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Joel Cassady And Ross Venokur Of HolidayVerse Bring Us Global Holiday Spirit, Plus: Crypto Grow, Squirrelly Squirrels, WOTE Performance, And More...
There are so many cultural festivals and holidays around the world that not everyone can witness. But with the HolidayVerse, that may be possible. Join Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, Josh Kriger as they talk to Joel Cassady And Ross Venokur Of HolidayVerse. Joel is a member of the band, Walk Off The Earth and Ross is the co-founder of EDH Animation. Together they are bringing the first-ever film funded by NFTs, one frame at a time. Discover how they plan to show it in the HolidayVerse, a self-sustaining digital ecosystem. People get to share the holiday spirit with other people from around the world. Learn more about these ornamints and how the NFT community can help create the film. Plus, more about Crypto Grow, Squirrelly Squirrels, and a WOTE Performance. Embrace the holidays today in this episode of The Edge of NTFs.
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Joel Cassady And Ross Venokur Of HolidayVerse Bring Us Global Holiday Spirit, Plus: Crypto Grow, Squirrelly Squirrels, WOTE Performance, And More…
This episode features Joel Cassady and Ross Venokur. Let’s get a little bit about them each. Joel Cassady is a member of the band Walk Off The Earth, the hugely viral platinum-selling indie pop-rock group who have sold out headlining concerts in more than 50 countries and notched over a billion views on their YouTube channel alone. The members of WOTE are part of the founding team of The HolidayVerse, a metaverse that will aim to spread year-round holiday spirit through cultural education, inclusion, acceptance and awareness. They intended to commence production on The HolidayVerse movie Ornamental in early 2022.
Ross Venokur is a director of animated films and a writer of TV, film and children‘s books. Ross has written original pilots and screenplays for the likes of Disney, Fox, Warner Bros., Dreamworks, The Jim Henson company and trust me, many more. He has directed or is in process with CG films featuring the likes of Demi Lovato, Avril Lavigne, Jimmy O. Yang, John Cleese and many more of those as well. In early 2021, Ross was half of the team responsible for the John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge NFT, which was publicized all over the world. Ross is also the Cofounding Partner of EDH Animation Co-op, in production on the first fourteen-episode season of Walk Off The Earth in Space. Welcome.
Thank you for having us.
It’s great to be here.
I’ve been pumped about this episode.
Us too.
We have been emailing back and forth all kinds of fun ideas some of which our readers will get to experience a little later in the episode. Let’s dive right in. HolidayVerse is the first NFT to fund a film one frame at a time. It’s a super cool concept. Tell us about the origin story. How did this all come together?
Joel and the band Walk Off The Earth and I have had this great experience of getting to work together on this series called Walk Off The Earth in Space, which is an independently financed animated series. Along the way, stemming from some of the NFT stuff I did in 2021, I realized that in making animation, we are making thousands of digital JPEGs every day. We are making so much art. I had this thought about a cool way to finance a film independently, which has been a big driver of EDH.
We have been trying to get away from Hollywood, finance and distribute our own projects and create freedom for creators to sell the animated cels of a movie because people collect animation cels all the time. We have about 42,000 or more we will make in a 30-minute animated project. I went and talked to Joel about it. It turns out Joel was, unbeknownst to me, hardcore into the world of NFT. He’s savvy and he got excited. Together, we started talking and it blew up into The HolidayVerse. Joel, talk a little bit about that.
I had no idea that Ross had secretly been involved back in March of ’21 with John Cleese. It’s no big deal. Ross is the most humble guy ever. He has worked with the top of the top in Hollywood. He never talks about it so I’ll do it for him. He did this thing with John Cleese. That was his opportunity to get his feet wet in this wild and wonderful world. I had at the beginning of the year ’21 supported an artist that I love by the name of Daniel Arsham who’s a cool modern artist. I love everything he does from painting to sculpture and everything in between.
I had heard the three letters as we all had and a bit of the buzz. My point of relatability or moment of excitement was when I heard that the guy who I had been supporting for years was about to enter this space. That was back in January 2021. That started my journey off that I could speak more about. It’s getting the green light on this project called WOTE in Space, which was this multi-year journey that involved an augmented reality-powered comic book that we sold on tour and all this crazy stuff. Ross was chasing us around the globe and trying to convince us it would be a good idea to pitch this show. COVID or the pandemic hit and we had a chance to get that greenlit.
HolidayVerse: For writers, everything was changing and not for the better. The moment you are lucky enough to get financed, you become a work-for-hire on your own project. You no longer have creative control.
We’re putting our heads together and working on this show that has employed 100 people. It’s this thing where we jump on Zoom and do these recording sessions where someone is checking in from India. Someone is out in London, England. Here we are in the Toronto area. There’s Ross and his team either in California or in Washington State doing these sessions. He and I get chatting. It turns out he had written this kid’s book called Ornamental about a red ornament who gets thrown out with the Christmas tree and has to find his way back to Christmas by linking up with the mascots of other holidays throughout the calendar year to find his way back to Christmas.
At the time, he was already in talks with some major publishers to get that pushed out in a conventional way but because of the history of the band that I come from and the ways in which we have been able to sidestep big establishments over the years with record labels and a whole host of the big guys that are good at infringing upon IP and creativity, taking that away from artists and not being the only point of exchange. If you want to be heard and seen and be a star, you got to do this and that.
The band that I come from had a big moment where we put up a video on YouTube, which at the time was the best thing in town as far as this is the first era of about a few months after Justin Bieber, our buddy from down the road, had blown up on YouTube. This is an early phase one era of, “We can put stuff direct-to-fan up online and own our own YouTube channel. We can monetize that with Google AdSense and we don’t need to go to that big studio, financier or whatever it is.” That was a moment for us that we have held onto over the course of a total rollercoaster of a wild journey. It’s bringing that experience into my chats with Ross and him talking about EDH and how they started that company.
Ross, you should jump back in here. They started that company because they were sick of a lot of the similar stuff of having to jump through the Hollywood hoops and along the way have your art bastardized, pulled apart and become a shell of itself in the way that it was intended to be seen, heard and celebrated. Coming together with boots on the ground experience of what it’s like to have to play that game to a point but also having a little taste of what it’s like to sidestep that and try to find a way around that is what got us excited about this.
Ross, let me ask you this. These NFTs OrnaMints are aiming to disrupt and upend Hollywood. What has that meant to you? How do they allow holders to be part of the movie building process from the start to finish?
Disrupting Hollywood has become the mission. I’ve been part of Hollywood in different ways for years. I’ve had many great experiences but it started with the Writers Strike back in 2008 or so. I realized everything was changing and not necessarily for the better for writers. There were already no complaints. I had a lovely career. You constantly are creating. The moment you are lucky enough and fortunate enough to sell or get financed, you become essentially work for hire on your own project. You no longer have creative control.
Money gets involved. That costs something. There’s no such thing as free money. I had a couple of experiences in the animated world with the first two movies I made. It was great and fantastic. You have to make it but at the end of the day, it’s the same thing. The financiers can come in. It felt like these things take years to make. In the end, you get your teeth kicked in every time. The last movie Charming, which is on Netflix and is not my version of the movie, was written for my three daughters. It came out of the experience I had reading to them every night and raising them. It was personal to me.
That led to a dark moment at the end where I was like, “I’m never doing this again.” EDH was born out of that. My wife created it saying, “We need to create a place that will protect you and then you can keep doing the thing you love.” We quickly realized if we could protect me, we could protect all sorts of artists. Take for instance the Minions. The guy who designed the Minions and drew that little yellow guy the first time probably made $1,000 that week or something. That Minion has gone on to make billions of dollars. That artist has never seen another penny.
When we talk about disrupting Hollywood, the desires of EDH are so aligned with NFTs, which is to protect and give the artists continued revenue from their creations if it goes on and sells the royalty models and the smart contracts. It’s exciting for us. To answer your question about how it allows holders to participate, it aligns perfectly with that because when Joel and I got talking about what The HolidayVerse could be, it was such a natural fit. We didn’t even realize until a month later. Joel, did I ever tell you that EDH stands for Every Day is a Holiday?
It was a coincidence. We were already trying to form a company to get away from it. We started The HolidayVerse. The idea was, “WOTE had amazing success and benefited from technology but also from people helping them along the way. I’ve had much more behind closed doors success but always through mentorship and people helping. What if in addition to making a movie people, we make the movie people?” We have WOTE playing the four lead roles of the movie.
If you’re a token holder, we’re opening casting. If you want to be in a movie but you never had the opportunity, audition for our movie. It’s only open to token holders. We’re going to with the community decide who gets each part. We brought in our friend, Tara Strong, who’s the biggest voice actor in the world. She has played everyone. I have daughters. She’s Raven from Teen Titans, Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony and all the way back to the Rugrats and Inspector Gadget. She’s going to mentor you as a voice actor even though you’ve never done it before and voice direct you.
Being a star means big studios are going to infringe on your creativity and IP. Click To Tweet
We always thought the book follows the holidays from a Northern Hemisphere or North American point of view. It’s got Easter, New Year, St. Patrick’s Day and all the holidays we celebrate. People celebrate different holidays all over the world. What if instead of the second movie someone from the community tells us what holiday is important to them? We go, “You write and direct that story. We will support you.” We pass the mic. That’s where the involvement comes from.
It is fun to google what holidays are happening every day. We’ve got some big ones. Monday, February 7th, 2022 is National Fettuccine Alfredo Day. It’s also National Football Hangover Day. In addition to that, it’s Ballet Day and National Periodic Table Day. It’s Independence Day in Grenada and Constitution Day in Mexico. That gives us a sense of what’s possible here.
I have to follow up because this is so timely. We went to a Peruvian restaurant called Pisco. It turns out it was National Pisco Day a few days before that. Can you believe it?
On the topic of what Ross had mentioned, being a part of WOTE and getting a chance. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do is be Travis Barker from Blink-182. I got a chance to drop out of music school here in Toronto and get a chance to live my dream and the dream of so many people that I was in school with that don’t get a chance to do that.
More importantly, getting a chance to tour around the globe with Walk Off The Earth, meet people from all over Asia, Europe and everywhere we go, be immersed within their culture but also get a chance to be a part of their culture for that one night that we’re there when we bring these people together in this room and do these concerts has been a special and privileged experience.
It’s the idea of getting even a small glimpse of these world cultures. Realistically, I’m a White dude from North America. I’ve never had a good excuse to want to learn about Diwali, Kwanzaa or some of these cultural celebrations like the Korean Mud Festival and the Running of the Bulls. There are so many cool festivals around the world and celebrations.
What if there’s a way with this technology to bring people together for good and promote education and awareness of world cultures? I feel like the world is pretty divided. What if there’s a way to use this tech to bring people closer together and realize that along the way, in an authentic way, I’m not so different from that family that celebrates a different holiday because of where they live in the world or what they might believe?
We’re not that different. There’s a real opportunity here to create a safe space that shows people that amidst all this criticism of how people are going to be more glued to their screens than ever and how there are all these ways in which this is going to divide the world more. We see an opportunity to bring the world closer together with this technology.
That’s beautiful stuff. It’s something that I believe in for a long time. It’s exciting. We have team members helping out with these projects in India. It’s always fun to see them celebrating Diwali or something and see what it’s like. I wanted to go back a little bit to the utilities. We talked a lot about what could come out of this. I’m curious if there’s anything else you can share in terms of the utilities that these OrnaMints can offer.
Going into this, in crypto years, the months that we first started to think about this, decades have passed in crypto time since then, even at that time. Certainly, this is even more timely than ever. We’re coming from the Solana realm. There have been some awful rugs happening and not fun stuff. It’s stuff that, in addition to being an unfortunate thing in its own right is bad for the space at large. It tarnishes that reputation for all the folks on the sidelines and all the people that have only seen the environmental headlines, “It’s all a scam,” and all this stuff. That’s going to scare them off that much more. We dislike those.
In doing a pulse check on the space when Ross and I first got chatting, we saw a lot of people promising the world when it came to utility, “Buy our token. You’re part of this club. We’re all going to get rich and change the world together.” There’s not a whole lot of detail. Beyond that, there’s not a whole lot of follow-through on these big and grand visions and promises that a lot of the projects are doing whether or not that’s to do a quick cash grab and run for the hills or to dream big, get a bit of that initial revenue happening and then start to figure it out.
HolidayVerse: There are so many different cultural celebrations and festivals around the world. By using this movie tech, people can come together and promote these cultures. That people are not so different.
It was important to us to put ourselves on the hook from day one as a docs team and a team that is known in various capacities throughout the world to put ourselves on the hook. We’re going to make this movie. It’s going to happen within one calendar year, which is light speed for animation. We’re going to bring our token holders along every step of the way every month. We did our first one. We’re going to have a behind-the-scenes members-only Discord chat where we peel back a different curtain of the production process and the movie.
We did our initial one. In March 2022, it’s going to be Ross and the animation team. We’re storyboarding the movie. The following month, that would be me and my bandmates in Walk Off The Earth. We’re starting the movie and soundtrack in the movie to give people the experiential side of this space. It’s something that’s so unexplored. The space is dominated by people looking to flip, get rich and make money. That’s great. We all want to make money and do that.
When you think about talking to someone who has been through some rough stuff in the last few years and the moments in your life that you most enjoy, do you think about the ones where you flipped something that you bought for $100 or $1,000 or $10,000? Do you think about a super special experience? You were able to be part of a small group of people that were the first people to digitally crowdfund a movie on-chain, be it for this whole host of unique experiences, have this dynamic token that’s changing out throughout the whole thing, buy a smart contract and call yourself a coproducer and part of a movie that was the first one to be made in this way.
We think about that, not to discount the value that we think our tokens do have inherently. That’s more of me speaking to the fact that we have at a relatively slow manner kept it wide open and kept the community plugged in every step of the way. No one in the community is concerned. Had we blown our mint though, we would have been a little concerned about the people we were bringing on board because this is so opposite of the quick flip, the big investment play or the 100X play.
Much as we believe so strongly that it will be the case regardless of the lower adoption model, we can assign to the fact that this space is dominated by degens, which is great. That should never go away. The more experiential and value-first side of this and the more, “We’re real humans and you’re real humans. Let’s get together and make something truly special, collaborative and community-driven together,” is something that hasn’t been explored a whole lot yet. We certainly hope to be part of the reason why that changes.
To build for the long-term requires meaningful community involvement. Even in the short timeframe that NFTs have become part of the mainstream consciousness, the best ones are built around community. We see that forming this long-term relationship. Here’s a specific question about the community and its ability to contribute to the storytelling process. How does that work in practice?
From what we did, which was exciting, like some of these projects, we are learning every day so much like, “We had this great idea. Let’s involve the community. We’re going to release the script to them.” From my background, it sounds like a nightmare. Anyone can give notes on the screenplay but we wanted to do it because we wanted them to be part of the story. We realized we also are running a business. We have to protect intellectual property.
We had to go through a bunch of lawyering up to get terms and conditions. Everyone can comment but no one can later on shut down the project because, “I wrote that joke.” We went through all that, released the script to the token holders and opened the channel on the members-only Discord. They’re giving feedback and saying, “We love this and that. The ending is not working so great. How about this idea for the ending?” Right from the get-go, they’re part of the process and storytelling.
There are fettuccine and pisco sours for all.
**Enter Igor of Squirrelly Squirrels. Igor Denisov, Head of Corporate Dev for **Squirrel Wallet
Thanks, Jeff.
We will talk soon.
That one I did know about.
Important Links:
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@Squirrel_Wallet – Twitter
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Discord – Squirrelly Squirrels
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iTunes – Edge of NFT
About Joel Cassady
Joel is the drummer in the inimitable Canadian band, Walk Off The Earth. WOTE is a Canadian indie band formed in 2006 in Burlington, Ontario. The band´s first success came from covering the songs of The Gregory Brothers.