. I think fitness does it quite well from the examples I've seen and in the long run will only benefit the user physically, it's one of the perfect markets for gamification.

Me - https://twitter.com/efesopoulos

Filmshape (The app we’re building 😊) - https://twitter.com/filmshape

https://juicebox.money/#/p/filmshape

Welcome to the community, below I go into detail regarding this crowdfund, what it’s for and why it matters as well as what you’ll receive as a contributor.

It’s new, exciting and right now we’re using crypto to crowdfund our app Filmshape - The filmmakers social network. With Web3 you can imagine the endless possibilities for the film community, similar to the music industry. We are starting out by facilitating the creation of film through a frictionless community where projects are built and teams/crews are formed. We’re actually already very close to our Beta release and you can see our progress over on twitter @Filmshape. I hope this displays our ambition and work ethic, that we’ve come so far by bootstrapping and working multiple jobs simultaneously but now we’re evolving and we can’t wait for you to join us.

Short Summary

Filmshape is democratising the filmmaking landscape and empowering every filmmaker to be involved. Our mission is to facilitate the creation of film through the connection and collaboration of people. With this social app we want to enable film production crews to bring their ideas to life and have fun while doing it.

We believe a good idea should be simple enough to understand in one sentence and so the idea behind Filmshape is to ‘Find crews and make films’… that’s it. Now there’s a whole lot more complexity that goes into the making of the app (which is 95% complete for our Beta launch).

The Problem

The community that could be anywhere at any given time with the pressures of project management, crews and ultimately creative exploration, are independent filmmakers. This collective faces a daily struggle of the following friction points.

• Discovery of filmmakers and actors.

• Project management of costly films and series.

• Communications between teams.

• Showcasing of portfolios and films to find work.

• Separated workflows and tools.

The Solution

A dedicated filmmaking social network. Simplifying connectivity, collaboration, management and promotion in one space. You can also watch films of others and invite cast/crew you like to your own projects.

Here are a few core components you can expect to see in the app:

• Create and manage projects.

• Search and recruit  talent.

• Interoperate with video streaming platforms.

• Showcase personal or popular community activity.

• Invite users involved in projects you like.

• Chat with colleagues and friends.

• Manage team roles and workflows in a collaborative space.

• Free access for everyone and Pro features for paid members.

By contributing you will ensure Filmshape is developed to a promising scale and decrease the waiting period for it’s release to both app stores. You can also gain early access to the app and become one of the first members to use Filmshape.

The Crowdfund Token

Token

No more than the target can be distributed from the project in a single funding cycle. Whenever a new funding cycle starts, any overflow automatically goes towards that cycle's target amount, acting as a project's runway.

A funding target allows us to redistribute surplus revenue to our community (You). When a project's balance is greater than its funding target, the overflow (surplus funds) can be redeemed by the community by burning your project tokens.

A token is required for all crowdfunds. Backers of our project automatically receive a $FILM token in exchange for your ETH. The token tracks how much each backer has contributed to our project. Tokens are issued at a ratio of 1,000,000 tokens to 1 ETH.

Discount rate

‘The ratio of tokens rewarded per payment amount will decrease by this percentage with each new funding cycle’. Ours is 3.8%.

Bonding Curve

This rate determines the amount of overflow that each token can be redeemed for at any given time. On a lower bonding curve, redeeming a token increases the value of each remaining token, creating an incentive to hodl tokens longer than others. Ours is 10%.

What Do $FILM Holders Get?

• Everyone

  • Be the envy of the town and receive up to the moment email updates regarding the progress of the development of Filmshape.

  • Mention in the app's acknowledgments in every publication we're permitted to do so, along with our massive gratitude!

  • Receive updates via a token-gated Discord channel with product developments and ideas in the pipeline.

  • Contribute to the discussion when an idea is pitched in the Discord channel with thoughts and feedback regarding feasibility, user benefit and impact.

• Contributors of 2 ETH +

  • Personal 1 on 1 video calls with the founding team (CEO & CTO) to discuss the app, progress, roadmap and ideas as well as blue sky thinking around Filmshape in the Web3 space.

  • Included in our Beta test list to be the first to try out new features and product updates before anyone else.

  • Receive a Filmshape cap and join the ever growing community of FS contributors.

  • Shoutouts on our Twitter page @Filmshape for the ❤️

Your token will primarily act as a "proof of patronage". $FILM tokens will also be used to represent membership in our community (e.g. a token-gated Discord).

In the future we aim to do a similar offering through tokenising equity so contributors can represent an economic stake in the success of Filmshape and enjoy proportional stakes in our revenue. We’re not quite at this stage yet but when we are we will do a separate offering for this.

Above all, you’ll be entering into the process of creating with us.

Where does the money go?

We’re predicting we're about a month out from our official launch. Essentially we're building a social network for filmmakers to find crew members, build their projects and showcase work (Admittedly this is our Web 2.0 way of thinking up until now). Our plans for the funding going forward are for continued developments on Android as well as building an iOS app, we will need more engineers for product development and bugs, we will need marketing and communications for our social channels and we'll need a solid product and QA team that understands the vision and can ensure the best user experience for all filmmakers on the platform. To give an idea of the average cost of a capable engineer it's around $66k/year and we'd need multiple as right now our CTO maintains all of the back end development and we've hired front end work on Upwork.

Business Model

• Free access to increase user base through word of mouth and referrals meaning no barrier to entry.

• Lowest ’Pro’ monthly subscription fee by a large margin.

• ‘Pro’ features for members to streamline workflows and showcase their profiles.

• Facilitate collaboration through our project focused approach and community feed.

• Building the network is our key priority.

Roadmap

• Our future roadmap will be largely based on user driven feedback and a network effect.

• Our longer term belief is that users will interact with Filmshape not simply for networking or collaborative purposes but also to find trends and communicate within their film/TV communities.

• Optimise our community feed for a more personalised experience (WITHOUT ADS).

• Include an incentivised referral mechanic.

• Broadcast team notifications and alerts

• File/link sharing

• Featured project listings

• Integrate with the web3 economy at some point to begin facilitating ownership of film content. In the future we want more communal governance, we want tokenised equity shared amongst our investors and we want to bring Filmshape in to the Web3 mental model of creators having ownership of their content. We're not quite there yet since as I mentioned its only a few of us working tirelessly alongside our days jobs to build and grow this hence the investment which would help take us closer to where we want to be.

  I’m personally very passionate about this space and you can find a mirror piece I wrote on ‘value’ below:

  https://mirror.xyz/ollies.eth/gn2GezV9rtOqoN-G_jnCxDjrHNcOpvbzLWR8lRWVuH4

To save you scrolling back to the top, you can find our crowdfund here:

https://juicebox.money/#/p/filmshape

I’m Ollie, I am building a social community for filmmakers to find crews and make films @Filmshape if you’re interested. I also am joining Charles Hoskinson’s IOHK as a product designer to work with smart contracts on Cardano and this is my first mirror post… actually it’s my first blog post ever so I hope you enjoy it!

Introduction

By the end of this article I hope to have given a little insight into my thoughts around NFTs and the value people attribute to them.

What the #$@!% is an NFT?

If you’re a Twitter user interested in tech threads or crypto crazed Discord servers you’ll have probably noticed a trending topic floating around that goes by the acronym ‘NFT’ or Non-Fungible Token. Some of you may ‘get it’ and others feel like it’s the stupidest trend since… well Bitcoin. Now we won’t get into the technicals because a quick Google search will find a better, more concise explanation than I could give but it’s essentially an immutable asset like a photo (most popular), sound, video, file or physical item and it’s existence/history of owners can’t be disputed. It’s stored on a digital ledger (blockchain) which is a collection of transactions, the creation of an NFT requires a transaction too! (oh the gas fees🥲). For example when you create an NFT it’s called ‘minting’ and in order to do so you’ll need a digital wallet, a supported cryptocurrency blockchain such as Ethereum or Cardano and a marketplace to create, store and sell it. I won’t go into too much detail about this but if you are interested here is a Decrypt article on it.

What is value?

Value is visible in many forms, depending on who you talk to. To some it’s in gold, stocks, houses and cars. Others its ideas, relationships, art and nothing. Each have a perfectly valid reason for assigning value to them and none of them are unique. With the progression to Web3 we’re reaching an age of discovery and excitement in the space. We’ve all seen graphs of tech advancements over the last 10 years claiming exponential growth but we get to experience it up close and personal. With cryptocurrencies for example the solutions have been built before the problems in many cases. But as we continue to develop an understanding of the software we can build connections to find applications for utility. When the internet was created most people didn’t realise they’d be able to order deliveries, learn new languages and video call their friends across the planet instantaneously. We’re in a time with NFTs that require a period of trial and error and as we advance into a singularity aligned future we need our values and tools to keep up.

Story Matters

The value of goods or assets such as art and in this case a JPEG is comparable to that of art collectors throughout history. In a way NFTs have democratised art collection but the core underlying values remain the same behind why people value it and these are the best reasons I could come up with:

• Story behind a piece matters - check out Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet sold as an NFT. The foundation for which the modern day newspaper ‘Twitter’ was built upon.

• Scarcity is king - When people assign a value to something such as a collection of art, the price can inflate drastically due to its scarcity and this is only reinforced by its existence on the blockchain. People on Twitter are changing their profile pictures to illustrated ‘Bored Apes’ to be part of an ‘elite community‘ alongside the likes of Steph Curry and Tom Brady. Each piece in this collection will have differing attributes to define rarity.

• Representation will be the most important factor for a core crypto audience as NFTs and Bitcoin represent taking control back from corporations and governments and putting it back into the hands of ordinary people.

• Profit - Trading these things have made a lot of people a lot of money and this definitely can’t be ignored.

• Common myths are a construct agreed upon by multiple parties so hear me out. If the idea of fiat currency 💵 like USD or GBP is a common myth amongst people because money was created by people as a standard for bartering. It’s handled by another common myth in the form of a bank 🏦 which aims to store and protect your money (this could be any intermediary… like an estate agent for example) but if they go bankrupt you’ll lose out too. Then in it's simplest form, Bitcoin, crypto and NFTs remove the NECESSITY of two common myths from your life and replace them with a single trust-less database putting you in control of your assets. Eventually we'll get to the truths! 🤥😂

• FOMO - Fear of missing out.

  A Physically Virtual reality

  With the announcement of Meta’s metaverse, (that’s weird to say) the direction is clear and it’s that many people want to experience life in an augmented or virtual reality. Bartering goods, wearing skins and living out their wildest fantasies through the convenience of their homes. But when you think about it, alot of these things are already adopted by the gaming community and it will only become more immersive. Throw NFTs into the mix and you get a society of interoperable, immutable assets that you can buy, wear, use, take into other games/platforms or real life and sell if you please and no other person can claim to own the exact same item as you. It seems like an obvious next step in our technological revolution and what a lot of gamers see and have seen for years is value in digital assets that are now being transferred out of the game.

  Final Thoughts

  The idea for this article stems from a personal development journey to discover and learn more about the cryptocurrency ecosystem myself. In doing so I wanted to contribute to a new platform regarding a topic I’m passionate about in the attempt to shed some light on a few areas that may not be so obvious to everyone reading. If you enjoyed this you can follow me on Twitter @Efesopoulos to keep up to date with more thoughts around the crypto space as a whole.

  If you still don’t find value in JPEGs I hope you found some in this post! 😊