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IFH 496

IFH 496: How to Make Money with PSD Self Distribution

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Our guests today are filmmakers and developers, Zach Lona and Anthony Gibson. Zach is the founder of Chicago-based film production company, Eleusinian Productions studio that invented the Patronized Self-Distribution (PSD) model. The Patronized self-distribution (PSD) uses NFTs essentially as an alternative film distribution model from traditional Hollywood distribution. It hoists and redefines the status of independent films to that of fine art while targeting the film’s specific audience (art collectors/patrons). 

After finishing up his feature mockumentary film directorial debut, He Who Lives In Hidden Lakes, at the end of 2020, and being reluctant to go the normal film distribution route, Zach sought an alternative and along with his team, invented the PSD model earlier this year. 

The fanatic beliefs of an internet mystic, a cult leader, and a rookie cop who went rogue are tested on the hunt for the “Hidden Man” — an elusive forest-dwelling cryptid that terrorizes their idyllic suburb.

He Who Lives In Hidden Lakes is now listed as Eleusinian Production’s first NFT auction on OpenSea NFT online marketplace. The NFT model is a huge incentive for independent filmmakers because the increase in viewers will lead to an increase in passive income and NFT value.

As you can tell, this is a deep dive topic. So, I wanted to bring them to the show to talk about how all of it works. Efficient ways to implement Patronized Self-Distribution, Who really benefits from Patronized Self-Distribution models, and more.

Enjoy my entertaining conversation with Anthony and Zach.

Alex Ferrari 0:11
I like to welcome to the show Anthony Gibson and Zack Lona. How you guys doing?

Zach Lona 0:16
Doing Excellent. Thanks for having us.

Alex Ferrari 0:18
Oh, man, thank you so much for coming on the show man, I, you guys reached out to me and I get reached out to on a daily basis to be on the show. And I get pitches constantly. But when I saw what you guys were doing, I was like, This is interesting. And of course, you hit a very sweet spot right now, which is blockchain NFT, these new alternative distribution models using technology to empower the filmmaker. Because there's been a slight history of filmmakers being taken advantage of by distribution. I'm not saying many, but some say just just a couple. I mean, it's it's not the norm or anything. But yeah, I want to bring you guys on the show to talk about your amazing new way of distributing through the blockchain through NF T's. But before we even get to that, how did both of you guys get into the business?

Zach Lona 1:13
So we actually met each other. In Chicago, we were a bit both based in Chicago at the time. And Anthony has since moved to LA. So we met through our cinematographers at Green on a feature like project, which was my directorial debut is called he lives in hidden lakes, which is the subject of this project here. And then Anthony, and I have since worked on that very closely with his his production skills.

Alex Ferrari 1:40
Cool. And that's how you guys got together. And what made you get into the business? Anthony?

Anthony Gibson 1:45
Oh, yeah, I mean, what made me get into it. I just love movies. My grandpa used to chase me around his house wearing wolf mask brought me into the world via horror movies.

Alex Ferrari 1:57
Grandpa, that's an amazing.

Anthony Gibson 1:59
Yeah, he was big in horror, big and westerns, it's one of my first memories were like in his kitchen, and he's chasing me around on that mask and would have been, it's interesting to have a first memory of feeling like you're about to be eaten by a monster, and feel like that's informed the rest of my life basically attracted to his exact movie here So

Alex Ferrari 2:17
I think this is, this is where the therapy begins. Anthony.

Anthony Gibson 2:20
Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 2:20
So so. So you guys just came up with this new idea called the patronis self distribution model using NF T's essentially, can you explain to the audience and we've had other episodes about this, but just want to kind of carry it a baseline? What is an NF? t? In the simplest, simplest terminology?

Zach Lona 2:39
Yeah, this is always a tough one, right? Because it's so new. And it's like, I'll give out Anthony. I'll give my definition. And then I've thought a lot about about how to position this. And essentially, how I think of it is it's a immutable function on a blockchain that represents a asset, like a work of art, a film, a house alone, something like this, where it's universally verifiable. So anyone, no matter who you are, where you are, you can come into the blockchain code, and you can verify that this token, this NFT represents this, whatever it is. So basically, that's more confusing than it was before. So now, I'm actually more confused about what an NF T is. And I know what an NF T is. No,

Alex Ferrari 3:29
I'm joking. So you you don't quit your day job? No. Basically, to my understanding, you guys can explain to this and NFT essentially, is a digital baseball card, a digital comic book, a digital painting, as a one off, or multiple versions, or limited edition prints of something. So there's a 5050 limited a 50 of this, or only one of this. And it's just a digital version of spider man number one, but there's only maybe one of them or there could be 100 of the market be 1000 of them, depending on how many you you release out there. Is that a fair? exponential? FTS? Yeah,

Anthony Gibson 4:06
you know, I think like, for me, the term in my mind is like digital, physical, or physical, digital, it's like a thing that exists, like, as itself that you can sell as a singular item, the same way that you would have any other merchandise, you can do that with an entity. It's a way to buy and sell means.

Zach Lona 4:24
Yeah, it's a it's a way to facilitate digital ownership of something.

Alex Ferrari 4:29
Right? And then when you were saying blockchain, I mean, I know what blockchain is. So you know the basics of blockchain. If you want to know about the basis of blockchain and what NF T's are based on, I have multiple episodes, and I'll link that in the in the show notes on on blockchain explanations of it, and what it all means in our world, because that's a long conversation, and I think I've ever had that conversation. So I just really want to focus on what you guys are doing, but I'll put that in the show notes guys. So tell me then what is a patronized self distribution model? Or a PSD model?

Zach Lona 5:02
Yeah, so patronis self distribution is a way to not necessarily actually release your film, but it's a way to verifiably own the film as a work of art. So a lot of projects that have been experimented with NF T's in the film space have been sort of in a in an addition or in a like a, you could like you were saying earlier, you could buy multiple versions of it, like you have like a limited DVD release, or something like this, what patronis self distribution does is that it It means a scarce token of your film. So you're not thinking of your film as a fungible asset anymore, where everyone can go to Netflix or Amazon Prime and see it, now you're thinking of it as almost like a piece of fine art, like a unique one of one painting. So then that is then mapped to the token. And then, on top of that, you can sell that token as a sort of non fungible piece of art. And then the economic aspect of it that we've designed that comes into it grants the owner of that NFT, which is representing your film, in all of its singular artistic glory, and all the blood, sweat and tears you put into it, it also gives utility to the owner. So usually, that's going to be mean like an economic benefit, like a perk. You can also have like crowdfunding type benefits with it with, you know, maybe you can have dinner with the director and producer. But really, what's what's what, what's going to make it the most powerful book for both you as a filmmaker and your patron, is the sort of economic benefit to owning this token.

Alex Ferrari 6:57
Right? So when you're saying, so basically someone, let's say, I buy your movie for five grand, you're NFT, according to what I read in your, on your on your website, you whoever buys that token would also get 50% of all streaming revenue, from here on to eternity, essentially, in perpetuity. Oh, yeah. Okay. So then they would come in, so now, I own it. I bought it for $5,000. And then now after I've purchased it, it releases the film, because the film would have not been released at that point yet,

Zach Lona 7:30
right? Yes, exactly. So there are many ways it really the sky's the limit with what you can do with NF T's, which is really like the power of it is like this is completely untapped potential. And there's use cases for this stuff that no one has even thought of yet. So this is a new one that we thought we would experiment with, where we're saying, okay, we're gonna mint our feature film as a one on one token, which hasn't been done before, to our knowledge. And then we're also going to give an economic benefit to owning the token. And that just exists in perpetuity. So the the potential that that unlocks is you can trade the token again, it's, again, we're thinking of the film as like a painting or a piece of fine art now, where you can now there's now a secondary market for that, for that film. And along with the economic benefit, that which transfers on the resale of the token, the new owner of the film token will then receive that 50% cut. So we can get into a little bit more, but it's, it's, it's powerful.

Anthony Gibson 8:35
Yeah, you know, it's really like an exploration of incentive, and figuring out, like, what we can do within this new technology to explore new models for small business. I mean, I think of myself as like a small business filmmaker, right. And this is like, like, this new modality is allowing people to enter a space and be new and to define it, and to set up new new norms, which is really exciting. And so I think, like, in this case, it's like, well, we had this feature film that we had produced, and we wanted to see what we could do to distribute it ourselves. And that was like, along came this conversation about annuities. And we just kind of racked our brains around like, Well, what does the incentive look like? And what could scenario be that would put something in the hands of the person who bought it, but also give us an opportunity to have an entirely new platform? And that's what's awesome about these aggregators is like, you can self distribute your movie, you know, and the terms that just happened to be attached to our NFT was, we're not going to touch the aggregator until it's purchased. And that was the term.

Alex Ferrari 9:37
Right. And the thing is to that, well, I'm assuming that the budget of the film was at a point where a $5,000 nF t made sense because if you spent a quarter of a million half a million dollars on a movie that doesn't make financial sense to give half of your streaming revenue away, so it's kind of like you know, it But let's say for example, that I have a movie that has a star in it. Even Not, not Brad Pitt, or you know, Leonardo DiCaprio, but just a basic, you know, a star power that has a fan base. And then we put it up for auction, as opposed to locking it in. Did you you guys locked it into 5000. Right? Well, we

Zach Lona 10:19
did. Oh, yeah. We put it to auction. So we actually got a couple bids in. And our starting auction was one ether, which I think at the time was a little under 2000. Yeah. Yeah. So we got a couple bids in there. And it went up to 2.25 ether, which was the strike price. So that was really cool to see the bids come in for this thing. That means that there's definitely like an inkling of a market forming around this stuff. But yeah.

Alex Ferrari 10:44
So Alright, so then, so if we put the bid out, and let's say that bid gets up to 75,000 $100,000, that's a very feasible thing, especially if you're guaranteed 50% of streaming revenue coming in, and that's a massive, it could be massive, depending on the kind of revenue you're creating. Where you're being put up on is that, you know, transactional? Is that a VOD? Is that s VOD, is that P VOD. What you can define all that in your NFT. Is that, is that right?

Zach Lona 11:12
Yeah, that's correct. So with ours, and I'm sure everyone is listening is thinking like, what are these guys doing? Giving a 50%? Like, we haven't gotten into like why we did? That's a good deal, right? But yes, you can define any of that within the economics of your token. It just so happens that we're including, like, you know, a VOD t VOD. Every anywhere it's streamed, the owner of the ift gets a 50% cut of our production company's gross. So not like the entire gross. So just what we take home.

Alex Ferrari 11:43
So the So then the question is, why the hell did you do this? And how does this make it make any sort of financial sense?

Zach Lona 11:50
Yeah, so it's it's an expense, like Anthony said, you know, it's an experiment in incentives. And maybe do you want to take this one.

Alex Ferrari 11:58
But I'm assuming it's an experiment, because I experimented to my first one was five grand my second film was three grand, I experimented because my budgets were extremely low. I didn't experiment with 50 or 100. Grand, because I'm not rolling that deep just yet. So I'm assuming that the budget justifies this kind of, of risk, or this kind of experiment. Does that make sense? Totally. Yeah.

Anthony Gibson 12:18
Yeah. I mean, and Zack can probably share more about where like the budgets coming from and all that stuff. But for us, yeah, we were very much in a place where you know, a, a one ether deal at a certain point for the one to one NFT was more interesting to us than maybe recouping a any money, like all of the funding back within the actual purchase of the NFT. But also to give away 50% of the streaming rights, I think for us with most interesting about it is the experimentation and saying look like we're trying something new, we happen to have something that we're willing to take a risk with. And it's like, hey, like, if this means that more people would watch it, like, the idea of like giving up more money was okay, because it's actually just about the piece of work itself. And also what this could mean for the future. Because everything every project you get out is like a case study in like business and economics and all these kinds of things. And it's every project is going to have a new audience. And it's like, someone who's buying soap and someone who's buying toothpaste, but they buy different kinds of things, you have to find another way to sell to that person. And it's like, well, the only way we're going to get to that knowledge is if we take the thing that we already have and put forth and say we're putting it all we're going all in on our chips here, because something on the other side of this is going to tell us what to do next.

Zach Lona 13:37
Yeah. And to be specific about, you know why we're actually saying this is the utility that we're going to grant with this NFT is the trying to capitalize on the incentive of either someone by an out of the gate, or on the secondary market of someone who it's almost like a like a High Renaissance artists patron relationship where the kind of person who has the money to allocate to this kind of, you know, merchandise or artwork, they might have in influence in the greater world, where we call it in the crypto space pumping their bags, you know, so you're like, Okay, I just bought this NFT I want to show it to everyone. So the more the meme gets out there that this is a movie, and you should watch it, the more valuable that the original NFT becomes. So the idea is the person who buys this, either one has an incentive to sell it to someone with a with a large audience essentially, or some influence, or the person who acquires it outright, can acquire it for a cheaper price. Like say $5,000, which if we're talking about artwork isn't really that much. But then they can say, Okay, I have an audience of, you know, maybe a million people. Maybe I'm like a big YouTube streamer, I could drop $5,000 on this film, you know, shill it to my audience. And then within a couple months, I've made my initial investment back. And also now the now that all of my audience has seen this film, more people love it. More people love it. The more cultural gravitas that the film has, the more countercultural gravitas that the film has, the more value that the original film and ft can capture on the secondary market. So it's almost like an incentive engine to keep things going and pump the bag essentially.

Alex Ferrari 15:32
That's, it's I know, a lot of people who listen to this, like, what are these two guys? What are these three guys talking about? This is these guys are insane. But look, we're and I told you guys, this before we started, I've said this a million times on the show before is that we're in the internet 1996 we're still trying to figure out what HTML is we're still trying to figure out what JPEG is, we're still trying to get faster than dial up modems to log onto the internet without stealing an AOL disk from a magazine in a Barnes and Noble. That's how old I am. So, you know, that's where we are with NF T's with blockchain. With all this, we're at a very, very basic beginning level. And it's been around for how since 2008, when Bitcoin showed up, and the concept of blockchain showed up. It, we were we were around, it's been around that long. And it's taken that long to get to where we are now. And people are starting to figure things out. And again, we've talked about NF T's at nauseam at some of these episodes. So you can go deeper into that. But I'm curious, okay, so obviously, the budget made sense. The benefits make sense for the investor who buys this. Now, something that people might not understand is that if I buy your NFT, I resell it for 20 grand, you get 10% of that for perpetuity, if that sells for 20 grand, and then a year or two later, it sells for 40 grand, you just made another 4000 bucks. And and it keeps going and going and going and going. And hopefully your next movie is you know, taxi driver, you know, circa 2021. And then you blow up as a filmmaker will the value of that NFT astronomically goes up. And I think you use the example of George Lucas, George Lucas added theory M and NF T, what would the Star Wars and if TV and and I've said, What is it? What would taxi driver be? What would be amblin? You know, Spielberg's first short film as an NFT? What would that be worth today if it would have been treated as such? And the technology existed when that came out? So is that

Zach Lona 17:35
right? Exactly? Yeah, we're so I come from a from more of a fine art background, myself, I didn't start in film, I just sort of arrived at film as a consequence of feeling like that, that was the best medium for my creative ideas to live. So I'm coming at it from I'm trying to kind of combine these two worlds, where now we have an opportunity because of this NFT technology to assign cultural value that translates to economic value to like these priceless film cultural artifacts. I mean, film is such a big part of, you know, our culture. And you know, you can argue that it's, it's sort of got a lot of competition these days, which it does, but that's an opportunity for independent filmmaking at this level to sort of ascend socially in terms of its social status. So I see feature films going more of the way of like the opera, or, or the theater where it's kind of more of a niche interest, but it's got a very high, it's got a higher class, social implication to it, which if we're, then if then we're assigning Fine Art value to the film's and that can be traded. Yeah, the value of these tokens could, you know, seriously be worth a lot in the future. And also, because of the technology, we get a creative royalty on each of those secondary transactions. So if you know one day this sells for a million dollars on the secondary market, we just pocket $100,000 you just automatically,

Alex Ferrari 19:04
right, exactly. And I mean, imagine Wizard of Oz, or Citizen Kane or you know, if you want to talk about fine art, you mean that's the equivalent, you know, or you know, of the earlier chaplains first films or something like that as NF T's treating film as fine art, which no one's really ever had that opportunity to because film is a next film has always been something that you needed to sell a lot of tickets in order to make it financially viable. And that's the entire business model. This allows that to continue. But this is just another revenue stream for like, I was telling people I'm like, Wait till Marvel or Disney jumps in on this. Like, what it what is what is the Avengers? What is what's the Avengers? And if t worth

Anthony Gibson 19:49
Yeah, you know, it's interesting, like the idea of like, the the concept of reproducibility is dramatically changing right now. Like there's a seismic shift that is happening. Understanding what like means even are and like essentially what we're talking about is like a meme engine, like a cultural, like cultural currency being added to financial value of like singular internet objects. And it's like, the film has a one to one identity. Now, the film is films have always up until now had this concept of reproducibility films are not plays, you know, right there, they're not a fine art piece. This is that convergence of, it's both now, it's simultaneously both at the same time, if you're approaching it with this model.

Zach Lona 20:33
Yeah. And it's the same exact concept, as you know, the, the Nyan Cat NFT selling for hundreds of 1000s of dollars. I don't

Alex Ferrari 20:42
like I don't understand it in the least. But

Zach Lona 20:45
well, it's that's the cultural gravitas of these memes that are being sold it because it's coming from the people who are actually, you know, who created the meme off the bat. So not only is it like, it's the official sort of meme version. And then the more that people share the memes, the more valuable that original NFT becomes. So it's the exact same concept.

Alex Ferrari 21:07
I mean, you guys are a bit young for this. But Garbage Pail Kids. Yeah. If you don't if you knew what Garbage Pail Kids were, but I was a young guy when Garbage Pail Kids came out. And I remember the first series of garbage, it's a sticker, man, it's a sticker on a piece of cardboard. That was not Mickey Mantle, which was not Spider Man, it was a garbage. And they were selling for hundreds of 1000s of dollars, Pokemon cards, baseball cards, comic books, these things have value to the audience that they're to the to the tribe that is in invested in that to my wife, a number one first appearance of an Amazing Fantasy number 15 first appearance of spider man is a bunch of paper. To me, it's like, oh my god, that's the first appearance of spider man. And there's a complete disconnect. Like she was like, how much is that gonna cost? I'm like, I don't know, probably a million dollars. But you know, but to me that's valuable. And so art is whatever value you put on it, period, regardless if you agree with that or not.

Anthony Gibson 22:09
Yeah, it's funny to think to like, like that the interest economy of how like that's localized, like you have a look like it's like a, imagine a local economy where like, value is interspersed amongst itself and has its own definition outside of something that exists over here. And it's like, things that exists on the blockchain with NF T's like we have this dollar value that we can apply to it. But it's like, it's funny to think, yeah, like, you can have one thing over in this corner. And that can be worth so much to one person. And then you come over here, and it's worthless, but it's validating those interests. It's saying within those communities, these things matter, and they get to matter even more now.

Alex Ferrari 22:46
I mean, all you got to do is go to Comic Con, and you can figure that out real quick. I mean, I mean, like I've I took my wife to my first Comic Con deck a decade ago, and she was just in her mouth was on the floor. She's like, I see these price tags on these on these little books, what is what's going on? She's completely at no idea she that people are dressed up, like these are these are grown adults. And she would stop them like, what do you do for a living is like, I'm an attorney. What, like, but that's, but that is the world and that's the value that that world puts on, on those pieces of art, where you can walk into a fine art museum or gallery. And I wouldn't, I would look at something like that, that doesn't doesn't float my boat, but the person right next to me, like, I'll give you $100,000 for that because he knows or she knows what that's valued in their community. So this is just another the beginning, just barely starting in naeba level of this this market for for films. And I think independent filmmakers have the ability to really cash in and create not only revenue streams for themselves, but to provide some cultural, cultural art for for the society at large. And like, like Sundance like Sundance winners, SXSW winners con winners, you know, these these things that have these kind of labels like what would what would an NF t from the winner of Best Picture at Sundance be worth today cuz that that director could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars later on because of all I got there for Imagine if you had Sex, Lies and videotape. The very first 1989 basically the beginning of Sundance, this is when Sundance blew up at the moment that Steven Soderbergh sold their movie, at Sundance for a million dollars or whatever it was back then. Imagine if there was if you had that NFT what would the NFP be worth in or slacker or El Mariachi or or clerk? Imagine if you had what would those be worth and they would only be worth something to like my generation, your generation people will understand what that is. The older generation will be like that. It depends.

Zach Lona 24:56
Well the fact that we're talking about these films in this context and we're realizing like, wow, how much would that be worth? I mean, it speaks to, I think the viability of this this model that we've come up with here too. Because, you know, we're talking about, you know, why are these you know, pieces of paper worth so much? Not only is it from the the meme and the the cultural aspect of it, it's also the scarcity of it too, right. So like, there's only so many, you know, holographic chars are, there's only so many Spider Man first appearances, like the the filmmakers will do very well to understand these principles around economics, incentive and scarcity. So the decision to mint a single NFT was also driven by the scarcity question. So there's only ever going to be we're not going to mint you know, in addition, after this, of, you know, maybe other kilos and hidden lakes, and EF T's that film is only ever going to be mentioned as a one of one NFT. So that means that that's just automatic built in scarcity, there's only ever going to be one. So that's that the dynamic of that makes it much much different than if we said, okay, we're gonna mint, you know, 50 of these, or 100, or 1000. So what that does is, you know, there's much good work to be done in designing incentives around those types of additions. But what happens then, is that you have to manage each one potentially being worth less and also, in less demand as well. So it's, it's, you gotta you gotta look at your trade offs with with this kind of stuff, too.

Alex Ferrari 26:30
Yeah, and I don't know if you guys knew this, but I jumped into the NFT market. When I did my first in my first interview, and I put out, I happened to be the first film tutorials ever on YouTube. Yeah, which makes me old as dirt. But I happened to be I looked at I looked, and I looked, I'm like, I think I'm the first guy ever to put an eye and I'm, I might be the first movie trailer. I can't. I can't say that for sure. But I beat like Sony classics, which was like four or five months after I released my movie trailer for my first short film in 2004. So I don't I can't find any movie trailers prior to that. But I don't want to say that because I'm like, that would be insane if I actually released the first movie trailer on YouTube. But I don't know I, I can't say I don't have an NF T for it. But But I did put an FCS out for the six videos that I put out on that day tutorials. And I put the first three out just to see what would happen they sold out within two days. If I only sold for 100 bucks, but still was just it was an experiment. Like, let's see what's going on here. So I put the rest of them out. And there's been slowly selling and it's just like, wow, that's because that's kind of cool. Like you have the first filmmaking tutorial now Who is that important to filmmakers, or friends of mine, you know, like something along those lines. You know, again, it's based on the perception of what that is valuable, what's valuable. There's YouTubers, like, you know, whatever, cutie pie, who's got whatever, 150 million followers, I'm like that to his followers, he puts out a scribble on a piece of paper. There's value attached to that, which you and I would pretty much be like, let me put my drink on that. But it's all about perception and value and what people think the value is. It is a very, it is NF T's and your model of NF T's as as ludicrous or genius as a piece of cardboard with a picture of a baseball player. Yeah, and someone attaching value to that. Yeah, it's, it's just a piece of cardboard with a picture on it. But

Anthony Gibson 28:40
the goal is to turn Zach into a human Pokemon card.

Alex Ferrari 28:44
Nice. Except no less than 10. We're working on the holographic shirts right now. That's genius. So So what are some tips that you can put, give the audience when they're creating a using the PSD model? What are certain things that should be in place for for a good successful PSD model? And?

Zach Lona 29:09
Yeah, I would say I would say, again, scarcity is looking very closely at the kind of utility that you're including with, with the NFT because you want to make sure that you're not giving away more than you're willing to lose, right? It's like, you know, the old rule of investing is, you know, don't don't invest more than you can afford to lose. So we went about it, we said, okay, 50% of our streaming revenue is an acceptable trade off for getting this you know, upfront fee, whatever it may be, because we tried to listen for 43 ether and then we put the starting bid at 12 ether. Now, I happen to think that it's still worth that much like we were just talking about, but because it's such a new thing. The market isn't willing to dip its toes that far into it yet. So I would say Make sure that you're that you're the utility is not only beneficial, mutually for you and your patron, but also that your patron isn't. They don't have to try to minimize the work that they have to do in order to capitalize on it. And also, like I was, like I said at the beginning, you know, dinner and, you know, tickets to exclusive premieres and stuff. Oh, that's cool. You can include that. But keep in mind that if you know you resell it, do you want to offer that to the new owners of that? How often do you want to, you know, keep that going. It's stuff like that is less quantifiably valuable to an investor or collector. And I also want to note that when I say investor in this context, much different from your investor, that's going to give you your budget to do the film. So

Alex Ferrari 30:48
to an art invest. It's an art investors different.

Zach Lona 30:50
Yeah, it's it's much different. So you don't you don't owe them any money. Unless you want to like where we're going or investor or patron money. That's why I call it a patron and not not an investor. But there's also the the next project we're going to be doing is kind of exploring how we can incorporate this model and do like a hybrid PSD crowdfunding model because we, we came into this already having the movie done. So it had never been released before. We just finished it in, you know, the tail end months of 2020. So we had already had the budget, and we you know, did it and you know, that's all done. So we were in a position where we could say, okay, we will have to pay anyone back now because we were self financed. But now how do we use this stuff to viably? crowdfund.

Anthony Gibson 31:39
Yeah, well, what does it look like to explore the nooks and crannies of incentive in development? And how, you know, you know, Alex, you were talking earlier, like, you know, if you have a star attached, you know, that's, that's often how distribution deals are made, you know, said, Oh, I was able to attach XYZ actor, which, you know, these kinds of audiences like this actor, here's, here's a way of shoring up your investment, because, you know, you've done the calculus, and you're like, this will fit, you know, the likelihood of this exporting value is higher because of this thing. It's like, Well, what does that look like, in today's age, with so many different corners of value in the internet? Because what does it look like when someone who does, you know, video tutorial podcasts? Or? And also someone who does fashion and makeup videos, someone else? Who does video game streaming? And you say, Hey, I'm going to put you all in the same movie? And what does that look like now, when now you're tapping value from all of these different areas? To say that, yes. And also, we're incorporating the NFT universe. And instead of incentivizing with, you know, like various crowdfunding perks and saying, you get a T shirt and those kinds of things? No, you have an NF, you'd like what if there was a way to create an NF T, that could have value on the secondary market. And so it's all about finding all of those different areas of incentive. And for anyone that's looking to make projects considering this as a model, you know, it's there, there are so many ways, it's ultimately so creative right? Now, you can do so many different things, and work right now are just getting nitty gritty for our next project about what that could look like.

Alex Ferrari 33:21
Right? And you can I mean, in a crowdfunding site, you can use, for example, someone, you could crowdfund an NF T, and then just give them a percentage of based on what they give a percentage of the final gross or the final this or the final that some sort of incentive and that way, so it's almost like more of an investment than a gift of a crowdfunding. So it's now you're you're actually sourcing it out and it's all could be done on the on the blockchain, which would be ideal, and I hope one day we get to the place where all distribution is done on the blockchain. And all payments are done on the blockchain. Yeah, everything's done with smart contracts and and we don't have to deal with this bs anymore that you know, distributors do this or distributors do that or, excuse me, let me rephrase predatory distributors do this. Do that with with not all distributors are bad? by any stretch, there are a lot of great ones out there. But we focus on the predators.

Zach Lona 34:21
Exactly, why let's let's talk a little bit about how distribution actually like functionally comes into this. Right. So like, for anyone who's still kind of like, skeptical a little bit about it, about this model we've done, I mean, we sold it, so we made, you know, $5,000 off of this, which is comparable to a minimum guarantee, you might get it from a distributor,

Alex Ferrari 34:39
if you're lucky, if you're

Zach Lona 34:40
lucky, if you're lucky, if you're lucky. And now, well, now you get the secondary, you know, revenue stream from secondary sales to but, you know, think of it like that, you know, it's like we can because the other thing that's happening with this is that we are retaining all the rights to our film. We're not giving away any rights whatsoever with this Because the revenue stream and the NFT itself are reason enough, obviously, for someone to collect it. So now, we could say, Okay, now we're going to go to a distributor and collect a minimum guarantee from them. So that's, you know, another possible avenue for so yeah, essentially, like you were saying earlier, Alex, this is like a another revenue stream for the film that will also work to hopefully automate some of the marketing lift that you have to do by virtue of being this transferable meme capture

Alex Ferrari 35:33
unit, so to speak, right. And if you had a, let's say, you did 1000 units, let's say, just throwing that out there 1000 units, and that those 1000 units are worth 10 15% of, of your revenue jumping in there, I'm just going off the top here. So you put away 15% of all revenue is going to go to these, this 100 units that you're going to sell on crowdsourcing of crowdfunding, excuse me. And then all of a sudden, all that all those people who buy those 100 people, they're going to be incentivized to market the living hell out of this. Yeah. And get this out in the world. And if you did that with 1000, and broke them that 15% accordingly that way, then you even have more. So it all depends on what you're doing. And then you could also put a price tag on all of that just to get in the game. There's so many different routes you can go on. It's it is it is essentially the wild wild west right now it is. It's the internet circa 96. Man, it is like the wild

Anthony Gibson 36:32
wild west, take a look and see, just like, like what's happening on the internet? How are people communicating on the internet? How are people pointing a camera at themselves? How are people quote unquote, influencing? And then, like, how can an taking a look at that and being like, hmm, there's some serious untapped potential, through this communication mechanism for getting new ideas, getting new films out into the world and seen by people. And it's just about connecting the dots. It's just saying, you come over here, you come over here, let's do this thing. It's, you know, in some ways, uses the same philosophy is like, you're if you're a YouTuber, and you want to, like, go on someone else's show to get to get some of their audience to come see your thing. And you cross pollinate. I mean, that's, essentially it's taking that and it's scaling it up, and using the blockchain in order to do that. And it's, it's all like Zach, and I love to just like, you know, one of our favorite things about this whole thing is that it's just, it's all memes, memes mean, everything is it mean, and like, that is like pretty like, you know, core to our philosophy. In all of this. It's like, what can we do with means? What can we do to make people think about memes? And that's a cornerstone of the mythos that we're trying to create with the bigger world that we're actually working on.

Alex Ferrari 37:45
Now, you guys also created a physical version of the NFT to send to the person who purchased it, which I think is awesome. How do you How did you create it? Because it looked awesome. From the pictures I saw. What was the cost? If you don't mind me asking like that? That's a customized situation. So what was that situation done?

Zach Lona 38:04
how he's done? So it that was a nightmare to put together? But I'll just be upfront upfront and get this. So our collector wishes to remain anonymous for now. But they told me like, hang on to it. I'll redeem it. One I feel like it so I still have it. Like it hasn't left my house yet. Which I'm fine with because, you know, I appreciate that. Like, it's, it's, it's gorgeous. We're pretty proud of it. No,

Alex Ferrari 38:29
it's stunning. I was like, That's gorgeous. Like that looks like a special special, special freakin criterion. The, you know, to the nth degree kind of one on one and drama is beautiful. Okay, you're making us blush. It is.

Zach Lona 38:45
Appreciate that. Um, yeah, very proud of it. But in terms of the logistics, yeah, it was. So not many, you know, packaging manufacturers take one off orders. And then the ones that do are pretty pricey. And see, here's the thing too, is that we didn't have to do that. Obviously, our patron doesn't even really want it right now, which is something it's a phenomenon that's happening in the crypto art, collectible space with NF T's where it's like, you know, there are artists who offer you know, the physical painting with the NFT and collectors will say I don't want any physicals I just want to I just want the JPEG in my wall. And that's totally cool. So we went into a kind of half expecting that but for me, you know, like, you know, I mentioned earlier I come from a fine arts background. I like having like a physical artifacts for for the film that I've created. But you know, obviously though it I'll put it this way, it was a lot of money. Probably more than I would recommend for someone else who's trying to do this, but it is a very cool thing. And when it's in a museum, you know, 20 3040 years. That's a nice little museum. Now. I'm just kidding.

Alex Ferrari 39:50
And when everyone understands my genius by then, I mean, hopefully I won't be Van Gogh when I'm dead and they'll go out Zach I get I guess, no, no, no, I'm sorry. I just saw I saw a clip from I don't even watch Doctor Who. But I saw a clip where they brought back Van Gogh, and they brought him into the museum. Oh, I've seen that. Oh my god, that's so like, you just start tearing up like an art. It's just like, oh my god, it was so cute. Anyway, sorry, geeked out for a second guys. Sorry, apologize. That was so. So did you, but am I wrong? Did you not create any other NFT things for like, you know, stills of the movie? or other things? Or did you? You know, you're getting into sort of the next chapter for us.

Anthony Gibson 40:43
And, you know, we're working on a big part of, I mean, I can let Zach take over sort of talking about like, the content of the movie itself, because I think it's specific to like, it's kind of amazing what work ended up working out what we ended up having in our lap at a time when crypto was around. It's kind of came to the mainstream. And our film is about a cryptid like a Bigfoot esque Sasquatch, Ian, figure cryptid cryptid meets crypto. And it was just like this perfect marriage of like, what can we do with that? And I feel like it led to that kind of take over there.

Zach Lona 41:20
Yeah, I mean, there's so many places to go from that, you know, it's like, so one of the ideas we have is, you know, Bill, so essentially what we're trying to get at now the phase that the project is in, is we are taking this feature film that we have, and we're trying to use these community incentives to build an audience around the IP itself. So you know, we can get into like the specifics of the plan, but we're going to be minting more NF T's around the, the the fiction and the lore of this, of this, you know, essentially a monster movie, mockumentary IP so you know, like minting specific clips from, you know, the film like, oh, here's a found footage. So the cryptid is called the hidden man is a proprietary monster that we came up with, you know, here's a, an eight millimeter still, or a film clip that we that we use, yeah, we actually used an eight millimeter camera for some of it. So, you know, a nice little badge of honor there. But yeah, like minting stuff like that, and then using that to sort of, do, you know, add more value into the IP through those specific items of merchandise, where it's like, at a lower level, you know, you're never gonna you're, you're only one person can ever have the actual film NFT but you can own pieces of the film, you can on merchandise of the film, that also give you like, community benefit within the community that we're trying to build.

Alex Ferrari 42:45
So I'm gonna pitch you guys something for an NF t please bear with me. This is a real thing. This is a real thing. This is not making this up. But there is such a thing called Bigfoot erotica. Now, wait for it. Wait for it. Wait for it. My friend told me about this. And I'm like, oh my god. This is genius. anyone listening right now when you're done? Listen to this episode, type in Google Bigfoot erotica, and just just lose your mind at what you'll you'll find out. There's not it's not just like pictures. It's like stories, like books, novels, ebooks, about it is amazing. I can't believe you guys have known about this. But the best but the best part was I had a friend of mine who's like, man, my brother's really giving me a hard time. I'm like this what you do? Go to his house. And he's married. He goes go to his house and go on his computer and just start doing a lot of Google search for Bigfoot erotica. And leave it on this. Leave it on his on his thing and let his wife find it. It's exactly what exactly what happened. And he left he loved that his wife and like, his brother calls him like, dude, did you was you were you searching Bigfoot erotica on my computer? My wife thinks I'm doing I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about. You're sick and disgusting. And he hangs up. Wow. So that's sad. That is does savage but that's that's their relationship. I don't get involved. But and it is a tool to ruin a marriage. Yeah. Or just or just, uh, you know, hidden man erotica. I'm just throwing it out there. Just throwing it to the in technically, proprietary world of the IP. Why not? Well, exactly speechless. If anyone listening if it was listed by sees next face, it's just like it all right now he can't even speak. Like.

Zach Lona 44:47
Yes, obviously, obvious is the thing that should happen. Oh, it's funny, actually, in the early days of the film, when I was exploring ideas, I was like, What if we had a romantic interest counter,

Alex Ferrari 45:01
tell there's a whole market that you guys are not serving sir. There's a whole market, you could be just selling this stuff to him just we're not saying there isn't a romantic encounter. There might be there might be there might be

Zach Lona 45:17
like, God, here's the thing. Let's get into me and Anthony have you know, we've got a very specific idea on how we can take this even further. So a new concept, a new blockchain concept that people maybe are not as familiar with is, is a doubt a DA, oh, have you heard of this?

Alex Ferrari 45:36
No, I haven't said

Anthony Gibson 45:38
decentralized autonomous organization.

Alex Ferrari 45:41
Well, I've heard of decentralized for banks, but not for organization. Okay, so talk to me about that.

Zach Lona 45:48
So there's been defy, which is decentralized finance. And that's very cool. The next step after d phi after NF Ts is doubtless, so decentralized, autonomous organizations. And these are essentially corporate structures or business structures, where it's not really run by anyone, there's not really a corporate hierarchy. And the governance of the organization is equally spread out among all of its members. So essentially, anyone can come in, buy the governance token, the, you know, the currency that's native to the Dow organization, and start working on projects and getting paid for it. So is that we're still doing a lot of research on how to

Anthony Gibson 46:30
imagine a decentralized production company where every all the fans get to vote on what the next project is, that's what we're working on.

Alex Ferrari 46:38
And they're paying and they and they pay for, and they'll pay for it by paying into things to help finance it creates a liquidity pool, essentially. Yeah,

Zach Lona 46:46
yeah. And they get rewarded for financing the production. And also what's going to happen is we're gonna we're creating. Now this is this is very early stages here, but we're really excited about it. The core component of how this data is going to work is essentially it's going to manage the hidden lakes IP. So you know, the, our film is just the first installment of this IP, we're going to be making sequels and stuff. And part of how we're going to get that done is that we're going to fractionalize and decentralize licensing to the IP itself. So we're going to say, okay, we're going to mint a set of 10,000 tokens, you buy a token, you can send it back to the Ethereum contract. And so it's, you know, not in our control. It's in you know, the the contract itself. And for as long as that's in the contract, as long as you're, you know, in this tank, you get in return a license to use the IP however you want. Thanks, man. pornography. Yeah, I mean, the

Alex Ferrari 47:49
thing is, like, erotica, sir, erotica, there is a difference. Let's clarify that right now. Between Bigfoot porn and Bigfoot. Radhika erotica can make porn. Very cool. There's a difference. There's a difference, sir. It's, it's, it's what kind of suit people are gonna think like, I like joy. I'm the one that started this.

I know right now I know somebody right now listening to this. It's like curving off the road laughing at like the Bigfoot. Oh, Jesus. No, this all sounds great. But this is the thing where we're so early on in this whole this whole experiment of NF T's and blockchain everything. I've said this before on the show. I'll say it again. blockchain is as or more important than the internet is the human civilization. And people, people who don't understand that statement, you will just the same way. As people in 1996 said, the internet's gonna change everything. Just like that guy who shot that rocket up into space the other day that looked like something that I won't say it looked like Bigfoot erotica. His rocket looked like Bigfoot erotica. That guy said, Hey, I'm going to sell books on the internet. And now he sells everything. That that's the same thing that blockchain is going to do. We're just not there yet. And we will get there. And it's getting there. It's growing fast. And there's issues and I think you said it in your article as well. Zach about you know, theory will become cheaper, it will become greener to sell a lot of electricity that runs through to get all this stuff. So it's gonna it's it's just like dial up man and 9695 and before it's like dial up it's like how can anyone can even think or conceive that I could buy something on the internet? Remember that? How old are you guys are younger that much younger than me? So I remember the time was like, people were like, I'm not putting my credit card online. Like that was people were like I'm not putting my credit card online that they're going to steal my identity all that was the mentality back That's where we are right now with blockchain I think in five or 10 years, blockchain will be at a completely different place crypto I think will be probably at a completely different place. And what you guys are talking about and defy and and dow and all this these kind of concepts I think are really going to help not only the world but an our little microcosm of independent film. It's getting a lot of power back to us.

Zach Lona 50:21
Yeah, that's what I was gonna say is that like this, like the the paradigm shift that's happening that mirrors the internet revolution, that's the the main people who are going to benefit from it are independent creators. So what this technology does, is it it cut out the middleman, it cut out the big centralized institutions that tell you yes or no, it's really going to power the empower the individual creators who want to, you know, contribute things to their favorite stuff and make money in the process,

Alex Ferrari 50:49
and you and use it, so you give away 50% of all streaming rights, but as of right now, you still have to do the accounting. In other words, the money has to come into an account, and then you've got to convert that into aetherium, or whatever, you know, whatever, stable coin or whatever you're going to use to pay. Yeah,

Zach Lona 51:06
that person. Exactly. So that that goes to show how early we are where you know, in five years, that won't be able to be able to get done on chain right now. The there's not really a solution for that. So we ate, you know, for however long that would take, and we'll just say, okay, we're just going to do the accounting ourselves. You know, that being said, you know, it may be that not only is the smart contract upgradeable in that we can automate that, you know, from the token on chain, or we could we could find a crypto powered streaming platform, which is also new territory, where the film will be online and you can watch it for free and also maybe even get paid for watching it. And it also probably give us a better rate streaming wise than, you know, amazon prime or Vimeo on demand. Does you mean a penny a penny for an hour? Is

Alex Ferrari 51:56
that not fair? I think that's more than fair. I don't know. I mean, didn't you hear that? That Jeff Bezos thanks that's all for having him go up into space? Yeah, don't built on the backs of independent filmmakers. Oh, don't even get me started. He made that rocket happen. We made that was all us. We started off at 15 cents. Now he's down to one cents. What happened to those 14 cents boom into space? Bigfoot erotica, anyway. So so another big player jumped on the scene in the NFT world, which is Kevin Smith, and he came on with his film Kilroy Was here, but he did the opposite of what you guys did. He's literally selling or giving his his distribution rights away to this film. What do you think of that? And how do you think that model is gonna work? Didn't even sell it yet? I don't even know if he sold it.

Zach Lona 52:47
I don't think it's online. So we didn't we that was actually his announcement. Or that was actually the reason why we press the Launch button on this project, because we've been building it since like, March. We're like, Oh, no, we gotta we gotta beat him to the punch. But yeah, I don't think it's online. But again, it's like, it's it's very similar to what we're doing. But there's also some key differences that kind of make it I preferred to not take that approach, simply because, like I was saying earlier, you don't want to make your patron work too much to exercise their, their utility that you give them. So with Kevin Smith's NFT, which also is being minted on the fantasma chain, which is different from aetherium, and we can maybe get into, you know, what chain you should actually meant on. But regardless of that, that's very technical knowledge. Essentially, the the the best person who's gonna want to buy the Kevin Smith and if t is a distributor, so like, if you come come at it, from our perspective, where we're our target market for this NFT is a private individual collector, they're not going to know how to how to distribute this thing, right? So if you're giving them the entirety of your distribution rights, that's cool. Just know that your market is much more different. And you're probably it's it's like, if you're selling to a distributor and you're looking to give the distributor your rights with the NFT you probably don't even need an NF t like that's pretty much just the exact same thing is a deal he would strike in

Alex Ferrari 54:15
I think he said I think he's just trying to get some hype over it and that's all it was because he's actually selling like, you know, James Island Bob NF T's and he's making a mint with them. You know, all those like cool little memes and stuff like that. He's not stupid in that sense. He definitely I mean, he was one of the first podcasters he was he jumped on the podcasting bandwagon, years ago, before it was cool. And and everybody had a podcast and people tell me I'm like, Oh, you jumped in early and I jumped in six years ago like Kevin Smith jumped in like a decade or more ago like it's it was insane. Like the oh geez for you got a Joe Rogan frickin he jumped into like, oh nine he like couldn't get the damn thing to stream. I saw the first in the first podcast. He was just like trying To make it work, and it was like, like 320 by, you know, by 40 videos like it was horrible. But, but he just made 100 million bucks and snap at it, okay. It's good, good ROI. So I think

Anthony Gibson 55:16
like, you know, anyone that's doing anything in the NFT space is just like adding to the value of everyone else that's trying to work on it. Like, we're all just trying to, like I said, like, for us, it's an experiment. Like, we're curious about other people's case studies, we want to see what they're doing. We want to see like, what models of incentive, they're developing and kind of like, you know, work some magic. I mean, we're all really excited about the new technology, we need people to know about it. This is still super inaccessible to like, an audience. Like they don't most people don't understand this stuff. And so it's just like, we need more people to be interested.

Alex Ferrari 55:48
I mean, I had to I had to educate myself. It took me like half a day to figure out how to mint something like the technology so plunky it's just so clunky to get stuff done. Now I'm like, Oh, my God isn't someone figured this out to make this a little easier. Like it doesn't seem that difficult, but it was like an I use mental because it was the easiest open seat was like too expensive. They want a gas freeze up front, mental to gas freeze on the on the now we're like talking in languages that nobody else understands. But, but yeah, but it was it just and even then miserable, was still like a pain in the butt to figure out it just it's still so early, then. We're still so so early. Now, one thing I wanted to ask you is, we're talking about all these NF T's and independent film and all that stuff. Not every projects gonna be a good candidate for an NF. t. So what make how do you how does a filmmaker know if their project makes sense for this world?

Anthony Gibson 56:43
They know this is an awesome question. I think Zack and I probably talked about this every day. And I think what makes particularly like, understanding like Internet communities, like if, if and who you're from a development perspective, who are the people who are going to be investing in your project to actually like, make it happen. So you can go into production and those kinds of things. Who is your like, financing audience essentially. And like, our film, specifically is targeted towards like, like, Village Voice mythmaking, and where does that happen? happens on the internet. We're doing that every single day. And so dramatically, our project is designed to be talked about on the internet. And it's like, self conscious of that. And we think that that, in itself is interesting to people who are on the internet, creating and sharing memes and using that as a form of communication. And so specifically for this world that we're building out, which is like, like, like a modern mythos, basically, using the internet as like, as like a community standpoint, people are moving money on the internet, people who are in crypto communities and want to see content that is more directly related to them and their user experience. Those are the people that we think right now, because it's the initial audience in this world that are going to be interested in funding projects and seeing things that reflect back like interesting elements to them.

Zach Lona 58:14
Yeah, I would say if you're trying to build a community like that, and you're trying to build an audience into the IP, and it's like the shared experience, this is definitely NF T's are definitely the route for you. And I think, you know, to for on a moral logistical point, this is definitely geared to like, like the PSD model itself, it's assuming that you already have, you know, you already have a completed film, first of all, and that film is probably going to be low budget, like we were talking about earlier, it's probably going to be director driven. to, you know, take the fine art sort of box. And, you know, like we were talking about before, you know, maybe if you have like a decent name, talent, maybe you don't need you know, the the boost that this PSD model would attempt to give you, but at the same time, maybe that's an incentive to grab an even more, the higher price at the auction, right. So like, oh, Brad Pitt is in this one of one NFT movie, I'm an art collector, I have a Jackson Pollock and and Mark Rothko in my collection, I can throw million dollars at the new Brad Pitt movie NFC, that'll be $50 million in 50 years. So

Alex Ferrari 59:25
what would what would a Kubrick be worth? What would be what would what would it Kurosawa would be worth? And now we have Nolan Fincher Spielberg Scorsese in what what's the Godfather worth? Like? It's just it I think, once mainstream Hollywood and some of these directors start figuring these things out, they're gonna go Oh, wait a minute. We and we can make not only can we make some money with this, but we can actually insert ourselves into the conversation, culturally. But yeah, it's it's it's worth that I think once filming makers are able to these higher end filmmakers are doing things like that. You know, what would a Fincher and FTP worth man? What a no. And what are the Nolan? You know, what would tenant be worth? You know?

Zach Lona 1:00:13
Yeah, like, that line of thinking again is very different from saying, okay, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna have NFT tickets, where you know, that might still be worth something that's more like a like a collectible, you know, Pokemon card or like a Beatles ticket from like, 1969 or something like that. So it's like almost like two different asset classes. You have the scarce sort of fine art and FTS and you also have the fungible, quote unquote, like ticker merchandise and

Alex Ferrari 1:00:40
FTF. Collected collectibles. Yeah,

Zach Lona 1:00:42
exactly. Yep. So there are two different asset classes. And when we're thinking about what is a David Fincher where there was a Kurosawa worth, like that, to me is the fine art. Like chars are for sure.

Alex Ferrari 1:00:54
Yeah. And obviously, Bigfoot erotica. So I'm Pokemon card. Game Freak, guys. So I'm gonna ask you a few questions asked by my guest guys, what advice would you give filmmakers trying to break into the business today?

Anthony Gibson 1:01:11
You take that one. And the advice I would give you is focus on what's in front of you and figure out how to, like build a team around the things that you're stoked about. And, like, don't be afraid to just like, not sorry, I'm blanking ongiving advice. What I'll say about this is that when I was in college, there were classes that were offered to me. And I felt like that wasn't meeting the needs of what I wanted to get out of my education. So I figured out that I actually had the agency to create my own class and get credit for it and bring people on and make the movies that I wanted to make. And I didn't have to wait for anyone to tell it to give me a curriculum to do that. So get creative. There's tons of opportunities out there you don't have to just follow what's given to you.

Alex Ferrari 1:02:05
What is that? Oh, no, go ahead Anthony. And fleet perfect answer for that. What is the lesson that took you guys the longest to learn whether in the film industry or in life tax credit financing to say sir, to Shay, to Shay, it's a as a very fine, fine, fine lesson to learn Tax Credit Financing everyone Tax Credit Financing, first time, in almost 500 episodes that someone said Tax Credit Financing is something about how valuable it is. And it's actually big on that. tax credit, and three of your favorite films of all time.

Zach Lona 1:02:49
Oh, mine are weird. I like 2001 I like Napoleon Dynamite and the third one is a toss up between Mystery Men and Badlands.

Alex Ferrari 1:03:00
Well, that's a hell of a combination of films there. I'm trying to put connecting dots I'm like I connected to and I connected to mystery man. Wow, Mystery Men first time on the show Mystery Men. So I love I love mystery minute. What a cast wasn't it? Same cast.

Zach Lona 1:03:17
They had the production design like the writing Smash Mouth Smash Mouth. Smash Mouth, man. Oh, man. Yeah, so that's that's mine. About about you, Anthony.

Anthony Gibson 1:03:29
I'll see Princess Mononoke A Little Miss Sunshine classic indie. And I will say Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone probably if I'm

Alex Ferrari 1:03:42
sure Hey, yes, nice. Nice. Nice. Can I use the magic of childhood in Yes. And it's in it's a nice Christmas movie. It's like every time it's I always watched it during Christmas that's when they get out. So I always associate Harry Potter movies with Christmas as well so and where can people find out about your NF T's about your films about your projects and so on?

Zach Lona 1:04:04
Yeah, so you can learn about the film and the NF t at who is the hidden man calm that's where all of our links are and also follow hidden ones Tao da o on Twitter you can join our discord to to get the drop on that cool Dao project that we're doing which is the next step of this oh and also the film is live on Vimeo on demand too. So you can search for he lives in the hidden lakes on Vimeo on demand and it'll be prime video as well soon

Alex Ferrari 1:04:33
and you're and you're using film hub as well right

Zach Lona 1:04:35
yeah, we are using film have discovered them through indie film hustle so thank you to that

Alex Ferrari 1:04:40
Yeah, there's some good doing some good work over there trying try and everyone's trying. It was trying to like I said everyone's trying to bring you know, you know, break that nut. No one's can crack it No one's cracked the nut yet on on on the perfect model. I think it's always shifting and moving and, and but this is awesome, man. I thank you guys so much for coming on the show. I'm excited anytime I hear new ways that filmmakers make money with their films and especially when it comes to the blockchain I'm, I'm all about it. So thank you guys so much for for coming in and jump in.

Zach Lona 1:05:10
Yeah. Thanks for having us, Alex.

Anthony Gibson 1:05:11
Yeah. Thank you so much.

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