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Dorian Banks (House Of Kebaa/Looking Glass Labs) & Aleks Paunovic (Gen Zeroes Actor/Exec Producer), Plus Musk’s Maybe Bored Ape, Minecraft In Web3, And More...
The NFT metaverse continues to establish new homes for various art-driven communities. It’s no surprise that the entertainment industry has found its way into the NFT ecosystem. Joining our hosts, Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger today are House of Kibaa associates Dorian Banks and Aleks Paunovic. Dorian Banks is the CEO of Looking Glass Slabs, which owns House of Kibaa, while Aleks Paunovic is the executive producer of the GenZeroes series powered by House of Kibaa. They sit with us today to share how live-action and television films are slowly penetrating into the NFT world. Listen in and learn how this transition proves to be a great asset for both the NFT and film industries.
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Dorian Banks (House Of Kebaa/Looking Glass Labs) & Aleks Paunovic (Gen Zeroes Actor/Exec Producer), Plus Musk’s Maybe Bored Ape, Minecraft In Web3, And More….
NFT curious reader, stay tuned for this episode and find out how GenZeroes is totally turning what it means to be a TV show on its head.
What bringing joy and perseverance means to our guests.
**Why traditional and Web3 gaming are more similar than many people think, all this and more on this episode. Enjoy. Remember, NFT LA is coming from March 28 to 31, 2022. It will be an unforgettable experience featuring the crème de la crème in the NFT space. Head on over to NFTLA.live to get your tickets as early as possible for the best pricing. **
If you or someone you know wants to partner with us to co-create this special unforgettable experience, there are still opportunities to get involved but they are going fast. Please reach out at Contact@EdgeOfNft.com. If you want the latest updates, make sure and visit EdgeOfNft.com/Discord to have some chats behind the scenes.
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This episode features Dorian Banks, CEO of Looking Glass Labs, which owns House of Kibaa and Aleks Paunovic, actor and executive producer on the GenZeroes series, which is being produced by House of Kibaa. Let’s talk about each of them. Dorian is a lifelong international entrepreneur which focuses on technology, blockchain and agritech. Notably, he has built companies from the ground up in wireless technologies, mobile phone gaming and apps, large-scale plantations, UAV technology, 3D printing and cryptocurrency mining.
He has served as a senior executive and/or board member of more than a dozen publicly traded companies over the past decades, arranging financings from some of the largest global banks. Aleks Paunovic was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He has been an actor for many years. We checked your IMDb, Aleks, with a lot of wonderful credits. We would love to start by giving you a chance to highlight some of the things that you think are most relevant here.
I have been acting for many years. I also have an extensive boxing background. I have three generations of boxers in my family. I also played music for many years and toured the country. I was playing on stage one day and a casting director asked if I wanted to audition for a role and I did. I ended up falling in love with the craft and I started late. I thought it started in my mid-30s. I’m going to acting class with kids that are twenty years younger but I had the drive and I wanted to tell stories. Most of the gigs started coming my way more because I’m 6’5 and 260.
I was always in the tough-guy roles. I wanted to branch out in that kind of stuff so I started trying to make and produce my own things where I could show more than just the physical. I feel like I had a very lucky and great career. I’m about to shoot Season 4 of Snowpiercer. I finished five years of a show called Van Helsing. We finished part of the MCU, which we did Hawkeye on Disney+ and Marvel. The thing that I’m extremely proud of is being a part of GenZeroes and the NFT aspect of creation. I also am fortunate enough to be a part of a project that Rick Dugdale, who is the President of Enderby Entertainment.
When you enjoy the work that you’re doing, your creativity opens up more. Click To Tweet
He and I, along with others, did the very first Hollywood scripted NFT film, starring Anthony Hopkins. We are stoked that we have gotten to the point where it did so well as a drop on an NFT that we are now doing the 2nd and 3rd ones. We have made this project called Zero Contact into a franchise. It is very exciting to be in the NFT market. I still have so much to learn about the NFTs, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to jump on here and get an education more than anything, knowing how NFTs and entertainment, especially live-action television and film, are artists-driven communities along with the consumer being a part of it and more than ever than is ever happened before. That to me is huge of being a part of this.
We have House of Kibaa and Looking Glass Labs. Let’s take a step back. Let’s talk origin story. Where did the ideas come from? How did all this evolve?
It started with a couple of founders. Jason is the main founder and the younger guys that committed the 3D and movie special effects space. They probably did the first-ever allow list pass. it is called the Genesis membership. They sold for $500. We took PayPal for them, trying to onboard the NBA Top Shots people because they were buying with credit cards. We thought that was a good way to get people into it. They were trying to sell 3,000 and 809 sold but they made the commitment they would burn the rest they did. There are 809 of these Genesis passes. Now they are selling it for between $15,000 and $22,000 approximately.
There are only 809 and every month you get a drop-off, you either get put on some other allow list or you get another NFT to drop your wallet. For instance, in January 2022, you got on the loudest for Hypebeast. If you sold pre-reveal, you got $30,000 airdropped on you just for holding our Genesis membership. They have been quite popular. It went through the summer. They kept building and then they started looking for some more C-level business guys.
I was dug up along with a couple of other people. We came on board and started organizing as a company and looking towards maybe going on the stock exchange because, in Canada, that is a very common way to raise venture capital. By the fall, we did our GenZeroes drop 10,000 of those, raised about $5.5 million in about 40 minutes. It was very popular. We started developing a backstory behind the GenZeroes. This is where it is evolved to, this GenZeroes live-action TV series. We did take the company public, Looking Glass Labs. That is the parent company of House Of Kibaa.
It is trading on the primary tech exchange in Canada called the NEO. If we want to do mergers and acquisitions down the road, we have built up a legacy there. We can go and raise money rapidly if we want to, let’s say, buy a movie studio or a 3D effects house. It is a land grab in the 3D world, which is warehouse keyboards, all fully made averse ready 3D rendered, built an unreal engine five-ready. It is super high-rise stuff. All of our production is always that. If you want me to do Gutter Cat or Bored Ape Yacht Club we did contract work, it is all unreal engine-based.
GenZeroes NFT: People are trying to democratize entertainment. They are trying to get rid of the black box of finance for a movie or TV series.
It is a little bit of a sequitur but what about holograms? Where do they fit into the mix?
They are not yet. We have been talking about augmented reality, though, quite a bit, where you can hold up the phone and look at your screen. You will see your GenZero in 3D on the table, on the ground or whatever. We have been working on that.
It is an endless supply of potential NFT projects in this space and many exciting possibilities. How do you navigate the process of choosing what to do next in the space?
I always say that one day in the NFP space is 30 days in real business. The stuff keeps flying at us. I said on an investor call that we don’t even have a biz dev person working for us because the stuff keeps flying in. I’m talking about third-party requests for work. We are building the Gutter Mansion for Gutter Cat Gang. Stuff like that comes inbound to us. They say, “We would love for you guys to build this for us,” but now we have got too much of that. We get to pick the level stuff for the stuff. Our guys are excited about the stuff that we know isn’t going to take too many cycles or they are going to burn our crew or overload us.
Now we choose and pick for the third party work. For our own work, we are focused on the GenZeroes series and the NFTs around that. Each of the actors will have an NFT based around them and their half-robot look. Those will come out along with each drop of the show of the ten chapters. Our guys are working hard on that. We are working towards our land sale coming up so that is a big thing. That is a very different type of land sale than you have seen.
It is not this traditional top-down map thing. It is a very unique aspect to it, which is going to surprise a lot of people. After that, we have got our token coming out and that is for our Metaverse and plus our play-to-earn game. It is a GenZero battle game where you battle somebody else out there in the world with their GenZero, you get points and then eventually, you can enter tournaments and earn tokens by entering and winning those.
On the land side, there are a lot of other land projects out there. I’m sure you have looked at them and you are thinking about how you can differentiate. Could you talk a little bit about that briefly?
I don’t want to drop too much because it is extremely unique but one thing we focused heavily on was, I want to say, privacy but we want each person that has owns their land to be able to control it. We don’t want it to be full of trolls and people doing crazy stuff. For lack of better words, we almost want there to be an allow list for your land. You are going to have a lot more control over it.
Just roll the dice and go with it. Click To Tweet
Facebook has tried to solve this troll issue. They put a 2-meter boundary around your avatar so you can’t get groped. That was the story I read. We are trying to solve it in a different way where you can do an almost allow list for your space, you can say which wallet addresses are allowed to come and visit there or you can choose.
It is where you want to grow up.
It is chosen real thing. That is the B2C land. Us being the business, see the consumer, the individual buying their 4 acres or whatever is going to be then we will have a B2B land sale after that. That will be if Tesla wants to throw up a skyscraper and a racetrack. That is going to be a bit more interesting because I do believe that we are going to see an influx of real-world developers come onto that land that is B2C land. That is because they are probably going to be able to develop it in different segments and then sell segments of that B2C land. I’m probably giving away a bit too much but it is pretty unique.
Thank you for giving away a bit too much. We appreciate that. We will get more out of you but let’s put some pressure on Aleks. What got you pumped about doing projects in this space? What flipped the switch for you?
It is always about relationships for me and who the people are that are approaching me. Being in this industry, you get approached to do different types of projects and favors for projects, especially talking with Neil and Rick. Rick Dugdale, I can’t say enough about it but Neil Stephenson is the man that is the one that got me on the project to executive produce and got the team together to build what we have built with GenZeroes. The idea of what made it interesting to me, what attracted me to it is I feel like I build my brand in more of an aspect of the audience and community. I love being on Twitter and talking to them.
I’m not a big cameo guy because I just love sending videos to the fans that are asking for a birthday wish here and there. I love connecting in that way. Even on set, that to me is keeping the levels up high and enjoying the work that we are doing. I feel like when you enjoy the work that you are doing, the creativity opens up that much more.
With the NFT space, the idea is that it is artist-driven and we can control the product we want to put out there with the consumer’s help, guiding us in those ways and having them being a part of it. I do a lot of sci-fi films in television and they are the most devoted fan base in the entertainment industry. That is why stuff like Comi-Con are such huge hits because they are so passionate fans.
For us to be doing a sci-fi show in the NFT platform and as opposed to in the Comi-Cons now, people get excited to go dress up as their favorite character like a Star Wars character then they meet someone. That is basically the boundary between the fan and the artist. In this space, we are doing this together. We are a community and a team.
We are trying to build something and we are getting feedback on it. We were able to give it back and tenfold in many different branches of the tree to the consumer, fan and fractional ownership of it. That drives me. That makes that fun for us because a lot of series work is done through a corporate office and people that have not been on the ground floor.
GenZeroes NFT: With NFT, it’s not just the actors that get to make some money and have fans; the artists, set designers, and production staff can also be a part of it.
There have been many times I have seen pilots or have read pilots and watched pilots, been a part of pilots that you are sitting there going, “This is going to go. How can this not go? This is such an amazing show.” For some reason, in the head top of the office, where jobs get switched, they drop the projects and bringing in their own projects and an amazing show can just literally get lost in the ether like that. With this aspect of it, we have control of how far and how deep we want to take a show. That is all to the credit of the audience in the community, helping us make those decisions.
I happened to be watching a documentary about rested development. It is one of those shows which holds its very interesting place among the corporate structure or rating structure around shows how that all gets developed. One of the things they are highlighting in the documentary was the intensity of the people who were watching or die-hard fans. The people that were creating it were passionate about what they were creating. It is interesting to think about what they might do in the NFT space. I wonder if they are cooking something up. We’ll have to get some intel.
I could add on to what Aleks said, specifically referencing a guardian article that came out about our GenZeroes series after Deadline broke the original announcement of the series coming up.
That was such an interesting thing because Deadline is a very hard publication to get into because it is only specific Hollywood announcements that happened on everything. We did two Deadline articles, which alone is a hard thing to get because there are many productions that want to get in there but both articles went viral, not because of who was a part of it, more or less but it was a part of the NFT platform with the sci-fi live-action community. We were in the Uganda Tribune. There were over 200 publications that picked up both those deadline articles and it went viral, which goes to show you that the world is ready for something very cool to happen in this space with sci-fi and live-action.
The Deadline thing was interesting, especially going viral. The Guardian newspaper in the UK picked it up and they wrote their own version of it. In the first paragraph, I believe they say something and I’m paraphrasing here like, “This might be the most important TV series ever made or the most important digital series ever made.” The reason is because, at the end of the day, we are trying to democratize entertainment.
We are trying to get rid of the black box of finance of a movie or TV series but no one knows what’s going on except the highest-level executives. I wonder where the cash is going, why there’s no profit or what’s happened to it. This is on the blockchain. We are selling NFTs to finance these pre-pilots instead of us showing up in Hollywood with a script in hand and some ideas, maybe a whiteboard saying, “This is what we want to build. Will you give us money?”
We are showing up with essentially pre-pilots already filmed professional actors, professional directors and writers that have worked on a lot of major projects, not of named projects. We are going to say, “These are series so far. How do you guys like it? Would you be interested in licensing it from us or buying an office?”
The cool thing about that is you go in and pitch a show. You could have your pitch deck and the guy pitching the show telling you how you got five seasons all planned out and then you literally have the boardroom making the decision going, “That is a pretty good idea. Let’s roll the dice and go with it.” Now what we are being able to do is not only showing them content and giving them the five-year plan of it but we are showing them the content, the five-year plan and the community that has backed it up and has put their ownership on it and wanting to be a part of it.
It is almost like how deep Game of Thrones got with many people wanting not only to follow the series and can’t wait for it but how is even the cosplay happens. We are being able to walk into a boardroom now and go, “Not only are we at this point and these are the actors that are a part of it,” as opposed to headshots saying that we could, could get these guys but the community that has pushed it because they believed in it also.
This is new Hollywood. Old Hollywood has developed scripts and how they did it for years and decades. Now we are literally on that break the way the web media started happening where no one ever thought they would watch a TV show on the internet, “What does that mean?” Now all these things are streaming and they are even making theaters such as Netflix theater. That kind of idea. We are on that brink where everyone is super confident that the NFT world is not going to go anywhere. What I love about it is it is artist-driven but just not for the actors.
For instance, when we were shooting, our wardrobe department and costume designer made these amazing costumes. They drew it out and showed us what it was. Our set designer drew the sets out. Those themselves can become NFTs to benefit the artists, as in the costume designer and the set designer. That, to me is so empowering and giving that now these creative people don’t just get to see them up there and the actor gets the accolades. They get to make some money and have fans of costumes, art and production design be a part of it.
There was a fabricated weapon. It was part of the one show. We looked at it and went, “That is an amazing look.” We talked about how it was made and about potentially selling the 3D printing model as an NFT. If you are a cosplayer and you want to print that weapon out or take it to Comic-Con. We also talked about selling NFTs for the actual physical item as well. It goes on and on but the crazy part about it is what we are doing here is we are pre-financing these pre pilots or the short pilots.
It sounds like an insane proposition for a full-length movie but isn’t. If you go and turn this into a full-length movie, we have already got the House of Kibaa audience plus we have got of those actors’ fans, the big fan base, “Two million social media on this account. Three million on this one.” We have got their Comic-Con audience that is fanatic. They are all going to come along for the ride. That is how we are able to do this on such a very low budget but we are able to pre-finance it, which is quite a twist.
Let’s do it.
Aleks, how about you?
Aleks, how about you?
Aleks, how about you?
To make sure he knows it is my turn.
Aleks, how about you?
I was hoping to sleep in but that didn’t happen.
I’m going to go to sleep.
I am moving. I’m going home to pack.
The studio did a DMCA on them.
He got sued or DMCA. I don’t know 1 of the 2.
Why? Because it wasn’t as film anymore?
It wasn’t his film.
Maybe somebody should do some Web3 TV shows.
Who was it?
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Thank you so much.
Important Links:
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IMDb – Aleks Paunovic
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Tor Bair – Past Episode
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@AleksPaun – Instagram
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Twitter – Aleks Paunovic
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Facebook – Aleks Paunovic
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Spotify – Edge of NFT Podcast
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iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
About Dorian Banks
Mr. Banks is an international serial entrepreneur, having started dozens of businesses in Europe, Africa, Asia and North and South America. For over 25 years, he has primarily worked in the tech, agri-tech and blockchain sectors. Mr. Banks primarily works to identify up-and-coming trends, develop a business model and turn the idea into a successful business.
He has also consulted globally on the sectors he has most expertise. Mr. Banks has served on over a dozen public Boards and taken his own startups to the public markets such as MetroBridge Networks which he started as a one-man operation. He also has served in larger corporations such as Chief Knowledge Officer of Voith GmbH in Germany. He continues as Managing Director of Design Build Research, a non-profit educating around sustainable building practices.