How NFTs Are Helping Produce an Animated Series on Wrestling

Remember when Saturday morning cartoons were funded mostly to promote plastic action figures and sugary snacks on television? Well, with adult animated content and potentially future online content, that commercial strategy of how shows are promoted and produced could be set for a revolution that won’t be televised. The boom of the non-fungible token (NFT) over the last year might have caused a great deal of cynicism as to how viable the purchase of digital IP at eye watering prices might be. But it’s already proving a vehicle for funding online entertainment—with animated series beginning to appear, tapping into the trend. What we're trying to do here is to discover what is there to do here with this new technology that any normal person can understand and believe in and be part of.Lisa Sterbakov, partner of Orchard Farm One such series titled The Gimmicks could be seen as a test case for the sector. Created by the web 3.0 animation studio Toonstar, which will produce 20 short episodes with Sixth Wall, featuring a group of former WWE wrestlers, the series will rely on those buying NFTs connected to the show to access exclusive content. This will test the viability of such a commercial strategy through community building. Developing The Gimmicks The project stems back to the creation of another online animated series featuring the voices of Jane Fonda, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis, whose production studio Orchard Farm was behind the project—and which owns digital business Sixth Wall, one of the companies driving this project. The series of five-minute animations was made during the pandemic, but offers to pick it up were found to be too low before Kunis suggested moving the format to NFT sales instead. And once the team had gotten their heads around what NFTs actually were, they were ready for launch within 12 weeks. The success of the project taught the team the potential of using the blockchain technology. https://twitter.com/therealgimmicks/status/1508875184672890887?s=20&t=I4YoSFg0dozsHNRPiOd4Nw “A lot of other entity projects come, you know, start with like some art first and then move into story, which is hard sometimes to find the story to match the artwork. We are starting with story first and then going into artwork,” explains Lisa Sterbakov, partner at Orchard Farm. She believes that in working this way, they have more chance of “a normal person” buying into becoming a part of the community it is building around The Gimmicks, away from the expense some are paying for NFTs, which run into six figures. “What we're trying to do here is to discover what is there to do here with this new technology that any normal person can understand and believe in and be part of,” she continues. Unlike Stoner Cars, the content for The Gimmicks will be free to view, with the monetization of the content around it to enable those unfamiliar with the technology to gain first hand experience at no cost. The NFTs were available to mint from mid-March on the show's website, powered through the Solana blockchain. One lesson from the original animation around IP ownership of the characters featured in the series has been considered and the NFTs will not be focused on the main wrestlers. Instead the community will get to “own a little piece of the world” through their own character’s backstory development—and the opportunity to influence stories where token holders vote at the end of each episode to outline what they want to see. The image of a dic punch token. "We dic punch them" exclaims Sterbakov, knowing full well what it really sounds like. This is in reference to token holders voting and, when they do so, they receive dic (decentralized inclusive community) punches into their crypto wallets which can be shared among the community through The Gimmick’s website wiki. “It’s like a Facebook poke but harder.” These are tokens that live on the blockchain to create a permanent record of each member’s social engagement, helping the company track community members' engagement in the project. There is also access to monthly writer’s room sessions and the development of merchandise. One token holder will also be credited as an “associate producer,” with a three-minute spin-off episode developed around their character. Producing the show in 'near-time' Another result of producing Stoner Cats was the introduction to ToonStar who, Sterbakov says, was described as “the people built for this space.” South Park-esque show The Gimmicks (which is the phrase used by wrestlers to refer to their character alter egos) came about when Luke Gallows, Karl Anderson, Rocky Romero, and Enzo Amore approached the team after leaving the WWE last year and approaching the animation company with the idea of creating a series. In the case of The Gimmicks, we're doing weekly episodes and the community gets to weigh in on the narrative.John Attanasio, chief executive of ToonStar The Toonstar team of John Attanasio and Luisa Huang, who have experience of working within Pixar and Disney, produce animation at speed—sometimes even reactive in real-time to the needs of a show—while appreciating the input from a show’s community or fanbase. “As we've been spending the last six months brainstorming about this project, they've had more crazy NFT blockchain specific ideas ... They've just completely embraced the space and understand it,” adds Sterbakov of the Toonstar team. https://twitter.com/therealgimmicks/status/1508838359124258818?s=20&t=I4YoSFg0dozsHNRPiOd4Nw The web 3.0 animation studio Toonstars was created off the back of the emerging creator economy and change in distribution that the founders saw as new people entered the animation space. They define the business as “part tech, part direct to community and creator partnerships.” Attanasio explains: “We're part tech, we're part tech report creative. On the tech side, we've got it, we built a tech stack that allows us to do high quality animation very quickly. And, then also, we can do interactive animation ... we call it "near-time" production. And so, in the case of The Gimmicks, we're doing weekly episodes and the community gets to weigh in on the narrative. And so we can react in hour and have something ready to go that's based on what the community has said to us.” This Woman Is Merging Entertainment and Web3, Despite the ‘Dude-Bro’ Crypto World The Gimmick’s community has already reached 7,720 members through Discord and is active most hours of the day due to the international reach the show has already made—despite only a few episodes having so far been released. NFTs have so far sold out and, while only 20 episodes are planned, the aim is to learn and grow the community further still. Sterbakov admits that the team don’t yet really know what success is for the show as they experiment with different ideas. This allows further learning opportunities for the team involved, while cultivating a fanbase using technology in a whole new way.