Digital Artists are rarely rewarded with intellectual property ownership.
The blockchain may provide an alternative.
Centralized Production
In 2012, the world marveled at the film adaptation of Life of Pi. The key to this film, was the performance of its tiger co-star. Unable to get an animal like this to perform, (and the dangers associated with it) the film enlisted the help of visual effects firm Rhythm and Hues. R&H, as it is known in the industry, created a fully virtual tiger, by designing musculature systems, complex fur shaders, and had some of the world's most adept digital animators create believable feline movement.
For the work done on this film, the visual effects supervisors and the top talent of R&H won a prestigious BAFTA and an academy award. It was one of the greatest achievements of computer graphics at that time.
But Rhythm and Hues went chapter 11. Everyone who worked at R&H was out of a job and adding to the insult, the production of the film simply ignored it (1).
How can a group of some of the most talented artists and technicians from around the world, collectively make one of the most creative and technical endeavors ever seen on a screen …
... and go out of business?
Royalties
The writers guild, or WGA, was formed in 1921 to "protect and promote the craft of writing for the screen." It was forged from the anger of early Hollywood screenwriters who demanded proper credit and recognition --- or simply termed "Attribution. (3)" Writers, who are lucky enough to sell a script in Hollywood, join the writers guild to enforce a trail of royalties for the scripts that they write. For example, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld get regular paychecks every time their show about nothing goes on the air (4).
Similar organizations have been designed for musicians and composers. Organizations like these were formed in the early days of the film industry when large conglomerates didn't have the centralized control they do now.
Visual effects were late to the party.
Any new discipline invented after the 1970s had difficulty organizing into a protective union. As such, the unionized craft services who put bagels on set, are ranked higher in the end credits than the people who make the monsters and superheroes that dominate the movies today.
The studios maintain complete control of the intellectual property. In this model, legally, a weekly rate compensates the imaginative labor needed to build these multimillion-dollar experiences. There is no rev-share in this model, and the weekly rate for these artists has stagnated over the years**.** It is often not enough to get a single-studio apartment in Los Angeles (5).
The legal mechanisms for protection exist, but have been systemically decimated. Effectively, I believe, it's too late to unionize.
However, our tools might provide a new opportunity.
Software eats Entertainment
The near entirety of the entertainment pipeline is now digital.
In the 90s, we saw the maturation of 3d animation, which replaced traditional animation and stop motion. Compositing evolved from bulky multiplane camera setups to a sleek node-based software. Now, real-time graphics, driven by powerful game engines, are driving the current evolution (6).
The Unreal Engine from Epic Games is becoming adopted by visual effects, animation, and virtual production houses at an astounding rate. Be it Disney's Mandalorian, shot on giant "extended reality" stages, or AAA game cinematics with near-human meta-characters, entertainment is going entirely real-time (7).
Teams are setting themselves up to develop real-time content by operating less like in-studio individuals, and more like a distributed team of contributors. Using a game engine as the hub of a project, asynchronous teams can collaborate while being distributed across the globe.
To coordinate the work of hundreds of workers, game engines like Unreal rely on version control which saves the code on a server. Individuals can be granted access to a repository that holds the project, allowing them to "check-in" updates and "pull" the latest project at any time of day or night. Someone might be updating the trees or environments, while someone else is working on the character systems. This asynchronous work has proven to be an accelerant, and is replacing the need for traditional on-ground studios (8).
As developers are onboarded, they are granted access to the code repository. As they push their updates, the version control tracks the addition. Access is granted with permission profiles attached to email addresses.
Perhaps contributors could use a cryptographically secure address instead. By tracking each commit, it becomes an ongoing immutable resume of the work.
This cryptographically secure address could be secured on the blockchain.
Attribution on the Blockchain
An artist can sell a painting for 600 dollars to a collector. But the collector, with the network of other investors, could turn around and sell the painting for 10,000. The next collector could turn around again, and sell the painting for 100,000. The painter, who has generated extraordinary value for this ecosystem, gets no percentage of this.
This age-old debate has come to a head in blockchain art marketplaces, as artists who sell their works as non-fungible tokens gain income on royalties from the secondary markets. These royalties, however, can not be defended entirely by code in an open market.
Centralized marketplaces, like Open Sea or Magic Eden, which have the opportunity to control the royalty protocols, must decide whether to lure artists with the defense of royalties or allow the open market to skirt them (9).
While this debate rages in the marketplaces, I consider only a single Unreal project and its contributors. Onboarded together, they can commit themselves to honor a set of attribution protocols for the network.
Attribution is the cornerstone of legal defensibility. This, combined with the blockchain, comes the ability to permanently track the contributions.
What compels me now, is that the technology exists to do what I suggest. A typical AAA game pipeline runs the Unreal Engine with a version control software like Perforce. The leap that I hope we make, is to connect this development to Solana, (IMHO) the only layer one blockchain with the transactional speed to support a real-time graphics ecosystem (10).
There is still much to do. The web applications and protocols to govern this endeavor are barely imagined. While it is clear we can gather the attribution of who worked on the project, determining owner percentages and the value of the work itself will be an ongoing debate for years to come. With AI on the horizon, the time to act is now. Let’s create new IP ownership models that will responsibly reward creatives for the work that they do.
There was never a union for creatives who worked on Life of Pi. I believe that it is now too late for there ever to be an effective real world one.
However, the blockchain may offer a new hope... (11)
Nye Warburton is an animation technologist and educator. This is the final post written in participation with the Bankless Academy Writers Cohort. Everything in this article was written and drawn with human labor. (February 2023)
Visit online @ http://nyewarburton.com
Links and Attribution
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Life After Pi - The Documentary about Rhythm and Hues - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lcB9u-9mVE
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Bambi vs Godzilla, On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business by David Mamet - https://www.amazon.com/Bambi-vs-Godzilla-Practice-Business/dp/1400034442
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Writers Guild of America - https://www.wga.org/the-guild/going-guild/join-the-guild
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Jerry Seinfeld's Royalties - https://www.bosshunting.com.au/hustle/jerry-seinfeld-net-worth/#:~:text=Jerry Seinfeld and Seinfeld co,of points to 15%25 apiece.
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Computer Graphics Salary for Artist - https://www.salary.com/research/salary/offering/artist-computer-graphics-animation-salary/ca#:~:text=Using the salary calculator%2C the,%2Fweek or %245%2C981%2Fmonth
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Game Engine Market Size - https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/12/20/2577443/0/en/The-Global-Game-Engines-Market-size-is-expected-to-reach-5-9-billion-by-2028-rising-at-a-market-growth-of-14-6-CAGR-during-the-forecast-period.html
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Real Time Round Up - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/real-time-roundup-the-growth-of-interactive-3d-and-emerging-2021-trends
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The advantages of Perforce - https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/85845/why-big-companies-use-perforce
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Magic Eden Launches Protocol to Enforce Creator Royalties - https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2022/12/01/magic-eden-launches-protocol-to-enforce-creator-royalties/
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Solana - (IMHO) The Layer 1 blockchain fast enough to support real time graphics - https://solana.com/
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Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust by Kevin Werbach - https://www.amazon.com/Blockchain-Architecture-Trust-Information-Policy/dp/0262038935