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NFTLA Live Twitter Space: An Inside Look At Signature Experiences By Autograph With Dillon Rosenblatt And Ryan McMahill

NFTLA Live Twitter Space: An Inside Look At Signature Experiences By Autograph With Dillon Rosenblatt And Ryan McMahill

NFT NFTLA | Dynamic NFTs

Entertainment is becoming less about watching and more about interaction, all thanks to the power of NFTs. With dynamic NFTs, fandoms and collectors are now beginning to enjoy utility-packed and community-driven experiences. In this NFTLA Live Twitter Space discussion, Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger talk to those at the forefront of this exciting evolution: Dillon Rosenblatt and Ryan McMahill of Autograph. They discuss their dynamic NFT offer Signature Experiences that gives sports fans a unique chance to connect with their favorite athletes. Dillon and Ryan explain how they produce NFT collectibles that immortalize sports legend Tom Brady, which includes real-time analytics, statistics, and even a photorealistic 3D scan of his body.

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NFTLA Live Twitter Space: An Inside Look At Signature Experiences By Autograph With Dillon Rosenblatt And Ryan McMahill

Welcome to this special Twitter Spaces session of the show. We’re also producers of NFTLA. That’s an event that leverages the entertainment and sports scene of Los Angeles for an experience that fosters curiosity, connection, and co-creation. That’s why we’re hosting this very special NFTLA-focused Twitter Spaces event. We’re joined by Dillon Rosenblatt, the Cofounder and CEO of Autograph, and Ryan McMahill, Head of Creative at Autograph. If you’re not familiar with Autograph, it is an NFT platform that brings together the most iconic brands and legendary names in sports, entertainment, and culture to create unique digital collections and experiences to better connect fans to the things they love.

Their partnership and advisory group reads like a who’s who of brands and people that move the needle, including DraftKings, Lionsgate, Sam Bankman-Fried, The Weeknd, Tony Hawk, Tiger Woods, and many more. Welcome, everyone that’s here. Welcome to our guests, Ryan and Dillon. Let’s start with a quick intro around the horn and a little background on each guest. Let’s tell us a little bit about you, Dillon. Let’s start with you. Where are you coming from? What got you to this point?

In Autograph, it has been an amazing first year in business. We have cultivated a strong community and taken steps to make some of the most iconic names, athletes, and properties feel comfortable in Web3. Our journey is getting started, though. Our first year was centered around drops on DraftKings Marketplace and being able to curate interesting experiences for our community and things that would have otherwise been impossible without an NFT.

The reason that we’re here is to talk about how we’re bringing our community into the next chapter of fandom and helping to live up to our mission of building what the future of fandom should look like. It’s a hazy North Star now, but I believe it ends with having an experience where fans are no longer in a one-way conversation with their icons and the things they care about. They are more connected in a more real way to the actual partners and rewarded for the time and effort they spend. That’s a quick background on me. I’m happy to talk about where we have been and where we’re going as much as you would like.

It’s an incredible mission as someone who has been a fan and an entertainer in music and things like that. It’s a strong pull. People want that connection. It’s beautiful when you can build it. Those are the greatest artists and the greatest communities of fans.

I’m super excited to chat with you and follow up here. It’s great to have Ryan on as well. I wanted to give him a few seconds to give a little bit about his role and background and a bit of the history behind it.

I appreciate it. I’m super excited to be here. Dillon, I, and the entire Autograph team have been heads down looking at building the next generation of our product here. We’re super excited to talk through it. I got a call from Dillon to come on this wild ride with him. It has been crazy. We’re all aware of the experience of building something so brand new and fresh and learning every step along the way.

We’re excited to take those learnings and launch into the next phase of what this Autograph experience is like for our users. Dillon nailed it. We’re looking to marry this creative exploration of storytelling along some of these athletes, icons, seasons, and their lives. We connect them with their fans and users in a way that brings them along for the journey in much more than that one-sided relationship that we all experience while watching sports from the comfort of our homes or even the seats in the stadium. We want to make a two-way conversation there.

It has been exciting figuring out how to revolutionize this fandom and this space in a way. My role there is to focus on leading the creative vision for those things and everything from the concept of the NFTs themselves. We’re going to talk a lot about the dynamic NFT that we’re excited to talk about all the way down to our new branding and that announcement. I’m proud of the team we have been able to build. I feel fortunate to work with some of the best producers, strategists, art directors, and 3D artists in the industry. That’s going to come through and shine when you see this next NFT.

You’re working with some incredible people. I love to call back what you said. Things are moving so fast. I was watching the trailer for what we’re going to talk about. I don’t know if we mentioned it yet so I won’t say what it’s called. The person who’s number one involved is watching that and being baffled and inspired by how quickly people are moving in the space and doing cool stuff.

It’s good to see you involved in that. I alluded to it. There’s so much goodness in the NFT world. It has been centered around sports-related ventures for some things. We look at NBA Top Shot. It was a huge mover when things got cooking here. Autograph has some killer releases worth talking about here. Tell us about Signature Experiences. Who wants to jump in and chat about that a little bit?

I’m happy to. This thing has been my, Ryan’s, and the whole Autograph team’s baby. The way that I like to think about it is this is a first-of-its-kind fan experience. None of it would have been possible without the existing community helping to get us to this idea and this concept that I believe stands apart and stands alone in the market.

If you think about NFTs that promise utility, the majority of roadmaps do. This packs a lot of the things that I believe the sports and memorabilia collectors have been craving all into one. The actual NFT is a dynamic NFT that takes you throughout the season with Tom as he goes and conquers different opponents. I won’t take the wind out of the sales there, though. I’ll let Ryan speak more about that because it’s his awesome work. I’m excited to announce also something that I believe is pretty rare.

That is such a big deal. You’re talking through it, but you said you’re riding along with Tom Brady through the season. This is going to be fascinating to get more details on. I want to put a pin in that because that is super revolutionary and exciting.

I appreciate that. Maybe now is a good time for Ryan to talk a little bit about the actual NFT that we’re putting so much work into, if that’s all right.

I’m super excited about it. Dillon has heard me and our team talk about it quite a bit since the beginning. A lot goes into building these things, as I’m sure some of us here are aware. We’re excited to have the foresight to be able to look into what it’s going to be. We’re all aware that every season at this point is a historic season for a man like Tom Brady, but it’s to be able to take a look at what’s going to unfold over the course of this next season and some records he’s going to be beating. People are obsessed with following this journey.

I get excited about telling that story visually through art in a way that’s going to find its way into these NFTs. Here’s a little bit of a teaser and a leak. The concept itself is to lay the foundation for the battles ahead for Tom and the Bucs. We’re trying to figure out how to create this story after every game, build a scene to commemorate whatever happened on Sunday night, Monday night, or Thursday night before, and bring those users along for the journey to visualize that.

We did a deep dive into the way that 21st-century football fan is experiencing their sports. We find everything down to the mechatronic mascots for broadcast football all the way down to real-life analytics. We wanted to bring a lot of that as a Web3 NFT company to the forefront along this journey and provide a lot of that data and that information.

If you think about NFTs that promise utility, the majority of roadmaps do. This packs a lot of the things that sports and memorabilia collectors have been craving all into one. Click To Tweet

Being so close to this stuff, it’s crazy when you look at Brady’s numbers and records next to anybody else around him. Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate how insane some of this stuff is. We wanted to make sure that data, those numbers, and all of these things inherent within this space find a way visually into this NFT as well in a beautiful artistic representation of what’s happening week by week throughout the season. After every game, you will get all his stats and all the information we can and present from there.

This is Josh jumping in as a long-time Brady fan who has followed his entire career. You can’t think of a better way to connect fans to a guy that has such a deep and rich history than what you are doing with all this utility. A year goes by fast. I think back to the original press release that went out that you were doing this, Dillon and Tom. For us, it’s on the moment because the early adopters always are doing the craziest stuff. The real building takes time. 2021 was about experimentation and exploration for the industry as a whole. I can’t think of any other project that has matched this type of utility in its totality. People have been trying to figure this out.

It has been great. Projects that launch in 1 or 2 weeks are still around. It’s incredible, but there has been some real building going on in the background like what you are doing here. It’s exciting. I was trying to refresh myself. Tom Brady joined the NFL in 2000, if I’m not mistaken. He has evolved, disrupted the game in a lot of ways, and kept fit over all those years, learning as he goes and evolving how he does things. You are applying the same thing, only it’s Web3. Everything is on fast-forward.

I’m feeling this interesting and unique experience of the wave of Web2 overlapping with the wave of Web3. I was excited about the wave of Web2 and maybe not as involved but what got me excited was these interactive web page things where you could take some data and do something cool with it. We’re seeing some of these shared bike systems. Citi Bike in New York City would publish your data.

You could take that data and create some cool visualization of all the bikes riding around the city of New York or something like that. It’s fun to see you breaking into the same type of taking data and doing something cool with it but engaging with NFTs in an interesting way. It takes it to a new level. It’s also fun. There’s a fun echo there of the way that tech moves.

Let me ask real quick because I don’t think we got into the full spectrum of the utility there. We want to geek out on the dynamic nature of the thing here for sure. Talk to us a little bit about that spectrum of utility. This is an amazing element you are tying in here. I wanted to try to elevate it. If you could give us some background on that a little bit more, that would be much appreciated.

I’ll go from table stakes to unique in that order. One thing for sure is that we are going to be having merchandise for all of our community as you’re welcomed into this program. Some of that is going to be designed in partnership with Tom’s brand, BRADY Brand. They brought in some of the most amazing designers and directors in the world. Between Ryan, his team, and that creative team at BRADY Brand, the community will be able to design some bespoke merch. I believe that’s going to be the second merch beat along the way as well. There are going to be community collaborations.

We made it unique, but every project says, “Merch is coming.” From there, there are going to be these unique NFTs that Ryan and his team are working on that are both rewarded for attending events, which we will get to, and also a combination of giving them for sale. The reason that we might want to sell some is that we can keep the quantity more scarce rather than having 2,500 for every single holder. We do think that these are records that deserve to be celebrated as well. We will bring them to this community exclusively and get them out in a variety of different ways.

This is probably a tie. The digital events are something I’m excited about. When I looked at our community experience overall, this defines the community experiences in the space across the board. I don’t want to overstep, but they’re in some way defined by the communities interacting with each other in Discord, on spaces, on Twitter, and all of the above. I started thinking, “How can you build a richer and more engaging community experience that scales as a utility?” That’s where we have built out the digital experiences on Autograph.io.

Whether it’s another project jumping board or for TB specifically, creators in his network are going to be announced, whether they’re fantasy football experts, people that love the Patriots or Buccaneers, or people that love Web3 and collecting. We’re going to have people coming on weekly in a token-gated environment to livestream and interact with our community. It’s a different way to engage with creators that scale no matter where anybody is in the world. We think that’s pretty unique compared to a lot of offerings we have seen in the space. It’s something that we’re proud of having built.

The last piece of the puzzle is the Brady IRL event. There are going to be three regional tailgates that a portion of the community will be able to attend, limited to 250 people. The reason why it’s not 2,500 is we thought four parties for 2,500 people in a span of however many months would be expensive and exhausting, but more than anything. We will do some regional tailgates for people in Boston, Tampa, and LA to meet up. Finally, there’s one big end-of-year bash for all token holders, which we’re excited about. All 2,500 holders will have access to this event, where Tom Brady himself is going to be in attendance.

We’re working on getting more exciting people to attend. We’re going to curate that experience and, along the way, take a lot of input from the community as to what that should look like. It’s a long list of utilities. There’s a lot of other stuff that we’re going to roll out that’s in a similar vein, but overall, I’m excited to have a highly curated, utility-packed experience for this community. I have to thank them because they have helped guide me in the right direction as to what to build for the product offering, which is a step towards the future of fandom.

Thank you for doing watch parties in LA. There are a ton of Patriots fans and Brady fans as a result in LA that have followed his whole career. Once you’re a Brady fan, you’re always a Brady fan, even when Brady changes teams. You are in LA. It’s great that you chose LA as one of the hubs for the fan experience. That’s exciting. Ryan, I would love to take a journey through your creative journey and geek out a little bit about the programmable nature of these dynamic NFTs, how you built that, and how Huddle is going to evolve the concept of a dynamic NFT.

Starting at the very beginning, here’s one of the things that I was always eager to do with Tom, a man like that has got a super busy schedule. He’s training to continue to be the greatest football player of all time. One of the things we wanted to do with him was to start with a full-body 3D scan of him. Our technology there has been incredible. We worked with a partner to complete this photorealistic capture and create this real-life model of Tom, which is the foundation of why we’re able to do what we’re able to do in such a quick turnaround.

We have this body scan in this eternal perpetual likeness of Tom with detailed form, color, and multimillion-point fidelity. That’s the foundation of what’s allowing us to move so quickly through this space. As you can imagine, building out the scenes that I’m describing now without that would probably take weeks and months for us to build, but to have this posable Tom Brady model started this for us. What we’re going to do is build a storyline of laying the foundation of where Tom and his team are going to travel over the course of his season and where they’re going to do battle.

We want to create this visual storytelling of Tom and his teammates taking on their opponents week by week within these different settings, whether it be Dallas for the opening of the season into games at home in Tampa Bay. We’re going to have unique environments every week that are going to be changed as well as unique scenes that are being built. The last few seasons of Tom are all historic.

We want to freeze some of those moments in time and create these visual and beautiful stories for people to remember this 10, 15, or 20 years from now forever on the blockchain to be able to look back at what happened week by week throughout this season for Tom. To tie it all off at the end, bring in that data and the real-time analytics, statistics that we’re able to bring, and potentially any records that he’s breaking, and bring those into the actual art and the NFTs themselves in a visual nature. It’s exciting and complex. It’s keeping me up at night for sure, but we’ve got an incredible team working on it. I can’t wait to show you how beautiful they all look.

I have this sense, like I did with Dillon earlier. With every little thing you say, I want to pause and say, “Let’s talk about that.” Interestingly, I made an interesting tie-in here. We did a recording of an episode with Collab.Land and Nuggets, which are working in the personal identity security space. I find that interesting because we’re talking about digital identity being a part of your identity.

NFT NFTLA | Dynamic NFTs

Dynamic NFTs: Dynamic NFs aim to marry the creative exploration of storytelling to connect athletes with their fans. This goes beyond the one-sided relationship from watching sports at home or in stadium seats.

It’s such a fascinating move forward to see somebody like Tom Brady creating a complete digital scan of his entire form and exploring what happens when you take your identity, extend it in that way into the metaverse and the Web3 space. Do these interesting analog things, which are going right alongside what’s going on in real life, and integrate the data. Data is another thing that we talked about in that episode. Some of it is ours and should be private and some should be public. We should own our data and have a more thoughtful relationship with it. This is all coming in here too. It’s fascinating.

I geek out over the data piece of all of this. As Dillon mentioned a few times, we’re still looking into where we continue to take this journey. We will always find ways to bring that into the foundation because it’s important in this space. If you look down to Fidenza and some of the high-end art pieces here, a lot of this intersection of technology, art, and this beauty is like, “How do you take that data, those numbers, or those zeros and ones and create color, life out of them, and any story?” That’s the reason I jumped into this company. That’s why we’re all super excited to wake up in the morning and work on those things.

We’re scratching the surface.

It depends on the week.

That’s a great thought. The space at large has tried a variety of different things to reward customer loyalty and continued fan loyalty. The way that we have looked at it is through our Collector’s Score. Everyone on Autograph.io that collects and connects their account to Autograph has a score that is calculated through their collection. We’re going to continue developing and refining that score and bringing in new aspects that are meaningful to fandom.

NFT NFTLA | Dynamic NFTs

Dillon, it’s Swaggy. I got this now.

We’ve got a question from 7 Rings.

NFT NFTLA | Dynamic NFTs

There’s some intel.

Check out Autograph.io to sign up or Autograph.io/TomBrady for the bespoke landing page. In summation, this dynamic NFT is leading to a first-of-its-kind fan experience in this space. I’m excited to provide a utility-packed and community-driven experience for our collectors to get them closer to Tom in an unprecedented way. We appreciate all of you. Thank you for having us.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks, everybody. We appreciate it.

Thanks, everyone.

Keep an eye on our socials for that winner.