Session: Why The Future of Entertainment Will Be Web3 - PJ Accetturo, Battle Island

[Music] thank you [Music] I would like to invite to the stage uh PJ achaturo from Battle Island to take the next panel that's the next talk which is about why the future of entertainment will be web 3 uh PJs we have PJ in the room um I am a recovering YouTuber and teleprompter addict so if I look a little too much at uh my sort of script here it is in the interest of giving you guys really concise information I know your time's really valuable I don't want to run over for anything like that but I promise it's going to be an entertaining ride um so my name is PJ sotero I am the CEO of battle Island and I'm excited to share with you guys all the Innovative

things that we're doing with our upcoming series ghost of Ruin today I'm going to tell you guys my story of how a complete Outsider to Hollywood um came to the gaming industry and uh came to assemble some of Hollywood's best talent to make a new animated series about the future of gaming so on our team now we have a a Marvel showrunner we've got an oscar-nominated director we've got Emmy nominated producers and we've got an incredible cast including Rosario Dawson Tony revolory Michael Longfellow and we have a video game in development so this will be really relevant to you guys uh not even though we're a little more on the film side to begin with we're also working on a game and a lot of these same principles can be totally applied to your games as well by the end of this talk I I think you guys are really going to walk away with some good takeaways one of the because one of the biggest pain points that customers of video games and TV shows face is the big lag time between the development of a project in the beginning and the year or two or more until it's finally released

and so what I want to offer you guys today is a way to include the community in that process for day one and why your games or your films are going to be better off for it so before we get into the fun details of why our project's been so successful and we're really trying to innovate and you'll get some key takeaways from that I wanted to set the stage for how I got here it's a crazy story you'll find that reality is often Stranger Than Fiction and my story is certainly no difference so I grew up with a traumatic childhood and like many kids I turned to video games for support most specifically Pokemon Snap did anyone ever play Pokemon Snap when they were younger yes amazing game uh it taught me photography like it it really uh it offered an opportunity for me to explore that world and so I applied my photography skills that I learned in Pokemon Snap to real life subjects in developing world countries when I was growing up in high school my disbelief my work actually ended up in National Geographic when I was just 18 years old and it

kick-started my decade-long documentary career and along this incredible journey I met my wife Charlene who's here with us and she led me to do documentary work in Thailand and we volunteered at a non-profit um here we go yeah we've got some just really cool photography that I've taken over the year and we went to Thailand together and um I really loved it but at the same time you know every Creator wants to eventually create a video game a TV show and non-profit work candidly can really burn you out with the long hours so my big breakthrough moment came when one of my videos went viral on YouTube you see my dad was making videos on YouTube and one of the ones we'd worked on together went viral and we leveraged the success of it to turn his channel into one that makes memes tells stories and over the next six months we worked with some YouTubers specifically PewDiePie and together with

PewDiePie's help we reached a million subscribers in six months it was crazy but then the pandemic hit and we couldn't go out to film and I was trapped in my house for weeks playing Battle Royale games with my best friend Ryan and I asked why hadn't anyone made a movie about a battle royale video game like they were so popular and it really seemed like it would be a lot of fun and I was talking to my best friend Ryan you know we could set the movie in the future it would be about this awesome game in which like the gaming World turned into this kind of like nightmare tournaments that you know everything went wrong and so Ryan agreed and he's like yeah maybe we could spend the next year or two writing the first draft who knows what could happen and then a week later totally out of the blue one of my buddies told me that he knew a Chinese investor that wanted to finance an American movie and write off 40 million dollars before these years the years end for tax purposes couldn't make it up and he asked me hey do you know anyone with a blockbuster film script that could support this and I was

like yeah yeah I know the perfect script um it's almost finished yeah yeah I've been working on this for a long time um and he said cool can you send it to me in like a month I said no problem yeah it's almost already done so I called up my friend Ryan said Ryan we got four weeks to write this your game and so we wrote it it was crazy crazy and so I found my two partner producing Partners uh Michael and Katie and they had produced Emmy award-winning TV shows and they had heard that I had an overseas investor which is always what you are looking to hear when you are getting pitched uh Concepts is if if an investor is in hand so they frantically called around production companies with me to see who could handle a 40 million dollar Blockbuster and while I kept calling my buddy who's like yeah I'll connect you with WeChat I'll connect you like the you know the language thing's a problem but don't worry about it don't worry about it don't worry about it until it was New Year's Eve that year and I he

still hadn't heard from his friend so if anything in life turns sounds too good to be true it likely is but it got me to write the script and in January of 2021 Clubhouse was in full swing do you guys remember Clubhouse by chance oh yeah I mean at least in the film film industry it was huge and there were some big producers on it like uh you know writer of Jurassic world was on there I met him uh Tom Cruise's producer was on there and I was like you know maybe this is my new my next big shot and so Michael and Katie suggested I go in see if any of those producers um would be open to the script so I was pitching my film for two months straight in fact every room that I was in was an excuse to share the gospel of battle Island which I did every single day faithfully and it finally led me to a call with one of Tom Cruise's former producers he was an old Italian guy and I think he took the call out of pity just to get me to shut the hell up he said get I like your Moxie you're being so naive nobody takes risks on new ideas

in Hollywood and nobody takes big budget risks on Outsiders and nobody's like you so if you want to get your film made right a low budget horror film make it on the weekends but until one of the hits you're not gonna make it so just please get off Clubhouse and I did and it was really depressing and yeah I mean I I didn't think about movies I just like kind of played fortnite and cried and I was out of money I was out of ideas it was in this two years ago like it really wasn't that long ago um but it was like probably the darkest few months of my life I was about to lose my marriage I was a mess and then Facebook's big metaverse video Trend thing came out and it was all anyone would talk about in back in October of 2021 and we knew that our show could capitalize on this growing interest in virtual reality in the future of entertainment so I thought maybe if

there's some way for a project with no pre-existing IP to get made this could be the moment because our show is about all those similar themes so I heard about this big web 3 event in Miami and I used the last few dollars that I had to drive down there and give it one last shot now the conference kind of sucked for the most of it except for the very last speaker he was this guy named bit Bender wearing a Gala games t-shirt which I am now and he talked about how their web 3 gaming company had made a lot of money this last year and they were looking to Pivot and disrupt film next and I knew this was my guy but after the talk I couldn't find this guy anywhere and I was asking around I heard he was going to be at the most exclusive party that night now you could only get to this party if you were a big wig in the industry and I most certainly was not but I knew the general area he was going to be and I'd figured I'd figure out a plan along the way so I park my 2001 Honda Accord around the corner it's pretty much out of gas at this point I

have no almost no money to fill it back up and I found the backside of this like 15 million dollar estate basically now the gates are 20 feet high tall I try climb them I can't climb them I can't get in I've got this like black shirt on so I was like you know what maybe I can pretend to be a caterer get in through the entrance and then do like a James Bond costume change once I'm inside to act like I blend in at the party when while I'm debating the Tactical and legal ramifications of my one last shot of getting this movie made this brand new red Lambo pulls up next to me and inside this like super tan handsome Miami guy he's wearing all white and he goes yo you're a Bitcoin guy right I was like well more of an ethereum guy but yes I am here to party and he goes dude me too hop on in I think you're on the wrong side why don't you come in okay so I swear to God I jump in this guy's Lambo and we pull through these big gates in style just like this and the suicide doors raised we step out people are turning their heads everyone's like who are these guys the

Miami guys looking fresh I'm looking like a waiter but through all the fire breathers and trace of caviar I see the gallic games guy bit Bender I walk up to him and I say I heard you've been looking for films to launch in your platform I've got a film about the future of entertainment we explore the next generation of virtual reality where players go into this game with their minds in the world watches as a hundred of the top Pro Gamers enter into the first neural reality Battle Royale tournaments but this Rogue program up their and he goes I love it that's exactly what we want this that's exactly what we want on this platform I gotta pee really bad so if you just give me your business card I promise I'll reach out to you and then again next coming weeks I was like okay that's not gonna happen you know like okay no worries here you go and he calls me back a week later and in a few weeks I'm not kidding guys he funded our film Gala games is gonna make it and before I had time to celebrate they threw us two

curveballs first one is that they wanted it not as a live action movie because it was going to cost 40 million dollars and they didn't want to spend that it was going to be converted into an anime and second is they wanted a trailer for it in six weeks now this is like unheard of in film tap uh you know to go from nothing to having a trailer for it in six weeks but just like that Hollywood is a thing where you can chase a green light for years but instead of being able to celebrate you just get to panic because if you get what you want your problems just get 10 times bigger and that has happened at every stage of the process and it's been incredible but we had an incredible team and so in six weeks we had a trailer it's hard to see with the lights but you can see some of these frames here we gave it this kind of Japanese anime style meets you know our own you know Hollywood storytelling and the trailer turned out incredible they loved it and you know it's about these teenagers who go in this tournament but also about a mental health crisis

you know as well because when this character Aiden wakes up he wakes up in a mental health hospital and this is like the night before the tournament goes live for the world and so they're panicking wondering are we causing this to kids because everything they feel in the game feels like it's real so it's a kind of a mystery it's kind of a you know action adventure it's just a really fun show and after we barely completed this we knew we'd need a Hollywood veteran to take us through the actual writing of turning this into a show so we found Mike Ryan he's the legend who who created shows like Johnny Quest Powerpuff Girls Dexter's Laboratory Johnny Bravo uh Scooby-Doo Batman Marvel's Avengers like this is the legend and so we knew we needed him and so he spent months this last year on our script he was the one who helped set us up with the animation studio our oscar-nominated director and so as the start of this year we started producing the episodes and we've got an incredible cast like I said Rosario Dawson Tony revolory Hans Zimmer's bleeding fingers music is doing the store

and all of that backstory is crazy but you guys came to not learn about me or the project and you guys wanted some takeaways so I promise to give you them I want to give you them now let's dig into everything that has really worked out because as cool as this story is and cool as my backstory is the real interesting thing about our project is what we're doing with web 3 capabilities and why our community was involved in our project from day one so here let's talk about it all right what is web3 web3 is an all-encompassing term with a lot of buzzwords and I'm not here to talk about all the use cases I just want to share what's actually working for our project in many years in many ways the easiest way to frame the web3 aspect of our project is that it's like combining Kickstarter and patreon into a new platform it's like Kickstarter in the way that we had a launch page in December where we showed a trailer and we talked about the project it allowed people to pre-purchase the final product with exclusive rewards that won't be offered at any other time and membership to our project is included in four tiers kind of similar to patreon where you get exclusive access to content delivered on

a weekly basis so for instance you know this is on our website you get weekly production updates with the creators chances to appear in the show direct access to our creators and weekly voting polls to see what happens in the show so for the weekly voting each week the community gets the vote on character designs voice over performances and more and in this way they help shape the direction of the show appearance is on screen so there's even background character there's a lot of background characters in our show and some of them uh you know they're randomly created faces but we wanted to Showcase faces of our community on our characters on our screen and spoiler alert characters die in our show a lot of them and so we wanted our top tier members of our community to die in a gruesome way that makes them freak out and show all their friends and finally the last part that I'm most excited about about this process is our weekly 30 to 60 Minute production updates slash master classes

that we send to them so this is the bread and butter of what makes this project unlike anything else on the market I think and this is everything that I wanted as Creator growing up you see for months we've been recording weekly videos that explain everything that's going on in our production and also exclusive industry knowledge about a particular aspect of our show is getting made I've gotten conduct interviews with our Oscar and Emmy nominated team the community gets to ask questions they get unparalleled access to exclusive updates on our project like for instance last week I was just in LA and we went to Hans Zimmer's music studio we got to tour you know scene where he scored films like Inception and Interstellar and you know we've been able to show the community this is the team he's built here's the composers that are working on our project and here's how you guys can also have takeaways on how to create music for your own project or how to work with an amazing composers like Han Studio so by launching ghost to ruin as a web 3 project it has allowed us to build a

dedicated and engaged community that feels a sense of ownership in the project whether you guys are working on games or whether you guys are working on Films it's the same principles can be applied to you guys these fans are invested in our success not just financially but emotionally as well they feel like they're a part of the journey and their contributions have a real impact on the final product on our web 3 strategies also opened up new revenue streams for the project selling membership through this through digital Collectibles has allowed us to generate six figures of initial income in the first week we launched our project also it's provided our community with unique valuable digital assets that they can trade or could potentially accrue in value as our project gets more successful and by embracing web3 we've been able to create a project that's more transparent more collaborative and more empowering to our community it's allowed us to push the boundaries of traditional filmmaking and create an experience that are that really feels unique to our community like we couldn't have done it without them so what can

you guys learn from how we can approach reb3 to your projects embrace the power of community your audience is your biggest asset engage them involve them make them feel a part of the journey this will not only help your project secede but also create a passionate and loyal fan base who becomes evangelists for your projects be open to new tech and ideas don't be afraid to experiment with new platforms and Technologies be authentic and transparent share your journey with your audience my initially I thought my the audience would be you know think like oh this guy's an imposter he's never run a show before and trust me that was terrifying but the more I've talked about my my story with the audience the more they're like oh my gosh it's possible for me too that's what's made our audience really connect with our project so in conclusion our experience with web3 has been transformative not just for our project for us as creators and we really think that by embracing this new paradigm filmmakers game makers storytellers can create groundbreaking

work build passionate communities and ultimately change the face of entertainment with creators in mind in your audience's mind at the Forefront thank you guys so much and I love to answer questions that you guys have [Applause] oh there's a great talk very inspiring thank you um I had one question you mentioned uh I'm not I'm just starting to learn about web3 um a lot of the the stuff you were talking about in terms of rewards um kind of lends itself to like patreon style rewards where people are getting stuff every week or every month um are you doing stuff in subscription or is it like one-time purchase So currently we did it just as a one-time purchase but I I don't see any issues with a subscription model I think that's also a really great model yeah I'm doing a subscription now it's amazing yeah definitely regularly totally great do we uh have any other questions that was great it was really inspiring

as we said and um oh sorry was there was there yeah yeah great uh and fascinating how you kept the uh got the community involved and uh thank you thank you uh thank you again for the talk uh also very inspiring um you mentioned that uh web3 like using like blockchain was you know really pivotal and bigger product I guess like my question would be is um some of these aspects right like you could have not used blockchain I guess like why did you decide on using blockchain and what was kind of really the key difference of using blockchain versus not using blockchain yeah I mean a big draw initially was that Gala wants to have games film and music all as this kind of transmedia Enterprise and even have interoperable assets between their games their films and so we really like the cohesion of what we can do by releasing our film on there and then having those same digital assets be

blockchain assets for the games that we have kind of in development so yeah but you can do a lot of this similar model with Kickstarter patreon we just thought it was a little more vertically integrated by going with Gala yeah yeah fantastic thank you very much thank you guys so much I'll be around for any questions you guys have in the back [Music] [Applause] [Music]