Interview with Brain From Uranus on Genesis x UPDAO- A new creative incubator #25

by Captainjames.eth

Brain from Uranus talks about his new UPDAO proposal for Pixel Vaults DAO where he has crafted a creative incubator in the form of GENESIS x UPDAO.

Captainjames: Tell us a bit about you and your journey to Web3

Brain: A few months ago, I found one of my old notebooks from 2017 and saw that I had scribbled lots of thoughts down during a flight about smart contracts and Ethereum. An article I read on the plane really inspired me. The singer Imogen Heap, was using Ethereum to release music and share royalties. At that time I was running my own music publishing label with some talented artists and was shockingly aware of how broken and exploitative the artist’s traditional licensing and copyright models had become. We would sometimes receive royalties of fractions of a cent for music placement, after everyone else had taken their cut, and this might be 6-12 months after the music had been used! Absolutely unsustainable for the people actually creating the music. Speaking with other artists, this seemed to be a common problem. Smart contracts seemed to promise a fairer, more efficient & transparent way to work.

The notebook had a few revenue models & ideas I’d pencilled down, but I ultimately decided to move away from music at the time and didn’t buy my first Eth until early 2020. DeFi was just really taking off and there were so many dapps to explore. The day I wrote my own loan on MakerDAO was the point of no return for me. It just blew my mind how simple, trustless and hard-coded it was. I really took a deep dive and absorbed as much knowledge and experience as I could during covid. 2020 was my full degen year. Just ask my accountant :/

Started looking into NFTs in late 2020 with 1/1 art, Sun-Min & David Horvath collections minted my own video work on a few different protocols, loved HeN on tezos and even had my own nft artist livestream show on youtube for a while. One day I heard about this thing called PUNKS comic which was licensing 16 cryptopunks and fractionalising ownership. Massive lightbulbs went off in my head and I just felt that this was what I had been looking for. A decentralised creative development community that uses groundbreaking tech to build a new model that favours creatives and rewards those who contribute fairly and transparently. I minted 3 PUNKS comics and have been a PV maxi since then.

I’ve worked as an editor, producer, camera operator and lighting in TV, film, music and web video for 20+ years. NFT culture & tech has given me such a huge burst of inspiration that will hopefully keep me going for the next 20!

Captainjames: What do you feel is the power of NFTs and how can this improve many business models including creative works?

Brain: NFTs have honestly changed the way I interact with creativity in many positive ways. The ability to pay directly to a creator and own something in return is more important than I realised. Owning is important because we are now so accustomed to not owning anything that creativity has become instantly disposable, like fast food. Endless amounts of over-processed shiny stuff that looks and sounds identical. Ownership connects us to the creative process and makes us part of the story. It forces us to care in some way, no matter how small. As fast-paced as NFTs can be, I spent more time in 2021 appreciating art, speaking with creators, developing ideas and taking my time to understand the process than at any other time in my 20-year creative career. All because I became part of the story with every piece I collected. That’s incredible! Watching artists and collectors discover the true value of creativity has been fascinating.

But by far the most powerful force has been building a community around creative projects. This is the superpower. Communities & DAOs have the ability to build quickly, share enormous amounts of information, coordinate efforts from a large talent pool and try things that just aren’t possible with traditional business & IP models. Permissionless decentralised systems are just faster than waiting for approval from the centralised, restricted & sometimes litigious chain of command. The communities that understand this will thrive. NounsDAO is possibly the most disruptive example of this. Time will tell, but I have a feeling we’ll be looking back 20 years from now and acknowledging that they absolutely redefined the creative development game.

Lastly, the tradability of the assets also can’t be overlooked. This is huge. A global, instant marketplace for digital assets with proof of ownership. We all saw the volume OpenSea was doing last year. There was obviously a lot of speculation, but the coveted art collections of the future began then.

Captainjames: Tell us about the project Genesis. What is the main draw and how will it be used effectively?

Brain: I can (and do!) talk about Genesis all day. The main draw is that it’s community-built and run. The comic we are proposing to create is a proof of concept, but really the focus of the proposal is to create a framework for how community IP can be developed within an incubation platform that is funded by the UPDAO, while also creating revenue streams for the UPDAO, creative teams and MetaHero holders. I believe a community-centred approach to IP development is really important at this stage for MetaHero and will benefit us long term.

I’ve been developing the Brain from Uranus & Nova characters since end of 2021, just playing around with ideas and possibilities. Seeing Pinballer build his comic and platform was super inspiring. I think it’s an amazing project and so well executed with great long-term vision and community involvement. Moonlings were also super fun to see and have been building away too. But not every holder can do what Pinballer or Moonlings do, yet we all have these characters with commercial licenses and ideas to build a superhero universe.

I thought that a community-centred approach would be cool. Somewhere where we can all contribute parts of the puzzle and build on each other’s ideas. I can see a couple of years down the line that we could have an astonishingly intricate and exciting universe of our own creation that we have contributed to. It also gives us something creative & positive to focus on as a community.

Captainjames: What are the goals of the project long term?

Brain: There are potentially over 9000 generative MH characters and it is unrealistic to expect Pixel Vault to establish them and their stories, especially as they have their own core collection. But as a DAO we can build what we think would work to promote the MetaHero brand and our characters more widely. These stories could fit into the game narrative that Pixel Vault is creating, or maybe vice versa. Perhaps some characters and stories become popular enough that a game, DLC or other media is made about them.

The long-term goal is to actively build a rich and growing asset library that generates content across all types of media, but that shares a common origin, or genesis if you will. The UPDAO. Available to all members to use as they see fit and build upon so that each iteration of the MetaHero universe doesn’t have to start from scratch. This allows many more members of the community who don’t have the time, skills, resources and opportunity to create a full project on their own, to contribute in a focused and proactive way.

Captainjames: How will the creative incubator develop Metahero IP? Can you explain in detail how community involvement will shape this new proof of concept?

Brain: There’s this 1st proof of concept - the comic - and then there’s the ongoing framework. Let’s talk about the comic first.

To start, we will ask for community MetaHero submissions. Similar to how Elite Apes submitted their BAYC for PUNKS comic #2. Community votes would determine which MH’s are selected for the comic. From there we would build these characters as 3D models. The reasoning behind the building in 3D is for long-term benefit. 2D drawings aren’t very reusable. 3D models can be moved across games, animations, web, toys, comics, AR and many other applications. Build once and re-using is a really important efficiency.

Community members can then submit stories to Superspace (superspace.app/metahero-genesis) which is a brilliant NFT story-building platform created by PV community member Abe Anwar and their team. These can be submitted by anyone, not just the selected MetaHeroes. Selected MH holders will of course be involved in telling their character’s story though. Active participants can vote on which storylines are the most appealing through Superspace and/or polls in discord or Twitter.

Artwork concepts are already being generated using Midjourney & DALL-E and then turned into 3D environments. This is another massive efficiency that has only recently become possible. We want to streamline this process as much as possible while giving people tools to contribute without necessarily being high-level artists or writers. This is an important part of how the community gets involved. Lowering the barriers to entry.

A core team of Creative Director, Story Editor and Producer will pull the community stories and the artworks together and work them into a cohesive visual narrative. We will also build a minting site where people can choose to buy the comic as an nft with eth or pow, or as a download with apple/google pay, paypal or a card. The site will contain information about MetaHero universe as well. We see the road to mainstream adoption by involving crypto and non-crypto people together, as difficult as that may seem at times!

But beyond this comic, the framework will allow anyone to build on these assets as they see fit. Whether that involves UPDAO funding or not. The created assets (NOT the licensed MetaHeroes) will all be CC0 and free to use for anyone at any time. It will be entirely up to the community as to how this works, and I imagine each use case will approach it differently. I don’t pretend to have all the answers for collaborative story development in Web3. It’s such a new field and while some projects have made great inroads, it isn’t without its challenges. The only way to figure this out is to work through them.

Captainjames: How will stories be integrated into community for votes? Will people vote on characters who live and die? Will they get to select story arcs?

Brain: Superspace has the functionality for users to react to submissions with emojis. We can tally those reactions after putting a call out to vote. While we are currently using Superspace to build the lore and characters, we are also open to trying other platforms that have story building tools for nfts. I think this will be an explosive space to be part of from now on. The UPDAO could well become a pioneer in this area.

As far as how much decision-making is handed over to the community, I would prefer to see community members submitting ideas, stories and characters rather than being asked about already predetermined outcomes. This is definitely a project for those that want to contribute creatively, even if it’s just 1 paragraph or an idea based on their own experience. I see the voting & decision-making happening there, and then the core team taking those ideas and shaping them into a cohesive narrative.

Captainjames: Normally, there is a singular vision or writer(s) that are chosen to develop a story. Most of the time, it’s one person who gets their vision from start to end. This new model disrupts that. How will this be effectively implemented?

Brain: We will be essentially editing the community’s narratives into stories.

I’ve spent 20 years in post production, editing other people’s stories and shaping them through my own lens, so I know that this approach can work wonders. Editing is such a powerful and often ignored storytelling craft. It is where the cohesion is created and the little details are threaded throughout that may have otherwise escaped the attention of the original creators. It is a very beautiful blend of objective & subjective approaches.

Genesis, if successful, will build many assets and stories over time and these can all be re-edited to create new narratives for a long time to come. This is the beauty of creating a frictionless creative environment embedded within the UPDAO.

Captainjames: What are some of the current roadblocks?

Brain: Roadblocks are part of every creative process, especially those breaking new ground. The first one is trying to get all the concepts around this proposal across to the UPDAO members. There are thousands of us, all with very different priorities and viewpoints. Community coordination is a challenge. I’m spending time on community spaces, in the updao discord & voice chat, on Twitter and also on platforms like this one, taking every opportunity I can to let people know what Genesis is about. So far the feedback has been excellent, both for and against. And I love the PV community for that. It is filled with smart, passionate people.

Another one would be to get enough people to vote for it to reach a quorum. Markets are quiet and a lot of people have lost interest for now. Although PV still has a super active and dynamic community which is fantastic.

And a future roadblock is likely to be getting this out to a mainstream audience. Let’s hope the merge has at least subsided the fears that every nft was worth a trillion megatons of CO2!

But I’m optimistic by nature and accept that challenges will always be part of any project. At least I’m building with the UPDAO and with that in mind, I know absolutely anything is possible.

(Location made in Midjourney)

Have a great weekeveryone!