A few years ago there was a lot of talk about how NFTs would change the film industry, for the most part it seems these notions have yet to be take hold, what has emerged however is a small group of filmmakers who have found success selling their work not as films- but as art. Though these pieces are usually referred to as art, when you consider them as films, their success becomes interesting for a different reason.
In this case, the terms film and art both fit, but there are very real reasons that most of these filmmakers have primarily opted for the term art to describe their work, and artists to describe themselves. People are not used to collecting films, but they are used to collecting art. Additionally, the term ‘art’ is a better frame to introduce an audience to these works- which are generally more abstract than films most are used to watching.
Due to their length (often between 30 seconds and a minute) these films are difficult to show via traditional means, but the same factors which make these films difficult for traditional distribution make them ideal for online distribution. The length of these filmmakers work fits comfortably within the limits of most social media platforms, with many opting to create an optical loop at the end of their films, taking advantage of platform’s autoplay defaults. These same features of autoplay and length limit are common to many NFT marketplaces, making these films fit comfortably in both places.
What has emerged is a completely new form of funding films- films are viewed by audiences on social media (not new), and supported by collectors on NFT platforms (new), disconnecting the act of experiencing the film from paying for it.
The result of this unique environment is a group of filmmakers creating short, punchy films at the furthest edge of their chosen technique. Here are a few (but by no means all) and their techniques, many of which are common in the film industry.
Joe Pease - Compositing
Joe’s work is a complete embrace of compositing, a technique that is nearly ubiquitous in feature filmmaking, though rarely noticed. Shooting separate figures and scenes, Pease weaves them together into a full tapestry, complete with echo printing and other artifacts of the compositing process.
Jake Fried - Hand-drawn Animation
Armed with ink, whiteout, and sometimes coffee, Jake Fried works in a technique now rarely found in major studios, creating rich hand-drawn animations, recognizable for their fast pace and monochrome style, dotted with common symbols of hands, eyes, and traces of technology.
Nikita Diakur - Simulation
Nikita’s aesthetics evoke the animatic and pre-vis stages of CGI heavy sequences in films. The exposed backgrounds and visible bounding boxes highlight the physics simulations at the center of his films. Watch Backflip, it’s amazing.
Diane Lindo - Stop Motion
Lindo’s videos have a rough feeling, built on found objects and handmade materials, and presented in a jarring, rapid format. The sporadic monologue, seen handwritten on paper throughout her films, provides a common thread between scenes, making them feel something like a visual poem.
Huw Messie - Embroidered Animation
(Mirror doesn’t support NFT embeds from tez so here’s a vimeo embed of Huw’s Self Stowage).
As far as I know, nothing like Huw’s technique of embroidered animation has been used prevalently in traditional filmmaking. This makes his work all the more singular, which despite the intense technical work necessary, feels handmade, complemented by his DIY method of sound design.
Conclusion
Whether called films or art, the social media distribution and digital support found by these artists has helped them explore further into their given styles, providing viewers the chance to see video work that is exciting and experimental, creating a landscape with an immense variety of aesthetics, nearly impossible to imagine in any other format.
I encourage you to check out more of these artists work, and send me more if you have examples!