‘Silicon Valley’ producers push Ethereum NFTs for user-generated comedy

There has been no shortage of celebrities Web3 to lose NFT collectibles, but more and more established creators are looking at blockchain technology as a way to reevaluate the creative process in bringing entertainment to life.

Now some of the comic brains behind HBO’s hit series “Silicon Valley” have unveiled their own attempt, Terrible Pets. The project will use Ethereum NFTs are to “turn the content itself into LEGO blocks”, so that the owners can use them to build meme-suitable web content, said Fika Media’s co-founder and CEO Adam Altman.

“Silicon Valley” executive producer and showrunner Alec Berg is one of the founders of Fika, as are producers Jonathan Dotan and Bubba Murarka. The show’s co-creator, Mike Judge – also behind “Beavis and Butt-Head” and “King of the Hill” – is an angel investor and a potential future partner for the start-up, Berg said.

Berg, also a co-creator of HBO’s “Barry” and an executive producer on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, said Decrypt that while television and film technology have improved over the years, the process of creating script-based media has not changed much in decades. Web3 offers a new way to co-create and collaborate with a potentially broad and diverse audience.

“With technology, there is the potential to actually re-architect the way stories are told and the way they are built,” Berg said. “I just think it’s super exciting.”

Altman, a technology founder, said he was inspired by the early pandemic success of the Clubhouse audio chat app, which he saw bringing people together from different backgrounds. He gathered a large following on the service (and became an investor), and together with Murarka and Berg they considered how the same “social energy” could be used on creative content.

Altman said he agreed with Berg’s dissertation that “the greatest creativity in the world is in the far corners of the Internet.” Entertainment studios have talent, resources and distribution, but simple memes get a lot of attention and spread all over the world.

“An 8-year-old in Indonesia can blow my mind on a Saturday morning, when done right,” Altman added.

Terrible Pets is Fika’s attempt to combine these two approaches: creative seeds and technology from well-funded professionals, but with the opportunity for a community to leverage these resources to remix and share all kinds of content. They have developed the premise “like a TV show,” Altman said, but with an eye to enabling online, user-generated content.

And while the project is built around Ethereum NFTs – that is, blockchain tokens that serve as proof of ownership of content or other elements – they will not look or function like the popular Boring monkeys or other digital collectibles with an animal theme.

Build with NFTs

The eight anthropomorphic creatures that make up the cast of Terrible Pets is described as “human-like animals with related traumas, wrapped in absurdism.” The cartoon creatures meet at Animals Anonymous, a wilderness camp that acts as an emotional support group.

Altman described the premise as “a fun, vibey thing” for building community and related content around, comparing the tone to Netflix’s “BoJack Horseman.” However, the characters revealed to date, such as Sussy Sloth and WAGMI Meerkat, nod to cryptocurrency and social media.

Unlike the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Cool catsand Ok Bears, Terrible Pets NFTs will not be animal profile pictures with randomized visual features. Instead, Altman described them as “one-liner blocks of performance” that can be put together in different ways to create content, reminiscent of the aforementioned comparison with LEGO bricks.

LEGO bricks are easy to use and can be combined in a number of ways to bring creative ideas to life. Fika looks at Terrible Pets NFTs in much the same way. The not final picture as Decrypt saw similar to the cartoon panels in the built-in tweet above, which can be arranged in different ways or potentially used as a starting point for other types of content.

Fika envisions that users combine these NFT moments into scenes and turn them into shareable social content, whether it is photos or videos.

Holders of specific NFTs in the collection will also have varying benefits within the apps that Fika creates around Terrible Pets. Ahead of the NFT launch, the team has released one Terrible Pics mobile app to avoid stickers with characters and Minions-like potato creations on top of photos, but Fika plans other creative tools afterwards.

Release the pets

In short, Fika has developed the premise of Terrible Pets together with several characters in that world. In addition to creating some internal content, Fika will publish NFTs with written dialog lines that can be used by collectors to develop their own content, which can potentially help spread this new IP over the internet.

What ultimately adds up to, or ultimately leads to, however, remains vague. In part, it is unclear because Fika is still finding out about the difficult topic of use and commercial rights, and how NFT holders can benefit from the project. But it is also unclear because the creators will first see what people do with the tools they want to offer.

In some NFT collections, such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club, holders have commercialization rights and may tap on their photos for products, content and services. Altman said the team is working on legal advice to determine the extent of rights for future NFT holders, but that it “is not really defined and locked yet.”

“The vision that we want to grow up to is to enable more content creation, and that everyone involved can benefit from it,” he added. “It’s a difficult thing to work through, legally.”

The NFT rollout is currently planned from late summer to early autumn, so it is still time for Fika to elaborate on these details. Altman also said he expects “a new launch approach”, including possible “significant releases” ahead of the NFT coin.

No matter how the NFT benefits work, Altman said they are not trying to design a model that will “squeeze and limit” user creations. “It is in everyone’s interest that the content goes as far and wide as possible,” he added. On the other hand, Fika does not want the characters and scenes to be used for potentially extreme content, so there may be limitations.

Berg and his colleagues said that they also want to see where society takes the calls and the technology, and go from there. Could it mean a Terrible Pets TV show or movie, or some other glossy content? Can user-created scenes make money in one way or another through other media platforms?

Usually, when he wrote for TV, Berg said that his first script outline rarely appears on screen. It is a process of iteration and evolution – seeing what works and what does not work, and leaning into what does. With Terrible Pets, they seem to be concerned with letting the community play with the content and find out what’s clicking.

“We have a plan for some things we want to do, and they’re organized around building things that allow people to do things,” Altman said. He described the process as “building the train tracks in front of you as you go,” saying they will learn and swing along the way toward potentially bigger ambitions.

“A big turn”

Fika was founded in 2020 and has so far raised around 4 million dollars, a representative said Decrypt. First Round Capital, XYZ Capital and Moment led the financing. Berg is a supporter, as are Craig Mazin from HBO’s acclaimed “Chernobyl”, “Destroyer” director Karyn Kusama, and Malcolm Spellman, creator and showrunner of Disney +’s “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier”.

– There is a pretty big ambition behind this. We are a venture-backed startup, and you can not get through that glove without having a big swing in mind, something we do, “said Altman.

“Terrible pets are the start of it,” he added, but the ultimate goal is to “create a new content format.”

As mentioned, Berg’s “Silicon Valley” colleague Judge is also an angel investor. Judge made its own NFT game late last year, launches “Dancing Dan”, a hand-drawn animated film. It sold in early May for 90 ETHor about $ 242,000 at the time, and was released for public use through a CC0 license.

Berg told Decrypt he hopes Judge will “do more and more things” with Fika over time, adding that Judge created “Beavis and Butt-Head” in his garage and turned it into a big franchise – and in the process created a new way to bring animation to TV. If Fika’s collective IP construction experiment is successful, Terrible Pets may rise in the same way.

“I think he has a huge understanding of innovation and starting small, and finding ways things work,” Berg said of Mike Judge. “He is an engineer, and he is someone who has built things from scratch. So I think he really understood – more than most people – what was cool about this, what worked with it, and what made sense with it. “

Berg said he is excited to explore this new frontier for Web3 and collaborative content creation – both with professional allies and a potentially large selection of online participants. He pointed the emergence of TikTok “duets” and remixes, and the eagerness of social media users to add and expand the creations of others in the pursuit of spreading joy and entertainment.

“That’s not how movies and TVs usually work, is it?” It is such new interactions that happen with this technology, Berg said. “It’s going to lead to such interesting things.”

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