$WAGMI: Humans of Web3, the first MidsummerDAO production
by the Midsummer DAO core team:
Mia von Steinkirch, Chad Hugghins, Damien Stolarz, Ian Q, Victoria Nguyen, and Barbara Castro-Rojas.
TL,DR:
🎬 The Production:
The Midsummer DAO is mirror-crowdfunding for the production of our first season of the Humans of Web3 series: the NYC Edition.
The Midsummer DAO, including all crowdfund participants here, will serve as Executive Producers of this series.
UPDATE: Read below to find out who we are excited to announce will produce and direct this first season.
📺 The Platform:
Humans of Web3 will serve as one of the first curated films to be available on Midsummer’s community-owned streaming platform, leveraging Arweave, Livepeer, and Media.network.
Mia von Steinkirch (CEO) and Damien Stolarz (CTO) are leading the engineering team from the Midsummer DAO to build what we believe is the next evolution of film distribution.
🤝 The Community:
Join the Midsummer DAO as we create community-owned storytelling productions and distribution strategies. We are a group of storytellers, technologists, and producers from around the world. All are welcome.
Contributing to this crowdfund will put you on the airdrop list to receive our governance token, $REEL, and will give you access to private Discord channels for this production.
I. The Human Side of Web3
The great majority of people on the planet are still not aware of what web3 is and how cryptonetworks can bring several fundamental changes in many sectors of our civilization.
Even worse, there is still a stigma regarding blockchain that can sometimes give “crypto” a bad connotation.
Let’s change this! Let’s reveal the human side of web3 and inspire the next wave of talent.
Enter: Humans of Web3
Once upon a time, a group of web3 folks, strangers to each other, decided to live together for a month in a house in Beverly Hills. What could have been a very chaotic experiment turned out to be one of the best times of our lives.
We asked ourselves, how did we get so lucky that everyone in this group is such an amazing human?
One explanation for this thriving encounter is that we are all part of a larger community, the web3 and crypto community, which is overwhelming hopeful, optimistic, and encouraging.
Our friend Filipe Macedo started capturing this ethos through his Human of Web3 Twitter and Instagram projects.
In October 2021, we announced the “Humans of Web3” production during Midsummer DAO's debut at the main stage in LisCon.
Announcing the production at LisCon allowed us to be fully connected and committed with the community as we start the pre-production of this inaugural series.
II. The Production
We are creating this crowdfund to help fund “Humans of Web3 - NYC Edition” to be produced in NYC this winter.
We plan to release 6 episodes of 15 minutes telling 6 different stories about the people pushing the web3 space forward.
UPDATE: We are very fortunate to have secured some of the filmmaking industry’s most talented people to help us deliver something incredible for this first season of Humans of Web3. Mary Ann and Alex will also be joining the Midsummer DAO as industry advisors.
Producer - Mary Ann Marino
Former Head of Production at Amazon Studios and Tim Burton Productions and Executive Producer at Park Pictures, Mary Ann Marino has been involved in some of the most imaginative and memorable films (Manchester By The Sea, James, and the Giant Peach, My Own Private Idaho) and among the most award-winning advertising campaigns in recent history (VW’s The Force, Apple’s Misunderstood).
In the past decade, her work has won Oscars, Emmys, and Cannes Lions. Skilled at balancing unique creative visions and commercial appetites, Mary Ann has over 25 years of experience in entertainment.
She’s currently developing The Caretaker, written by Andres Heinz, for Studiocanal, and in post-production on Oorlagh George’s Sundance-Lab supported feature, Stranger With A Camera.
Director - Alexandra Martínez Kondracke
Alexandra Martínez Kondracke is an award-winning writer/director/producer who studied at Dartmouth College and NYU Graduate Film school.
Alex worked as a writer on several high-profile feature projects, including an unannounced Star Wars trilogy, an upcoming Star Trek film from J.J. Abrams, and multiple Disney feature films. Most recently, Alex directed a 3D animated short called Pocket Portals in collaboration with Epic Games, using their Unreal Engine.
Other notable projects include an adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked for Amazon Studios and co-creating Annapurna Films’ first television project, The Players, for Epix. Alex was also a writer/producer on Showtime’s The L Word and HBO’s Hung, and directed the musical feature Girltrash: All Night Long. Alex co-founded The Latinx House, which launched at Sundance 2020, and co-founded Poderistas, a Latina lifestyle platform, with America Ferrara and Eva Longoria.
Early in her career, Alex’s short film Ice Fishing won a jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and she worked as a cinematographer for documentaries and TV shows on the BBC, Bravo, VH-1, TLC, Discovery, A&E, and National Geographic.
Alex is currently developing several TV pilots for Warner Brothers.
III. The Next Evolution in Film Distribution
One of the unique parts of this project is that these films will be the first to debut on the Midsummer community-owned streaming platform.
Every episode will be transcoded and stored on Arweave through the Glass protocol, and available for streaming through the Livepeer and Media.network infrastructure.
This is our commitment to the community and to the web3 principles of composability, and we believe an important step towards creator empowerment that could have lasting effects in the filmmaking industry.
We are speaking to various film projects to expand the library of content on this platform because we think the centralized subscription model that big tech uses on the major streaming platforms today is outdated.
It’s time for Midsummer.
IV. What’s Next
While this crowdfund will specifically go to the first season of “Humans of Web3 - NYC Edition”, that’s just the beginning of the story.
We hope we drive the movement of re-thinking film production and distribution as a whole. To that end, the community of people involved in this crowdfund will help us shape the roadmap for future projects.
In other words, HoW3 is a proof-of-concept of how the Midsummer DAO community will foster, fund, produce, and distribute compelling and up-to-date storytelling. The north star is to form a community of people interested in exploring the intersection of crypto, DAOs, and storytelling.
Upon the success of this NYC edition, we will be creating new seasons in other web3 hubs such as Los Angeles, Miami, and Lisbon.
We are also focused on building a decentralized community for storytelling production and distribution.
The future of organizations is decentralized community-owned collectives. We hope you’ll join us.
V. How $WAGMI works
$WAGMI is an ERC20 token that gives fractionalized ownership to the “Human of Web3” series and membership to Midsummer DAO. All revenue from Humans of Web 3 - NYC will be donated to our DAO treasury, which is a Gnosis multi-sig owned by our community.
In this crowdfund, we are also selling two tiers of NFTs, unlocking special production perks:
- $WAGMI Proof of Humanity: a series of 3/3 NFTs granting an invitation to be part of the production in NYC (either on-camera or behind the scenes).
- $WAGMI Golden Ticket: a series of 10/10 NFTs unlocking access to behind-the-scenes footage and the Collector’s Edition of “Humans of Web3 - NYC Edition”.
Anyone who holds $WAGMI when this crowdfund closes will be airdropped our $REEL governance token. 1 $WAGMI = 1 $REEL.
If you own a minimum of 100 $WAGMI, you’ll be added to our private “Humans of Web3” channel in Discord, where you will get the chance to follow the entire production of these series.
Finally, all the proceeds from this raising are going to Midsummer DAO treasure, located at midsummerparty.eth and owned by our community. You are welcome to join our Discord at midsummer.community, and our Twitter.