NFT Animation: Risky Business or Brave New World?

***This article originally appeared in the Sept/Oct. ’22 edition of Animation magazine (No. 323)***

Technology and animation have always been joined at the hip. Film made animation possible, television spread it to all corners of the world and computers took it to new levels of creativity.

So it should come as no surprise that animation is a hotbed of experimentation for new technologies like Non-Fungible Tokens, better known as NFTs, which are part of the next generation of internet technology referred to as Web3. Both Web3 and NFTs have struggled for widespread understanding and acceptance—a goal hindered by the risks associated with investing in NFTs and frequent scams involving the technology.

But that hasn’t stopped animation from experimenting with the new technology. To date, the experiments have had less of an effect on the production of animation itself, but as the trio of accounts below show, they’ve already proven to have a huge impact on bringing in new voices, building fan-based communities, and connecting creators and fans in new ways.

One of the most high-profile projects is Dan Harmon’s new animated series Krapopolis set to debut on FOX TV next year, but Web3 technology has already given it a head start on building a community and audience.

Krapopolis takes place in ancient Greece and is about mortals trying to build from the ground up humanity’s first city. “They’re trying to figure out all the things that are obvious to us that aren’t yet obvious to the people of the first civilization,” says Matt Bilfield, project manager for Krapopolis at FOX’s Blockchain Creative Labs. “What’s cool about the Web3 component that we’re building in is that it’s our version of going through the same process of teaching people how this new technology can impact the growth and building of a community and fandom of a show.”

Game of Krap Chickens

What does that mean? Well, by the time you read this article, Krapopolis.com will have already minted 10,420 unique NFTs called “Krap Chickens.” All the characteristics of these chickens are based on elements of the show that sharp-eyed fans will be able to find as Easter eggs, says Bilfield.

They also give owners access to a screening room where episodes will be shown early, as well as behind-the-scenes content and a store stocked with exclusive items, says Bilfield.

Token holders will also get to vote on how certain aspects of the show will play out, such as what weapon a character will carry in battle or what background element may be incorporated. “You can actually take part in some decisions in the show,” says Bilfield. “The next thing is we’re going to start figuring out ways to incorporate the chickens.”

Chickens will also lay eggs daily in their owners’ wallets. The eggs are non-transferable ERC-20 tokens, and only work for the egg’s original owner; a chicken will stop laying eggs if sold. This opens up a kind of fandom ranking, where fans with the most eggs can be recognized for their level of fan engagement. And there are plans for more ways for the most devoted fans to earn even more eggs, and rewards for those who collect them.

The results have so far yielded results, with Krapopolis The Discord channel has around 15,000 members, many of whom create fan art for a show that hasn’t aired a single episode. “I think this experience really paves the way for the way shows can be marketed in the future, using the communities to drive that level of interest,” says Bilfield.

Animation company Toonstar and Sixth Wall, the digital arm of actress Mila Kunis’ Orchard Farm Productions, have jumped into Web3 in a big way with the online animated series The gimmicks.

Sixth Wall came to the project in the wake of its first NFT-based animated series, Stoner cats, says producer Lisa Sterbakov. While the show, which sold NFTs of individual cats, was a success, there was a desire to build content directly with a community.

“We have also heard a lot of feedback from Stoner cats community on, ‘We want content faster. We want more direct interaction and direct involvement in the content, says Sterbakov.

That led to a production partnership with Lindsey McInerney, who while working for AB InBev – perhaps better known as Anheuser-Busch – wrote an influential treatise on the Metaverse, crypto and Web3 in 2020. “The thesis there was that if you abstract the business of beer away from ABI, they are effectively an entertainment business,” she says. “They bring people together to be entertained and are the world’s largest sponsor of sports media entertainment. And so much of it was kind of rooted in that.”

Ready to rumble

Inspired by shows like South Park, The gimmicks is about a group of washed-up ex-pro wrestlers voiced by wrestling talents including Luke “Doc” Gallows, Karl “Machine Gun” Anderson and Rocky Romero.

The characters have been entered into a competition pool where community votes will ultimately determine a winning character who will get their own full episode.

“We actually hit a million DIC hits,” says Sterbakov. “So even though we only have 10,000 tokens, and we have about 4,000 people in our community, they’ve interacted on chain in this project a million times.”

Back in March, the show sold 10,000 NFTs, each with a unique character. The NFTs were minted on the Solana blockchain because it enabled low fees and has a low environmental impact, says Sterbakov. While these tokens aren’t required to watch episodes, which come online weekly, they do come with benefits.

At the end of each episode, there is a chance for token holders to vote on an aspect of how the story will continue. And for each vote, a token holder receives what is called a “DIC Punch”. (Sterbakov is quick to point out that it stands for “diverse inclusive community.”)

Additionally, each token’s character has a wiki page where the NFT owner can log in from their Web3 wallet and create a backstory about their character. Other token holders can read the pages and use their DIC punches to vote for the ones they like, showing which characters are most popular in the general community.

Animation is perfectly suited to this kind of experimentation, which McInerney says she expects is the starting point for a new evolution for content.

“I think you’ll continue to see people iterate and try to figure out what it means to involve a community in the creation of content, what it means to democratize access to content and to author spaces, and to bring creators closer to communities, and what that means to have, you know, maybe the next big TV show or movie be kind of community-created and community-owned, she says.

Bears and robots

TIME Studios and Nelvana are also teaming up to adapt NFT collections from creators Pablo Stanley and Wil Lee into animated children’s series. Stanley’s new series is titled Robotos and follows a group of friends who go on fantastic adventures in a world located in the distant future, while Lee’s the little will introduce viewers to a preschool girl who uses her imagination to befriend a set of cute but mischievous bears.

TIME President Keith A. Grossman threw the company into the Web3 era a year and a half ago, offering NFTs, accepting cryptocurrency and finding ways to use the technology to change the company’s relationship with customers. The breakthrough for Grossman on the kids’ entertainment side was seeing how NFT collections created communities larger than the number of owners, and that members of those communities become advocates and essentially marketers for the brand.

That combined with her daughter’s immediate attraction to Robotos after she saw one of its NFTs on his computer screen it made it clear that this had potential. “We have these unique tokens, and they’re these unique IP addresses, but they actually speak a different language to a larger community that has nothing to do with NFTs,” he says.

He approached Maria Perez-Brown, head of TIME Studios Kids and Family, to reach out to NFT creators and find ways to take these brands from blockchain to the big screen.

The result was a new experience unlike anything she had experienced in 30 years of working in children’s media. “It was very interactive, it was very gregarious,” she says. “They would say: What color should it be? What shape should their heads be? … All of a sudden you had a collection of people who were invested in making this content, and it was a fascinating world for me, because I had never done content in that way before.”

The technology also spreads that ethos throughout the production of the shows. Nelvana has committed to full series rather than just pilots. But they’ve also sped up the production process to satisfy the notoriously impatient Web3 audience, Grossman says.

It helps that the shows start with character designs, but the existing Web3 communities also have input as production progresses. “We’re able to accelerate the process of getting this to market and also be able to go back to that community that Keith referred to as our marketers and show them (key elements) along the way,” says Perez-Brown.

And that connection is the unique thing about this process, says Grossman. “The barriers between the creator and the community have actually come down,” he says, citing Web3’s infrastructure for cross-border communication and ownership. “Then suddenly someone with a good idea who does something niche … has the ability to connect to a means of distribution.”

FOX will air a sneak peek at Krapopolis on November 27 New episodes of The gimmicks is published regularly on thegimmicks.com. Robotos and the little ones is currently in development with TIME Studios and Nelvana.