I admire the open-source nature of blender, especially the digital community that’s developed around it. I’m not a blender artist, although I’ve toyed around with the program for some 3D printing projects I worked on. It was enough exposure for me to understand how powerful the software was when combined with the community resources.

I am immersed in the blockchain world, it does for money and commercial interactions what blender does for digital artists. The blockchain is a digital tool that has barely been experimented with regarding how useful it can be to our economic lives. For obvious reasons the financial services have been the quickest to adopt it’s use, but it’s magic applies to almost every other aspect of our digital lives too.

The term Blockchain and what it does is very abstract, but that’s how I like to think. Probably why I am drawn to it so much. One of the ways I think the blockchain can improve our quality of life is by allowing geographically decentralized groups the ability to autonomously monetize content over time.

By the time that wordy and mind bending paragraph makes it into actual practice, it means a community like the Blender Artists Forum could create a platform which automatically assigned and distributed value for any project created within it. A feature length movie could be constructed in many small parts by many different people who were assured of earning a known portion of the movies earnings for the entire length of it’s existence.

To give an example of what that might look like, an artist who creates an awesome character as a part of his tutorial or education in graphical design could submit the file to the platforms library. If a another group wanting to create a video liked the character and featured it in their youtube series, the character’s artist would earn income from his model based on some preset equation. Maybe total character file size / movie file size x duration present in the movie = artists percentage of revenue from youtube monetization.

There was a specific reason I was thinking along these lines and specifically of the digital artist profession. There is so much crap television made for children that it’s almost disturbing. I have two children and I really wish there was better shows they could have access. Specifically, I wish there were well done animations of many of the old European fairy tales that are a part of my own heritage. Stories that big studios like Disney have severely altered to the point where they don’t contain the same deeper messages present in the originals.

So the basic structure of this Blender Blockchain I’ve been thinking on would start with an education class. An instructor with some amount of experience would be responsible for taking a less experienced group through the process of learning blender. Keeping in line with the original open-sourced software and community this could be a no cost class (using steemit students could actually earn some cryptocurrency through it). The only barrier to entry would be effort on behalf of the student and availability on behalf of the instructor.

The instructor would be a part of a larger project so they could direct the class to produce useful scenery and characters as they learn the program. These first characters and objects that are produced, along with all subsequent files used could be kept in an open sourced library as well. The coarse figures used in free youtube series could be taken and further refined to be used in more serious productions. Each member knowing they will receive income from their work as they build upon what’s freely available in the library.

Once the student shows sufficient competence, they are able to access the full design studio. Story developers, digital artists, and animators then collaborate to work on whichever productions they choose, each task or job along the way automatically assigned a value and paid out as the finished product began earning. Each job they complete adding to their reputation, experience, and becoming potential passive income for years.

What I’ve described is basically and open-sourced owner-less business. A place where people who desire to do work gather and are able to be productive without the overhead of an unproductive Boss, PR Department, Accounting Department, etc. This is one of the really beautiful aspects of the blockchain, it allows people to cut out a lot of the inefficiency in current economic models.

So I’ve laid out a bare bones concept of how the blockchain could be applied to a digital arts studio. There are many discussions and brainstorms needed to get an actual platform like this set up and working, but the ball is at least on the field now.

Does the Blender community see any value in this? I’d really enjoy developing the idea further with some people more experienced in the profession and with an understanding of the whole process of film creation.