May 24, 2022

Brazil's Hype Animation Aims to Fund Animated Feature Film through NFT Crowdfunding

Brazil's Hype Animation has launched "Meet Ed," an NFT campaign to fully fund the production of an animated feature film.

About Ed - Ed is the protagonist of a short film by Gabriel Garcia of Hype Animation that screened at the 2013 festival. He is an anthropomorphic rabbit and one of the world's leading film stars who traverses genres and styles with ease. While his career is the envy of all, Ed's personal life is a mess: a 2013 short film (link below) shows Ed battling depression and contemplating ending his own life.

What is Meet Ed - Meet Ed is a fundraising campaign in which Hype Animation has created a collection of 10,000 NFT pieces of Ed, which will become a classic in film history. Each piece has a different value and rewards are available to supporters who purchase the piece. Available rewards include a credit in the film, a specific NFT appearance in the film, a character in the film named after the supporter, etc. The NFT will be released on the Open Sea platform on June 9. The filmmakers hope to raise approximately 1,000 ethereum (approximately US$2 million at the current rate).

What are Hype's credentials - Hype's credits include the animated series Tainá and the Amazon's Guardians (Nickelodeon Brazil, 2018), Guitar & Drum (Disney Channel Latin America, 2020) Among the films are. The company is also a member of Los Amigos (Angry Birds Bubble Trouble), a Latin American animation collective that includes the Oscar-winning Chilean studio Punk Robot and Peru's Red Animation Studio. The collective boasts more than 160 in-house artists and is capable of producing approximately 20 minutes of animation per week, making it one of the largest and most prolific animation organizations in Latin America. Los Amigos has worked with Disney, Nickelodeon, and Discovery Kids, among others.

Their comments - according to Garcia:

This project aims to bring every part of Ed's life to life in a new world with a new perspective. We are also paying homage to the history of cinema while preparing for a new era in the industry: web3. In addition to the possibility of financing in new ways, we also want to innovate our production model. Our idea is a co-production, bringing the community together and having them follow the entire production from script to completion, while interacting with our artists and helping them with their proposals regarding the project.

Have other feature film productions used NFT for funding? Last December, Neils Juul of The Irishman launched NFT Studios and issued an NFT to raise funds for his film A Wing and a Prayer. The project, a U.S.-British co-production, was advertised as "the first feature film intended to be financed solely by the minting of NFT tokens." At about the same time, Al Pacino's daughter, Julie Pacino, sold prints of her own photographs without commission to raise money for her film, I Live Here Now, earning approximately $100,000.

In January, First Flights was launched as a tokenized, community-driven film financing platform. Barcelona's Miguel Faus is working on Calledita, the first NFT-funded film in Europe. In addition, France's Rooftop Production and Karlab recently launched their own NFT financing program for the feature film "Plush". It is too early to predict the first fully NFT-funded film in history, but it is probably already in production.