Interactive Storytelling A Creator's Journey: 'Pleased 2 Meet U' with pplpleasr

Transcript

[Applause] [Music] thank you hi everyone my name is Emily and I go by the artist named people pleaser and um well I'm gonna tell you guys my story today and how it led to me standing here but some of you may have heard this story before so I'm gonna do something a little bit differently today and the company that I'm building called Shibuya is based on interactive storytelling so we're gonna try that with this presentation it turns out you can make

hyperlinks within presentations to other specific slides within a presentation so maybe that'll give you a hint to where this is going okay so let's say you're me and you grow up in a normal middle class family and you have some interest in art but still skewing towards pursuing something academic due to being raised by somewhat traditional Asian household fun fact my Chinese name is literally pronounced d-gen and I was born in the year of the monkey so in some ways I feel like I was always destined for this life um so anyways I grew up you know sort of putting art on the back burner and then

I worked my way up got into UCLA and then one day I'm sitting in my dorm room in my first year of college and I'm bored and thinking about renting a movie to watch so this is where the presentation is going to be a little bit interactive and you guys are going to help me pick a movie to watch so if you guys want to just reach underneath your chairs there's going to be something under there I'm totally joking there's nothing under your chairs we're gonna do this the old-fashioned way and we're gonna just raise our hands so raise your hand if you would rather

watch Rango anybody just one two uh what about Drive raise your hand with your wash Drive yeah it's a good movie me too um what about Wally popular choice uh Rise of the Planet of the Apes oh okay so we got some like ape fans in here uh well let's see what would happen if we watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes well that's the end of my presentation thank you guys for listening um because I don't know what would have happened to my life if I watched that movie so let's go back

um the movie that I actually ended up watching was Molly and I didn't know it at the time but this movie would later pretty much change my life so after watching it the story was so compelling that I fell in love and desperately wanted to be a part of this world somehow and I felt so inspired that I basically dedicated all of my free time outside of classes to learning 3D animation in order to pursue my dream of getting a job at Pixar and after three years of doing this I applied to Pixar many many times didn't get the job ones but I did get an offer from a VFX studio and but the offer was immediate so this meant that I would either have to drop

out of school to pursue this opportunity or pass on it and continue to finish my studies so if you had to choose between dropping out of University or getting your bachelor's degree raise your hand if you would drop out of school what about uh continuing with school okay we got some okay so well uh I in fact did drop out of school to take this short gig and so what happened was the next few years would comprise of a constant search for job stability and work in the visual effects industry is

hard to find and especially hard to keep so I went through numerous contract jobs moved across many different cities and just trying to acquire sort of the necessary skills to become a better animator and finally in 2018 I landed my first somewhat stable long-term job and they provided me with a visa to work in the US however I think it was would be like a little bit more than a year after the stop or I was still working there I got approached with the opportunity for a very short two-month contract to work at Blizzard Entertainment now if you work in the commuter Graphics industry you would know that this is probably the Holy Grail of places to work so it was a

really good opportunity but I was at this long-term stable job that I had worked so hard to get to so here's again another sort of crucial decision point in my life would you raise your hand if you would stay at the full-time job truthfully really only only three people okay what about if you were to uh quit your job and take the contract you're gonna do both yeah we can so let's see what would happen if we stayed at the stable full-time job well so that um Studio ended up closing two years later anyway so I think I

would have ended up topless so that's what would happen if I had stayed there so let's go back um I did end up quitting that job just to take this uh blizzard job I mean Blizzard's awesome right so my time at blizzard was short and sweet I worked on the Diablo 4 cinematic and watched this Premiere at the BlizzCon um in 2019 and watched the audience's reaction and it was really really awesome and I think this was the moment that made me realize that what I was really passionate about wasn't just what I thought was working on animation in general or working on the next biggest Hollywood film but what I really was sort of in love with was how this form

of Storytelling made people feel it didn't matter if it was two hours long or 30 seconds it just mattered if it made people feel something so anyways my contract came to an end and after two months I was once again unemployed and uh yeah it was essentially this decision alone that began my sort of prolonged period of unemployment so about five months and I was still applying for jobs and constantly getting rejected and um and then almost caught it like I uh applied a job at Apple got the offer but then I didn't know that a pandemic would happen which would cause them to resend

the offer one month later and once again I'm still on this jobless Journey so in the following months of unemployment what did I do well I started to make artwork under the pseudonym people pleaser and I was casually browsing crypto Twitter during this time and I realized there were all these super interesting narratives and culture around crypto and D5 but none of which were being told in the form of Animation so one I saw this as an opportunity to create some work for myself and two I started using this as a canvas to direct my own little 30-second short films that I was collaborating with these D5 protocols on now every time time we would make a video it was purely for the

purpose of posting to Twitter for marketing and every time we post a new video more people started paying attention to my work by the time that I got to making the unisop animation uh nfts had become a thing and it was like this giant tsunami that was happening alongside D5 that I couldn't ignore and I really wanted to be a part of this movement too but I was too busy making Twitter videos for a living and so purely making animations to post on Twitter was a formula that was safe and had always worked for me but that also meant that I was sitting on the sidelines watching other artists thrive in the nft space so had I ever put up any nft for auction before and it was

really scary to think about letting the market decide on a price for my work right so I would then come to another decision point where I was trying to decide if I should admit this as an auction which was scary or or just stick to posting Twitter videos I mean we probably all know the answer here but raise your hand if you would rather mint the nft for auction okay it's pretty unanimous so yeah I guess my video must have made people feel something because it went viral and it sold for a lot of eth and I can still remember the feeling of logging onto Twitter that day and reading everybody's reactions to this specific animation and it really reminded me of back when I was

at BlizzCon and watching people's reactions to the Diablo cinematic except that back then people were cheering for something that I was just a really small part of and this time it was something that I directed so it kind of sort of opened my eyes to my newfound love for directing things and telling story in a longer form the auction had obviously gone very well and was the Genesis of pleaser Dao we have probably a few members in the audience here and it also kicked off an entire movement of crowdfunding in Dallas that year so what happened last year with nfts just kept trending upwards and with my newfound nft Fame I continued to get

mainstream attention and during this time I received advice from a lot of people to sort of seize the moment make connections with collectors and Galleries and you know this lightning and a bottle movement isn't going to last forever you should sort of monetize all the attention that you're getting uh but you know while it was really tempting to cash in on this momentum something just didn't feel you know super right to me and I wasn't totally sure because I felt like my calling wasn't just to sell individual pieces of artwork you know like I really think that my heart was sort of drawn towards long-form storytelling still back to you know sort of how I felt when I watched

Wally so uh what you guys have taken advantage of the nft bull market and sold art or if your hand if you would do that I mean I wouldn't blame you if you would do that um so let's see what would happen if we took advantage of that and well I guess this living my life probably wouldn't have been a bad one but that's not the path that I chose so I did in fact take a pause to just think about my career well what was I spending this time thinking about uh I was thinking about the attention economy a lot and I was also thinking about how incredible it is that in an era where our attention stands are constantly shortening we

still dedicate so much of our time to watching movies or TV series music videos basically longer form storytelling the problem is this type of content is extremely time consuming and expensive to make and it's obviously not practical to you know spend all this time and effort making something and then selling it as a one-on-one nft that's not very um just it's just not practical and so I was thinking about how we could combine sort of web free technology with this type of Storytelling and currently when you spend all this time money and effort into making a short film you have a few options one you can seek traditional means of funding which often takes a

long time or two you can sort of you know bite the bullet fund it yourself throw it into the film festival circuit and see what happens uh so I'm always looking to sort of innovate and push boundaries and around this time I also felt like the nft market was already oversaturated with profile picture projects and people selling artwork none of which were particularly inspiring to me so a desire formed within me for a space for long-form content on the blockchain and this is where the idea of Shibuya came to me it's named after Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo and it's a web 3 experiment where longer form content is free to watch but monetize on the blockchain to incentivize further

development as well as viewer participation it's basically a culmination of everything I've learned in my career thus far from anything from crowdfunding to monetizing engagement to empowering creators and so the first film and series that I am doing on Shibuya is a passion project that I'm co-directing with Michelle cuchiara and it's called White Rabbit and white rabbit is a web3 interactive series about the Journey of going down the crypto rabbit hole it's metaphorical of course and the short film follows Mirai who is the protagonist embarking on a journey to defend the blockchain and the general themes explored are self-sovereignty Freedom versus

um illusion of choice and it pays homage to many themes in our industry it's about you know building new types of governance and economic freedom and there's a lot of Easter eggs and symbolism if you know to look for them it's basically like anime meets Black Mirror meets love death and robots meets crypto so the concept is simple the pilot episode ends at a point where the main character comes across two doors and behind each door is an alternate ending and the audience are helping to vote in order to watch one you have to vote uh and just like we're doing in this presentation instead of voting with your hands you're voting with an nft so the act of minting an nft simultaneously

funds the development of this animation while the act of voting is helping to shape the general direction of the story okay so my entire Journey sort of started with the stream of working at Pixar and then while I never actually got to realize that dream sometimes life takes you down super unconventional paths that lead you on outcomes that are far exceed your expectations and so instead of making movies for other people I now get to make my own movies and here's the main character of White Rabbit on Vogue magazine earlier this year uh White Rabbit was also playing in in real life she'd be a crossing screens I also got to recently meet the mayor of Shibuya we had meetings with their

government they're very stoked that we named our company after them we got to make some memes together and that was really cool and yes there were many times during these years that I was disappointed that I never got to realize that a dream of getting that job at Pixar but sometimes life gives you something better so for example because web free has opened so many doors for me I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Bob Iger and he has seen the first two episodes of White Rabbit and we even had a conversation where he told me that he knows my story started from watching Wally and then he told me about the creation of Wally which was super cool

so all this is to say that you never know where this crazy path of life is going to lead you and with that I will leave a quote from Steve Jobs which I think everybody in this room can highly resonate with so the quote is you have to trust in something your gut Destiny Life Karma whatever because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path and so ironically me standing up here and talking about the Steve Jobs quote today is a direct result of me not getting a job at Steve's company a few

years ago but because of that I was able to pave my own path start a company and combine a wonderful new technology in web3 as well as my love for storytelling so I don't know hopefully this will continue to inspire all of us to continue building what we believe in and pursuing our dreams as Founders um so thank you guys for listening and last but not least I'll show you guys a short clip of white rabbit foreign

[Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]

thank you again [Music] you go [Music]

[Applause]