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Dave Broome Of Orange Comet — The Platform That Is Pioneering NFTs In Entertainment and Virtual Worlds, Plus: Lucky Ducky Stop Animation NFT, Candy Digital Sale And More…
Orange Comet has captured the attention of some of the biggest IPs in the world. What goes into this massive success? Joining Jeff, Eathan and Josh is Dave Broom, who tells us how the world’s premier Web3 entertainment company helps drive the digital revolution by working with some of the biggest brands in sports, music, arts and entertainment. Dave discusses NFTs as content and how great content will always find a way to bubble up. Plus, for today’s hot topic, we are joined by Jeremy Fisher, a talented stop motion director, animator, and founder of Lucky Ducky, who tells us all the cool projects they have going on in the intersection of NFT and animation. Join in!
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Dave Broome Of Orange Comet — The Platform That Is Pioneering NFTs In Entertainment and Virtual Worlds, Plus: Lucky Ducky Stop Animation NFT, Candy Digital Sale And More…
This is Dave Broome of Orange Comet, the Web3 entertainment company that has captured the attention of some of the biggest IPs in the world. I’m here on the Edge of NFT, the show that captures the attention of the finest builders and creators on the planet. That means you. Thanks for being here. Keep reading.
NFT-curious readers, stay tuned for this episode to learn what incredible NFT experiences Orange Comet has co-created with some of the biggest names in sports, entertainment, and beyond, how much a family photo can be the sweetest treasure among one man’s impressive set of possible possessions, and how Lucky Ducky managed to create a scrappy family-friendly stop motion project and turn it into something truly timeless. All this and more in this episode.
Don’t forget that we put together a gathering called NFT LA that brought out thousands of the world’s most innovative doers in the Web3 space. Head to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, bolder, and better but also as intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles from March 20th to the 23rd, 2023. We will see you there.
This episode features Dave Broome, Cofounder and CEO of Orange Comet, the world’s premier Web3 entertainment company helping drive the digital revolution. Orange Comet works with some of the world’s biggest brands in intellectual property in sports, music, arts, and entertainment. Outside of his work with Orange Comet, Broome has been a Hollywood producer for nearly 25 years.
He produced NBC’s The Biggest Loser, Ultimate Beastmaster, Netflix’s first-ever unscripted competition series co-produced with Sylvester Stallone, as well as two Netflix documentaries, The Day I Met El Chapo: The Kate del Castillo and Sean Penn story and the Jennifer Lopez documentary Halftime. Broome leads Orange Comet by mirroring the storytelling and cinematic approach of Hollywood with the dynamic innovation of technological immersive experiences, driving the brand as a digital leader into the future of entertainment. Dave, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you here.
It’s great to be here with you. Those are some of my credits, but I like those and the three D’s for the show, the Doers, the Dreamers, and the Disruptors. That’s spot on. It’s good to be with you.
It’s a central rallying cry. I’m a musician as well. I trained in jazz at Rutgers University.
Are you a New Jersey boy?
I went to school there. Don’t ask me why. New Jersey people are like, “What did you do? Why did you come from Chicago to New Jersey?”
We didn’t come from California to Jersey. Don’t tell me that.
I’m looking at your setup there. I’m like, “Let’s jump in there. We can jam out. If you hop on the drums, I’ll play the keys.”
What do you play?
I play the keyboard and piano.
I got my keyboard over here.
I see that. I’m drooling. It looks good.
I started playing drums when I was about eight. When I was about eleven, my mom and dad rented a piano for one of my brothers. He never played it, but one day, I sat down, and my fingers fell on the keys. I’ve been composing ever since. I never took a lesson, but my grandfather was the stand-up bassist in Rudy Vallée’s band. This is back in the ’40s. It must be in my blood. When things don’t go well in the world of Web3, I’m taking my frustration out on the freaking drums behind me right here.
That sounds like a good idea.
For our readers at home, we have some history with Dave. It was an honor to get to know Dave when we were putting together NFT LA version 1.0 back in March 2022. It’s crazy to think about.
I can’t believe it. Nothing happened during the course of that year.
It has always been normal day-to-day stuff.
It’s the same shit.
This is the time when things are crazy. There are eighteen meetings a day for NFT LA. I get on a call with Dave. I don’t even know who you were. I get thrown on calls. I start googling you. I was like, “We have people like this coming into our industry and bringing the heat.” To see what you’ve done in the space in such a short amount of time, your reputation precedes you in terms of your passion and your commitment to the creative arts and how you’ve translated that to Web3. The genesis of Orange Come is this commitment, innovation, and proprietary technology. I know a little bit of the story, but I would love to share with everyone at home how the idea for Orange Comet came to be.
Thanks for the nice words too. You said the word passion. It is everything to me. I’ve had a very fortunate career. Eathan mentioned some of the highlights, but I’ll talk about some others. I’m up here in my Lake Tahoe home. During the hard days of COVID, I had about seven shows in some form of production, shooting, pre-shooting, and post. All got shut down as the world did.
It came up from our LA place to Tahoe, “Chill out and hang.” We thought it would be a few weeks, and we would be right back on the set. Back then, I certainly knew about NFTs, Web3, and blockchain because I stayed on top of that stuff in a big way. It was in the zeitgeist. I got a phone call from a good buddy. His name is Will Meris. He’s the President of Orange Comet. He’s got an entrepreneurial and investment background. He has done a lot of different things in a lot of different spaces.
He called me up and said, “We have been looking at this space. There’s a huge opportunity. I want you to run this company.” I said, “I’m flattered. Thank you so much. I’m not going to leave a 25-year career in Hollywood to run a Web3 NFT company. This is not going to happen.” It’s hard enough to climb to where I was and then walk away from it. He said, “There’s a huge opportunity here. You have to look at this.” I thought, “I will. What is he talking about? I’m not going to look into this,” but I did.
It was gnawing at me a little bit. The deeper dive that I did into NFTs, blockchain, and Web3 at that time, the more of a head-scratcher it was for me. A little bit more excitement started to boil inside of me. The head-scratcher was, “What am I looking at here? What is this stuff?” I don’t mean, “What is an NFT?” I’m thinking more like, “What are people buying at the end of the day?” I wasn’t commenting on digital artists because artists are artists. You have to put them in their category. Art is art.
I was looking at brands, IP, entertainment properties, sports, music, and my world from a Hollywood TV and film production standpoint. I’m looking at stuff and thinking, “Quite honestly, this is the biggest shit that I’ve ever seen.” It was regurgitating content. I called Will back up several weeks later and said, “I could be wrong or right.” I built a very high-end 3D digital design studio for more than twenty years when I was in TV and film along with my Chief Creative Officer, Dante Ferrarini.
I thought, “If we could take Hollywood-style production quality and Hollywood-style content storytelling and combine it into Web3, could we have success?” I saw this from day one, not as a speculative play. I didn’t care about somebody making money on these things. I still don’t. We can get into that after. I cared about a value-add proposition by saying, “How can we deliver something that is the greatest content?” At the end of the day, a great NFT or Web3 project in my mind back then and still now should be no different from a great movie, a great song, a great book, or a great television series.
Great content is great content, but no one seemed to be looking at NFTs as a content play. There were certainly communities and utilities, but they weren’t content-driven. Long story short, I said to him, “Either I’m way off, or we’re going to hit a bullseye here. Let’s take the dog and pony show out and see what response we get.” Fast forward to a year and a half later, and we have been very fortunate.
We have been recognized as the best creative company in the world or this space. These are other people’s words. There are some people doing some great stuff out there. I’m not sitting here like an egotistical asshole. I don’t want to come off like that. For the most part, it’s the most important thing. We’re driven by passion and by trying to build something that is of value to the fan base.
I look at blockchain technology and Web3 as amazing technology and an amazing opportunity for creators and entrepreneurs to come in and build. I despise the motherfucking criminals, the hackers, the bullshit artists, the rug pullers, and everything that you would expect in a nascent industry, as you saw in the dot-com days of the ’90s. That’s what we’re dealing with now. Those people are gone. They have gotten washed out, and now you’ve got real players and real companies building.
Orange Comet: Web3 is an amazing opportunity for creators and entrepreneurs to come in and build.
That’s what we’re looking to do at Orange Comet. There have been so many articles. The last project that I did prior to coming onto building Orange Comet was I filmed Jennifer Lopez for the last few years and made her documentary feature, Halftime. That was a four-year project. I’m very proud of it. We opened up at Tribeca. It was the last project I’ve done, and it will be the last project I do as a TV and film producer because I’m so embedded and passionate about what we’re building here. Hopefully, that gives you a bit of the story.
We hear the passion. It’s great stuff. To echo what you were saying, it’s so interesting to be in the position that we’re in where we get to see everybody at every level of what’s going on here. It’s fascinating to have this position of seeing certain things fall apart. At the same time, people are getting into the space like you who are like, “I’m keeping going.”
It’s very interesting and analogous to other technological revolutions. Thanks for sharing that. We know from the way you’ve been talking that what you’re about is creating unprecedented ecosystems and other ways of engaging in the system. How do you see going about creating those types of things and those ecosystems in the world of Web3?
I look at NFTs. It feels like a dirty word. We’re looking at whatever you want to call them as the basement floor into a much bigger play. That’s where the industry is going to evolve. We are in the nascent stages of this industry. I’ll take The Walking Dead as a good example. AMC saw our work. We ended up in a multi-year partnership for the iconic franchise of The Walking Dead. We started with selling Walker Access Passes, or typical passes that you would see, except the art that we were doing in it, and the 3D digital design was pretty spectacular. That got the fan base into the world.
You’re accessing what we’re building. From day one, we said, “What are we doing? We’re building out a Web3 game environment.” There’s a purpose for every asset and NFT that you’re buying, whether it’s Darren Dixon’s motorcycle that we’re recreating, tools, weapons, or avatars. They’re getting used in a game system. That’s the ecosystem that we’re building. There was a real value to these. They looked amazing. The animations were sick, but you’re buying these for a real purpose. That real purpose is a video game. We know Web3 gaming is an interesting place.
It has to be great content in a Web3 game. First and foremost, it has to be fun and cool. If it’s a play-to-earn or a collect-to-earn, that’s great, but that’s a secondary part of it. The ecosystems that I’m talking about as the CEO of Orange Comet means that whatever we’re delivering on a project should be part of something much bigger. It shouldn’t just be a PFP of something. Ape-type projects where you’ve got profile pictures built a tremendous community and did an amazing job, which is the meat behind that, but it’s going to be a struggle for a lot of companies and players to come out and do PFPs.
To be clear, it has always been a struggle. There are 10, 15, or 20 PFP projects that rose to the cream of the crop, but there are thousands that did not. At the end of the day, being ecosystem-centric is critical to any brand that you’re building. Any brand in Web2 and Web3 is not just a community. It’s an ecosystem if it’s done right.
That’s an important part because what you end up getting are not crypto-savvy people, but my goal is to expand the base and the world that we’re all in here. I want to keep the NFT and crypto enthusiasts intact because they’re a critical part of what we’re doing, but I want to expand beyond. Back to The Walking Dead, an interesting stat is that about 75% of the people who first bought into the project had never seen a second of the episode.
This is not some hardcore stat. This is based on our best determination. 75% had never seen an episode of The Walking Dead. They were NFT enthusiasts, NFT collectors, and crypto fans, but the better stat was that roughly 20%-something of the buyers came into the project as their very first NFT project ever. They never knew what an NFT was. They had no idea, but they were fans of the show. They saw our work. They were pumped on it. We got them in.
That is what I’m looking to do, and because of my unique background as a TV and film producer, I could be a voice among a lot of other people out there, too, who could onboard the masses. That’s what I want to do. My goal is to find the next million people. The only way to do that, I believe, is to give them amazing content and make the system a lot easier to onboard, but the ecosystem is a critical part of it where they feel that there is a real purpose behind this shit and a real value for them to want to get involved.
That’s fair enough, but that’s not the only part of it. When you’re putting together these projects, you’re thinking about dynamic storytelling and gamification. Generally, creativity and technology play a role in creating these types of experiences. How do you infuse all these components and move the timelines from 4 years, which is what the JLo project took, to 4 months or even less?
It’s funny because we’re working with several game companies and traditional game publishers that take years. Let’s go to a studio for a second. We’re partnered with DreamWorks and NBCUniversal. These are amazing creative companies. You would say, “Why would they want or need a company like Orange Comet in this space? They could do great creatives themselves.”
They’re specializing in what they’re doing, and we’re specializing in what we’re doing. We can shorten timelines and budgets and build out content in different ways. Because of my background as a TV and film producer, especially in the unscripted space and reality television since I started in reality television in the early days, I felt like I was one of the pioneers then, which is an interesting parallel to what I’m doing here. Back in the early 2000s, the reality was starting to take off.
If you can create content in a less expensive way than you can in traditional scripted shows, that is one of the appeals for reality television. The same thing here is I’ve been able to take those practices and move them over but let me tell you something. I’m not shy to say that we put hundreds of thousands of dollars into every single project we’re doing.
You’re looking at our creative and the Anthony Hopkins partnership that we had. He’s one of the most iconic actors in the world and an amazing artist himself. We had tremendous success. We sold out in seven minutes on that collection. We put hundreds of thousands of dollars into creating the digital pieces to that, but we believe that we’re investing in a long-term project and building content.
You have to shorten timelines. The first and foremost barometer for us is, “Do we care about the project?” We want to make a shit ton of money. We’re not a nonprofit company, but that’s not what’s driving us. What’s driving us is, “Can we tackle something that we feel great about creatively? Can we serve a purpose with that?” That’s question number one.
We turned down many opportunities. Big celebrities and big music talents are attached only because we feel like either they’re not in it for the right reason, or we can’t be in it for the right reason because we can’t see the vision of what it is. If we can find that vision, first and foremost, that’s our gut check. It goes into, “What’s our creative approach? What are we doing with this?”
I looked at Dapper and Top Shot when I first got into this space. I gave them much credit for creating that market, but at the same time, I told my guys in the company, “We will never be Dapper. I would love to be Dapper from financial success, but we’re never going to regurgitate content that you can see on live television or online afterward and repurpose it. That’s not us.” We need a vision for everything we do.
Orange Comet: We’re never going to regurgitate content that you can see on live television or online afterwards and just repurpose it. That’s just not us. We need a vision to everything we do.
It was innovative at the time. They went first but ultimately, they catalyzed a movement around pushing the envelope.
You have to give them a lot of credit for what they did. They created a market. They were visionaries themselves, but everything about Top Shot is the opposite of what I, as the CEO of Orange Comet, want to see Web3 being. This should not be about buying into a project and 5X, 10X, or 20X-ing. That is the wrong approach. That is the pure speculative aspect of this.
Let’s look at Apple. They don’t sit there and make computers, amazing phones, and all that stuff because they’re trying to make their stockholders’ money first and foremost. That’s what they need to do. What they’re first thinking is, “How do we create the greatest products in the world? How is this phone, this computer, or these buds going to change your life?” That then, in turn, creates value for their stockholders. There’s a difference. That’s what I’m trying to do. Let me create a project and content that delivers great value. If you want to go ahead 5X or 10X it, that’s up to you, but that’s not my goal.
Let’s talk about the Anthony Hopkins project a slight bit more. It sold out in seven minutes. I visited the website. They’re incredibly ornate, beautiful, and elaborate things you’ve created. Can you give us a little bit on how that all came together and the ethos of that in light of what you’re talking about?
Eathan, I have to find out what that first conversation with Anthony Hopkins about NFTs is like.
First of all, it was amazing.
It looks a lot like the Donald Trump NFT project. There are a lot of echoes there. It’s very similar. They’re wearing different suits and stuff like that.
We ripped something off and said, “Here we go.” Gloria and Emilio Estefan are Founders of Orange Comet and good friends of mine. I’ve produced Gloria on one of my shows over the years. It was funny because Gloria or Emilio called me up and said, “We want to put you in touch with Anthony Hopkins because he wanted to get into the world of NFTs.”
It sounds like a special episode of the show.
I’m on his Twitter. The dude is having a blast.
That’s beautiful and very exciting.
Let’s do it. Let’s throw it down.
I want to see the Joshsaurus Rex.
I’ll give you very quick hits.
Are you ready?
I’m ready to go.
You taught him how to negotiate at first.
Is that in California or somewhere else?
This episode is brought to you by Sony FX3.
It’s very common here on the show.
I know the feeling.
Is it working for you?
Check with me in a month. I’ll let you know.
It’s probably 90% of producers.
I want to let it all go.
That’s good.
Can you be like that?
It’s a tough one to find the balance on.
Take a piss. I have to pee badly.
That would be fun.
If you do a collab, I’ll bake you a cake.
There you go.
I’m going to hold you to that.
It will be gluten-free as well. I promise that.
Eathan is very strict on gluten-free.
Thanks for saying that.
Josh, that’s very original.
You could change the Ducky.
Thank you so much.
Congratulations.
That’s fair enough.
I do have a giveaway.
Important Links
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William Tong - LinkedIn
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@LuckyDuckyNFT - Twitter
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Fanatics sells its majority stake in the NFT Company Candy Digital
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Yong Yam - LinkedIn
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@Broome88 - Twitter
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Twitter - Orange Comet
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Instagram - Orange Comet
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Discord - Orange Comet
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Spotify - Edge of NFT
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iTunes - Edge of NFT