Blockchain for Independent Filmmakers

Happy Trails Animation started as a husband and wife animation company out of a 1 ? car garage. Over the years we have had some amazing, talented folks come through the doors. I hope we were more inspiring than soul crushing, which can happen with those big box production studios. There is a certain small town charm to the indie studio. Filmmakers now need to take a look at the blockchain for inspiration and funding.

There are usually several levels that an indie studio needs to adhere to:

1. Take in commercial work, which is usually creative handed down from clients to their ad agencies, and over to production studios. This is usually more about replicating or creating looks and styles based on something they’ve pitched;
2. Create interesting promotions to bring in work, always playing in the stylistic mediums you wish to work in; and most importantly for the future vision,
3. Create short films and play with methods and styles to fit the message or storyline. If they get into lots of International film festivals this becomes your stamp of creative acceptance from audiences around the world.

Once in a while you hit it right on the head. Many studios started this way. Portland natives, Will Vinton and Bob Gardner, won the Oscar for best animated short with their college thesis film,?Closed Mondays , a clay creation about art and conceptions.

Our short film that got major attention was,?Winter/En Hiver . My wife Amy and I were big fans of Canadian animation and of how Norman McLaren single-handedly built the support system for Canadian animators to thrive and explore with all kinds of techniques. As American filmmakers, we couldn’t help but envy Canada’s film funding system that continually gave animators the freedom to explore new ideas.

Enter today’s world where support through the blockchain can come from anywhere in the world. We’ve seen the likes of Kick Starter or Indiegogo, but now the NFT markets are fresh arenas for fans to support true independent filmmaking. Technology is opening barn doors for individuals, giving them the ability to reach out across countries and tap into new fans.

An indie movie i.e. independent movie is a short movie that is made outside the big film studio system, in addition to being made and distributed by entertainment companies that are also independent.

Indie movies are different by their style ad content, and also by the way in which the personal artistic vision of the filmmaker is realized.

Commonly, but not always, indie movies are produced with lower budgets in comparison to major studio films.

Generally speaking, the marketing of an indie movie is characterized by limited release at independent movie theaters, but at the same time, they might have wide release and major marketing campaigns.

Often, indie movies are screened at national, local, or international film festivals before their distribution, which includes retail or theatrical release.

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Over the years we’ve attended the annual?Telluride Film Festival ?with family and made ourselves dizzy, rolling our eyes when its moderators referred to the films of wealthy producers as independent. Casual use of the term discredits the hard labor and running on fumes reality that true independent filmmakers deal with. Being famous enough to simply make a few calls and be off to the races is not what making an independent film is all about. Telluride is one of our most favorite film festivals. It’s a small, unpretentious festival that brings an intriguing array of international selections and short films. Lately the festival seems to be introducing some distinction between fully funded indie and boutique indie.

Toronto ?hosts its own festival three days after Telluride’s. A few years back, they attempted to?overtake Telluride’s reputation ?for premiering the most films in North America each year. They put filmmakers in the middle of the battle by saying their film would get a lesser screening if they didn’t premiere their films at Toronto. Word got around, but in the end, folks preferred the experience of premiering their films at the charming, comfy mountain town of Telluride, Colorado over Toronto’s metropolitan city. These sorts of maneuverings and political tactics are part of what filmmakers encounter while promoting their films.

It sure was great when we got our first call and found out that Winter had been accepted into its first festival, and fun to be asked how we did some of its cool scenes. There are some great festivals out there. We got our start at a very nice, small but classy animation festival in?Portugal (CINANIMA) . Our most meaningful award would probably be the?Crystal Heart ?from Heartland Film Festival.

The playing field for independent filmmaking is changing. At present, no single studio owns the blockchain technology. As usual, it’s independents exploring this strange new frontier, figuring out how to make use of blockchain tech before the big studios jump in. Right now everything is still experimental.

Reminds me of the Amiga days when our studio added special effects to our first film,?Rip-N-Glide . MTV’s Cartoon Sushi and Mike & Spike’s Sick & Twisted Festival picked it up, which was awesome. For this quirky short we rotoscoped the scenes, brought them into the Amiga and added special effects by programming our own quirky burger meat brushes.

We’ve been pushing tech since the day we got that first computer. Eventually our film Winter was part of a cool,?promo piece ?for Wacom Technology featuring their new Cintiq drawing tablets which we used like crazy. Thanks to Wacom, our little studio and many others could push the boundaries of high-level animation from their couch, if they liked. After that Wacom promo piece hit the market, Disney bought a gazillion Cintiqs for their cubicle artists — an expense they probably didn’t want to incur. Whenever indie artists find a creative edge, mega studios become aware of its intrinsic value.

Use your social currency and drive others to check it out. Filmmakers must include marketing as part of their digital footprint.

The power of influencers still funnels through festivals for the most part but once a short film’s initial two-year run is over, it tends to gather the proverbial dust. It might be revived for family fun or find its way into a collection that gets streamed with some service somewhere.

Nowadays, every part of a film can have digital value. For instance, our 5 minute film Winter, shot at 24 frames per second, is made from over 6,000 personally hand inked frames. Winter’s story and imagery came from a dream Amy had while dealing with her parent’s dementia. She dreamt of holding her mother’s hand and found comfort in seeing how similar they were. Winter touches on the inevitability of loss and the rewards of love.

Winter’s hand-inked images danced across many international screens for audiences. In looking for ways to fund animating Amy’s newest story and our studio’s charitable donation, Happy Trails is offering frames from our films as NFTs.

Film fans can directly support independent creatives through the blockchain as NFTs. Right now the NFT market is flooded by those wishing to replicate its first mega successes. The trick for now is, how to push that content further from an independent perspective? Filmmaking starts with story and characters. True independent filmmakers can jump on this new pipeline of fan engagement. The technology of NFTs offers a new network of distribution that will bring clout and interest to more than just crypto fans. Also, this tech makes it easy to assign portions of an NFT’s sale.

Filmmakers can now make a bigger difference than to simply entertain, educate, and spark conversation. They can create content that can help folks around the world, and fans can be the wind in their sails. We hope you’ll be inspired to help us raise some funds for the making of our next film and our humanitarian cause for the children of Ukraine. We can all play a part in the big picture.