Shibuya’s Rethinking Production Studios with pplpleasr, Maciej Kuciara & Jacky | Alpha Leak

welcome bankless nation to this edition of alpha leak formerly known as meet the nation but we are now calling it alpha league because it's just a hotter name today we are talking about shimbuya shambuya is a brand new content platform out of the hands of people pleaser the famous nft artist behind the x times y equals k nft from unit swap v3 and many many many more nfts beyond that we've also brought along two other co-founders of shambuya mache and jackie and we tell and i get them to tell the story of shambuya itself and shambuya is a kind

of a content production studio but instead of a director instead there's a dao and that is where this story gets really really interesting uh emily and her fellow co-founders are are devs and and artists and they have been charged with the creation of the story but who determines the outcome of the story or where this story goes is up to the discretion of the dow members of the token holders who stake and make make the producers actually have the express the choices that the community

wants and so this is decentralized storytelling this is storytelling by the community and then the uh the producers actually tell the story uh and so if you want to check this out while we're going through the show you can go to the website it's shibuya.xyz that's u y s-h-i-b-u-y-a dot x y z you can go watch the first chapter of this story and then you can stay tuned to watch the remaining chapters of the story after token holders determine what the story actually is this is like a kind of a choose your own

adventure type story but built for the web3 metaverse world and we've talked about this concept before on bankless where previously you would have the artists on stage producing creativity producing music producing art and then it being consumed by the community but with the power of tokens tokens give gives the community voice and the ability to actually give back sp uh uh reverberate their interests back to the artist and say hey we liked this but less so of this so you should go in that direction and this uh

this back and forth content creation this back and forth creativity between artists and community is i think going to be a very fundamental part of web3 a fundamental part of the metaverse and its platforms like shibuya that are enabling this to come into the future uh so we're gonna go and talk to people pleaser and the t and mache and jackie uh from shibuya uh but if you are interested you can definitely go to that website again it's s h i b u y a dot x y z and then the twitter account is s h i b u y a

x y z without the dot on twitter so you can you guys can go follow those directly there as well there will be a link in the show notes so you can just go click that if that makes things easier for you so let's go again ahead and get right into the conversation but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible living a bankless life requires taking control over your own private keys and that's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallet and brand new to the ledger lineup of hardware wallets is the ledger nano s plus a huge upgrade to the world's most popular hardware wallet

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build on the polygon ecosystem go to the link in the show notes to check out their fantastic documentation and if you're a user who just wants to experience fast and cheap defy you can bridge over your eth or other tokens and start playing around with any of the thousands of applications that are available on polygon welcome bankless nation to this edition of alpha leak where we are going to explore shibuya and so with us on today's episode we have three of the co-founders three of the five co-founders of shibuya you guys probably recognize people pleaser she's the person behind the x times y equals k nft

that rocketed her into fame and she also has brought along her two other two other co-founders we have mache and jackie from the boot shambuya project guys welcome to alpha leak thanks for thanks for joining me i appreciate it thanks for having me thanks for having us thank you uh so people pleaser i think people recognize you the most so i'm going to start with you can you just give us the high level pitch of what shibuya is what are we going to be talking about today sure and i think for the rest of the podcast we can just not even acknowledge the existence of our other two guests

um no i mean yeah like so we're building this new thing that we're calling shibuya it's named after shibuya crossing and you know what it really is is sort of like a decentralized video platform um but we hope to also expand to other uh media forms outside of video and i think probably the easiest way to explain it is um if we have sort of like a first animated web series that we're launching on shibuya it's called white rabbit and

it's kind of just taking the sort of pick your own path um like style of storytelling and bringing it to web3 and so for example our first chapter that we're calling it uh you see you watch this little animation and then at the end of the chapter uh our main character comes in front of two doors and then behind each door is an alternate ending to the chapter and to watch each alternate ending you have to mint what we're calling these erc 1155

nfts that we're calling producer passes and so when you mint one you can then use that producer pass to stake it in the uh you know the outcome that you want to see so you know you pick a door and then you can watch the ending and then you know when we give sort of like a grace period for everybody to kind of give everybody a chance to stake their producer passes and then you know when that voting period ends then whatever is the majority um vote which uh already happened for our first chapter um would

be uh sort of dictate the plot going forward and so um in this way everybody who has a producer pass and has also staked it feels like you know they have a part in sort of the development and the storytelling of this uh web series that's currently being built and at the same time they'll also you know get to keep that nft as like a paper trail of their like participation in the project and also in return are rewarded um the valueless governance tokens that we're calling

white rabbit tokens and currently you know they can be using these tokens to do things like uh vote on you know the main character's name in the show or also like um we uh right right now we have a leaderboard as well and um sort of what we're calling dynamic credits at the end so um you know when like the credits roll and it's like uh artists executive producers producers and it's all based on um people's uh token holdings basically and there's also a leaderboard on our site so you

can see who kind of like our our top producers and so forth and um so that's kind of like a very high level explanation uh we're really what we're trying to do here is just to sort of change the way that the stagnant um state of the nft market is like sort of like stuck at these pfp projects and we're just kind of coming in and already building something and we already have content to show and be like this is what you're getting into and this is what you're supporting instead of like doing a draw a drop first and then

promising some kind of like road maps later you know and also just to kind of change the way that people are thinking about how utility is actually used in nfts beyond it just being a jpeg or some kind of membership or you know and also trying to decentralize and democratize the way that um independent film projects could be funded so i'm reminded of these uh choose your own adventure books back when i was a child where you would come to the end of a chapter and there were some choices and you could

pick which page you would flip to based off what choices you wanted wanted to go and then the other thing that this reminded me of is a twitch plays pokemon where you have like so many people having inputs into the choices that the main character makes uh and so um uh i think i'll throw it to mache uh why do you think that this is going to be exciting like why do you think this is a product market fit what do you think is really going to get the creative juices going on this project it's well first of all in terms of like a long-form

filmmaking this is something that rarely ever happens like usually when it comes to long-form filmmaking there's a there's a production that's set up it takes quite a bit of time to find a team to get get things built you have obviously passionate artists and directors who do short films all the time but that's like very rare and just takes out your soul basically i i can tell that from experience working on a couple of like my own short films where it's it's it's really difficult to

make them and combine that with your like life choices in general um also a lot of us are video game enthusiasts as well like you know there's the gaming industries is huge it's actually bigger than the film industry that tells you that people like to play the characters or or have their own choices and see where the stories or the gameplay will develop so i think it was a no-brainer like as you mentioned um those old books where

you choose your own path and you choose your own way of how you want to develop the story that's been always exciting and uh there maybe have been only a handful examples where where that kind of type of content has been used in in animation or film so we we felt like you know it would be very interesting to try this but also just because the way web3 works in general and the technology itself allows you to do so many

different things on so many different levels it almost became for us like uh like a playground where it's like how can we make uh an interesting storytelling an interesting story overall but get the community involved in how this story develops or and where it goes and from that point you know we kind of started with uh choose your own path like you have two different doors each of them lead to a completely

different storyline obviously the one that people choose is going to be the one that that's going to develop so that gets community involved but from there it's just like we we sat down and started thinking like what else can be done okay you can vote for the character name and then just opens up okay when we have that utility there is so much more that can be done that never has never been done before and that's i think that's the exciting part uh in this project specifically in white rabbit where it's like

yeah we can we can kind of like do whatever we want and get the whole community engaged without asking for some producers studios and you know high level executives that are basically funding the project to see if our idea jives with where the studio wants to go instead it's just like it becomes like a grassroots film project where it's just creatives in the community and we kind of decide what it's going to be

um and i don't think that's has ever been tried before i might be mistaken obviously there are so many projects out there it's very difficult to track the whole internet obviously um but i haven't seen anything on like a really high creative level with high-end animation where that kind of plays out and that's probably the most exciting part about this project specifically but but just also like the utility of it of itself um the leaderboard credits you know credit

is something that is very easy to come to compile um if you get people involved in the project but this is like a dynamic credit too which is which is also exciting because now that also gives us an ability to play with different things play with like different ideas okay depending on the level you are whether you're like executive producer or a producer or associate producer fun fact actually last place is the production assistant

just as a funny thing we found it it can give you like a different um experiences throughout as well so there's just a lot of a lot of creative things not only just just level of tag but just level of uh animation where we we can kind of get to decide okay we can add like the extra interactive layer to to a medium that normally isn't really interactive at all so that's definitely like the the biggest part of it so with all things this sounds like the

gist of this is like decentralized storytelling you're allowing storytelling to kind of be pushed to the margins allowing the users to have say in the outcomes but also at the same time uh sometimes decentralization can be bad there are a lot of dows out there that are just like chickens running around with their heads cut off and so they actually do kind of need that like centralized leadership and even with like the choose your own adventure books like you couldn't make the characters do anything there were only certain predetermined outcomes on this and so i'm wondering like what on

the spectrum of just like complete community control versus some guided outcomes how much is like what does the infrastructure actually look like like when what when you guys like start the story did you guys start like the gist of the story and then you want the community to finish it or like how are you guys giving power to the community but not too much power how are you like navigating that balance so i think the best way to kind of think about this is um referencing if anybody has seen that one

black mirror episode on netflix um it's a one-off called vandersnatch and they adopted this sort of choose-your-own-path kind of storytelling model where they pre-shot a bunch of different sequences um and then split it up so you know your character could be like having cereal and then between choosing the two different types of cereal which they're allowing the audience to do um it leads down to a completely different storyline and then down the path it could you know sort of like loop back into the same storyline again or it could just go down you know um there's people who have like mapped out the entire thing

and so we've done something similar where obviously we have complete sort of like artistic um direction that's already been you know dictated already so uh we show it to the people and then you know it's kind of like based on their engagement and their interest levels and you know obviously um if anybody has seen mache's artwork it's incredibly um he's incredibly talented and so you know most people respond extremely well to this kind of art style right and so um

and you know the community doesn't want to actually do the artistic work you know they're not they're not like sitting there like oh i want to animate either like they want to be fed content and entertainment but um so you know we have like sat down and kind of written out you know and we start are still doing this every day actually you know writing out sort of like the general um different possible plot lines like you can think of as a node graph and all the different paths that it can take and just so that we sort of like take the front seat and kind of direct um driving

the community down this what we think would be you know good storytelling and things like that but having the community you know be a part of you know sort of less um detrimental decisions like um so kind of like giving them an option or like a palette tasting right and not having them create the meal from scratch is how you can think about it i love i love that uh metaphor it's like a it's like a tasting menu uh and that also it makes it so that you guys don't have to go do like five story lines of work just for the community to pick one of

them and then you just wasted four story lines of you know production value that you are not ever going to use but is that the final form of what this kind of vision looks like like in how in what ways are you interested in like kind of opening it up even more so it's not always a binary choice actually um future chapters there's going to be um ones where it's not just binary choices but on top of that you know because it is a native web 3 media that we're you know broadcasting this on it's

a web series right like and so um we are really trying to take advantage of the fact that um it's web free native and so you know an example of this is we're like partnering with d-gen score and you know they're the guys who are building um technology related to scanning you know on-chain identity and wallet history and so you can imagine like one of the chapters where you know somebody like david who's interacted let's say with unisof a bunch of times you know based on your wallet history you're seeing a different uh version of

the episode than what i'm seeing um and so that's kind of like you know things that we're experimenting with and adding you know depth to how this kind of storytelling is possible and making it even more interactive beyond just it being sort of like a binary option in choice yeah i could add maybe uh what you touched upon in terms of like how scalable that would be in terms of like the the taste palette and like pre-scripted decision-making one of the one of the interesting things we already found out uh working on chapter two and

chapter one is that we ask we actually talk with community and ask like what what they feel the story is going to be like where where they think the direction is going and why they made one decision over other and that kind of like informs us to look at the plot line we have and sort of like the story structure and and and be experimental in terms of okay maybe there's a specific visual cue that we're going to add that is a reaction to what communities expression

to what they saw already was so in terms yes it's it's sort of like a curated experience because obviously when you're filmmaking you kind of have to do that to make a cohesive story that that holds together glues together the characters make sense they they talk and that makes sense obviously and the story concludes one way or another but there's always like side elements or even just main plot elements that could be changed whether it's visually or through the

audio or through the music or even through the dialogue where the story still holds holds together but it's a it's a pure reaction to how people who engaged the content and wanted to participate on the level of voting and and uh and voting and with tokens and whatnot to a point where those decisions can have like like a domino effect on what's going to happen later so as emily mentioned we pretty much every day

we're kind of sitting and writing it's because like we do have the story we do have a structure of what the scene is going to play out but there's also like okay how can we kind of spice it up based on what's happening and that's that's the interesting part too because it's very challenging in the persp from the perspective of directing and editing but it's also like super exciting because you get to like almost crowd source the outcome with the community which is

which is great i feel like projects artistic projects that combine community input and really like cater to the community itself as almost like a love letter of like hey here's a piece of entertainment but you're also part of it are probably the most interesting projects in my opinion rather than just like hey here's here's the content watch it like it like it or leave it that works too but it's very rare you find find real gems uh when that happens so

yeah i feel like you know sort of so many like hollywood productions or things like that are in such like closed doors like you know they're always like boxed into some studio and people like don't see what's going on but everybody's curious right and so this is sort of like a more transparent way for us to be like this is how we're making it and you know everybody who's in on this early like clearly because it's just started production right you guys are all part of like the storytelling aspect of it yeah i just want to add that our discord community uh has been pretty

amazing like people are crazy about potential plots uh different scenarios have all these different theories of what the story actually means to see that organically grow and people participating and be really really invested into the show it's pretty amazing so you've got some money but how are you going to use it you want to spend me shopping now bro when you know you should be saving you'll never buy a house at this rate but what if you could spend and save at the same time

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co-founder and helping to design the fair fair launch of a cross if you want to bridge your assets quickly and securely go to across.to to bridge your assets between eth optimism arbitrary or boba networks yeah i remember during the when um game of thrones was in its its peak the game of thrones subreddit was like one of the most lively spots on the internet and there was just so much ideating on theory and and conspiracy theories and like you know what's gonna happen in the future uh and just and then also just

kind of its own culture and its own vibes as well and what i'm getting out of this is very much aligned with the whole web 3 narrative where you know previously in the trad web 2 world you have exactly what people pleaser was just saying you're kind of just like spoon fed content like here's the story like i hope you like it uh and you either like it or you don't but in the web 3 world the the possibility that tokens have to return voice to echo back towards the leadership saying oh hey we like that versus oh hey we don't like

that or actually just giving them user autonomy to actually be a part of the creative process i think it's actually a really big challenge because in the web 2 tradify world you had the benefits of just like centralized talent just producing it and it just worked and in the web 3 world we see this potential where we have you know the talent which is you guys the co-founders uh but also trying to figure out how to also empower the community which might be people that you know are explicitly not talented people and so i

think the challenge that you guys have is well how do you uh guys as artists how do you uh enable the good expression to come out of your community have you guys thought about this angle and how you guys plan on doing that i think we're pretty pleasantly surprised actually you know i think i sort of started in well first we have these like token gated discord channels um where we think of it like more of like a writer's room or producer's roommate and i sort of um really encourage people in there to start you know talking about their theories and you know their analyzations

of um the plot and things going forward and easter eggs and such and yeah it was honestly a pleasant surprise of how sort of much attention to detail that people actually are and they're surprisingly really good writers too so maybe we've been really lucky in that regard that we haven't received sort of any super terrible ideas um on top of that there's always sort of like a comedic element to it so anything that's like really terrible has has always been sarcastic and intended to be a joke like oh we

should name the main character kevin you know like things like that but nobody is actually you know giving out really really bad ideas um and in fact we really encourage that too and obviously we have some kind of like filtration system too where if somebody's like we want to you know make a you know not pg-13 film or something then obviously we can you know sort of uh veto that of course i think the the other dynamic here is where a lot of like defy web 3 protocols they need governance for a means to an

end as in they need governance to prove like produce the outcome but i think with this like the product itself is the governance as in like this is a governance platform what are we governing over this story but it's about the governance the governance is the product and the value of the governance is a function of like how interesting and valuable this story is um i want to put listeners into the shoes of what they would actually expect if they were participating here what what is it actually like if they want to go and consume this story well what's the form what's the format we're talking about like you know five minute short form

videos like what what what should listeners expect if they wanted to actually go watch the story and and then maybe we can actually start talking about the website so um our users would go on shibuya.xyz the first chapter that we made i would say is you know probably around like just a little over a minute long um and it's um probably a little bit shorter because it's sort of the initial proof of concept that uh we um are releasing to the world right and also keep in mind we did this with zero

funding it was completely grass-rooted like um our first round of sort of um you know any kind of support that came in came in from uh us um you know selling producer passes but before that everything we just sat here and you know sort of like built it and made the animation without it was literally just um the shea and i um and so what you can expect is you go on the website and you see this super beautiful animation um in the style of mache's artwork and then

um yeah and then i would say each sort of like alternate ending has they're like are a little bit different in length too but yeah roughly just a little over one minute um and we're obviously already working on the second chapter um that is expected to be around uh just over two minutes long and um maybe more yeah maybe more because you know it's constantly evolving and changing and you know basically you know literally every day we're like um adding or subtracting things into the plot and things like

that uh but um yeah we're hoping uh you know if anybody has seen love death of robots those are really really high quality animated shorts and each of them are between let's say like six to 15 minutes long and we are hoping for a white rabbit at the end of every chapter stitched together to be probably an over 15 minute high quality short film animation so with that first episode that was just you guys uh setting the scene setting the stage not too much governance in