The other day I woke up to the sounds of A Love Supreme by John Coltrane.
We recently bought a record player for our home. Carrie requested one for her birthday. I never grew up with vinyl records, so I didn't "get it." But now I do. It has been a gift that keeps on giving.
One of the best parts about it is that our kids have taken to it in such a special way. They love putting a record on and watching it spin and listening to the music come out of the speaker.
Every morning when he wakes up, one of the first things my seven-year-old does is run to the record player and throw something on. His favorite album is The Best of the Pogues. He picked it out himself when we visited a record store in Kingston called Rhino Records. It's a lot of fun to go record shopping with your family because you get to talk about all the different artists you see. The owner also gave us two free classical records when we checked out, Vivaldi and Debussy, because he wants more people to be exposed to the genre.
Watching my kids play with vinyl records reminds me of how I felt playing and collecting CDs growing up. Sitting on the floor of my room reading the lyrics in the album booklet while following along with the music. I can't help but think that this is a similar experience for them. There's something uniquely physical about it, and stands in stark contrast to a world filled with streams and screens. It's nostalgic, but also extremely present.
I remember several months ago my partner Albert sent me this chart about a resurgence in vinyl record sales.
I now understand why. It's such a special way to experience music. It's very akin to the idea of deep reals. This record player has been a wonderful addition to our home, and it has already become an important fixture in our lives. I'm really happy about that.
This week my wife Carrie, a documentary film producer, took me to see Eno. The director of the film is Gary Hustwit, who previously made the film Helvetica. Eno is a spectacular film and I encourage everyone to see it. I never realized how profoundly special Brian Eno is. He is a true artist-philosopher, the perfect personification of what we may envision to be a master of a craft.
What was most exciting to me is that Eno is a generative film. No two screenings of the film are the same. You will never see the same film I watched the other evening in a sold-out theater, and that is by design. The director, Gary, started building software more than 5 years ago that would enable him to feed footage into a system and for that system to create different permutations of the film, indefinitely.
For the past several years my wife Carrie has been working with Optimist and Linda Xie to make a documentary film about Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum.
Inspired by what they learned, they have developed the film in a crypto-native way and will release it in a similar fashion. In 2021, they raised funds for the film through a pplpleasr NFT crowdfund on Mirror (a USV company that has since merged with Paragraph, another USV company).
The other day I woke up to the sounds of A Love Supreme by John Coltrane.
We recently bought a record player for our home. Carrie requested one for her birthday. I never grew up with vinyl records, so I didn't "get it." But now I do. It has been a gift that keeps on giving.
One of the best parts about it is that our kids have taken to it in such a special way. They love putting a record on and watching it spin and listening to the music come out of the speaker.
Every morning when he wakes up, one of the first things my seven-year-old does is run to the record player and throw something on. His favorite album is The Best of the Pogues. He picked it out himself when we visited a record store in Kingston called Rhino Records. It's a lot of fun to go record shopping with your family because you get to talk about all the different artists you see. The owner also gave us two free classical records when we checked out, Vivaldi and Debussy, because he wants more people to be exposed to the genre.
Watching my kids play with vinyl records reminds me of how I felt playing and collecting CDs growing up. Sitting on the floor of my room reading the lyrics in the album booklet while following along with the music. I can't help but think that this is a similar experience for them. There's something uniquely physical about it, and stands in stark contrast to a world filled with streams and screens. It's nostalgic, but also extremely present.
I remember several months ago my partner Albert sent me this chart about a resurgence in vinyl record sales.
I now understand why. It's such a special way to experience music. It's very akin to the idea of deep reals. This record player has been a wonderful addition to our home, and it has already become an important fixture in our lives. I'm really happy about that.
This week my wife Carrie, a documentary film producer, took me to see Eno. The director of the film is Gary Hustwit, who previously made the film Helvetica. Eno is a spectacular film and I encourage everyone to see it. I never realized how profoundly special Brian Eno is. He is a true artist-philosopher, the perfect personification of what we may envision to be a master of a craft.
What was most exciting to me is that Eno is a generative film. No two screenings of the film are the same. You will never see the same film I watched the other evening in a sold-out theater, and that is by design. The director, Gary, started building software more than 5 years ago that would enable him to feed footage into a system and for that system to create different permutations of the film, indefinitely.
For the past several years my wife Carrie has been working with Optimist and Linda Xie to make a documentary film about Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum.
Inspired by what they learned, they have developed the film in a crypto-native way and will release it in a similar fashion. In 2021, they raised funds for the film through a pplpleasr NFT crowdfund on Mirror (a USV company that has since merged with Paragraph, another USV company).
Ride It to the Sky
Ride It to the Sky
The resulting films, while similar in length, are always different. New footage can be added or removed whenever the director wants and the underlying system can be altered in any way. I didn’t realize it, but Brian Eno produced and pioneered generative music in the same way, so it makes sense that this new film format mimics its subject’s unique style.
After the film Gary stayed back for an interview onstage. I asked him if he planned to let other filmmakers use the software, and he said yes. He made it because he grew disenchanted with the linear format of films. It’s the same thing every time, and that constraint was a relic of the past and never adequately challenged. Why shouldn’t a film be a different experience for every view and viewer? Why should its mood not be different in the evening than the daytime, or be influenced by the weather or current events? These ideas are now possible to achieve, generatively.
Gary talked about how there may be novel ways to stream the film. Perhaps it can be customized to a streamer's environment. It's unclear how this would work, but everyone can watch Eno while nobody sees the same film twice is powerful. This is the type of idea that drives people to see bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish hundreds of times. You never know what you're going to get on any given night.
I'm a believer that AI-powered tools will lead to the creation of new media formats and change the way entertainment is created, but this film showed me that generative media doesn't need AI to create content or art. I'm looking forward to seeing what Gary does with this platform. One could experiment with film length, styles, and more. A piece of media that "feels" the same to everyone but never truly is is a new form of art in my book, and I'd love to see what happens when it's unleashed for the world to experience.
pplpleasr NFT for the film
They plan to continue to release the film and a variety of other associated stories onchain through a combination of mints on Zora and Base. They have thoughtfully detailed their release plan in this post. The gist is summed up in the article:
Minting the trailer, tickets and ancillary content for the film not only unlocks viewing access but will help to fund the feature documentary’s self-release in theaters and on streaming platforms worldwide, making it accessible to people both within and outside of the crypto space...
...By harnessing the power of crypto for the film's trailer, ancillary content and ticketing, we’re creating a distribution model that gives the community direct access to the film while funding a decentralized release of Vitalik: An Ethereum Story in theaters around the world and on a traditional streaming platform.
This is a film that is pioneering a new model in how stories can be financed, distributed and experienced. It has been inspiring to watch how this plan has evolved in conjunction with the growth of web3. Today, the team released the trailer for the film, which is now available to mint. Soon, tickets for the film will be available for purchase onchain, and the film will premiere IRL in theaters across the globe. Ultimately, it will be distributed on traditional streaming platforms, but the Ethereum community and anyone who wants to will be able to experience it together in person and online beforehand.
film trailer
I'm excited for the world to see this film and to watch how creators all over the world can learn from this model, build on top of it, and transform the way film and other types of content and art are funded, distributed, and owned in the future.
The resulting films, while similar in length, are always different. New footage can be added or removed whenever the director wants and the underlying system can be altered in any way. I didn’t realize it, but Brian Eno produced and pioneered generative music in the same way, so it makes sense that this new film format mimics its subject’s unique style.
After the film Gary stayed back for an interview onstage. I asked him if he planned to let other filmmakers use the software, and he said yes. He made it because he grew disenchanted with the linear format of films. It’s the same thing every time, and that constraint was a relic of the past and never adequately challenged. Why shouldn’t a film be a different experience for every view and viewer? Why should its mood not be different in the evening than the daytime, or be influenced by the weather or current events? These ideas are now possible to achieve, generatively.
Gary talked about how there may be novel ways to stream the film. Perhaps it can be customized to a streamer's environment. It's unclear how this would work, but everyone can watch Eno while nobody sees the same film twice is powerful. This is the type of idea that drives people to see bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish hundreds of times. You never know what you're going to get on any given night.
I'm a believer that AI-powered tools will lead to the creation of new media formats and change the way entertainment is created, but this film showed me that generative media doesn't need AI to create content or art. I'm looking forward to seeing what Gary does with this platform. One could experiment with film length, styles, and more. A piece of media that "feels" the same to everyone but never truly is is a new form of art in my book, and I'd love to see what happens when it's unleashed for the world to experience.
pplpleasr NFT for the film
They plan to continue to release the film and a variety of other associated stories onchain through a combination of mints on Zora and Base. They have thoughtfully detailed their release plan in this post. The gist is summed up in the article:
Minting the trailer, tickets and ancillary content for the film not only unlocks viewing access but will help to fund the feature documentary’s self-release in theaters and on streaming platforms worldwide, making it accessible to people both within and outside of the crypto space...
...By harnessing the power of crypto for the film's trailer, ancillary content and ticketing, we’re creating a distribution model that gives the community direct access to the film while funding a decentralized release of Vitalik: An Ethereum Story in theaters around the world and on a traditional streaming platform.
This is a film that is pioneering a new model in how stories can be financed, distributed and experienced. It has been inspiring to watch how this plan has evolved in conjunction with the growth of web3. Today, the team released the trailer for the film, which is now available to mint. Soon, tickets for the film will be available for purchase onchain, and the film will premiere IRL in theaters across the globe. Ultimately, it will be distributed on traditional streaming platforms, but the Ethereum community and anyone who wants to will be able to experience it together in person and online beforehand.
film trailer
I'm excited for the world to see this film and to watch how creators all over the world can learn from this model, build on top of it, and transform the way film and other types of content and art are funded, distributed, and owned in the future.
