Testing the Waters
A pilot for one of the many stories in Frogland
Frogland is a land of abundance. Ideas and dreams, hopes and plans all take root in our ecosystem, fed by the passion of our community, the knowledge and skills of our team — and watered with plenty of blood, sweat, and tears. However, those IRL resources are finite. To ensure the appropriate allocation of resources, the Frog Team endeavors to test, iterate, and fail fast with all that we do. The ideas with the most traction within our community — both for growth and retention — are the ones that should be nurtured and fed, following the path to a larger pool of resources and the capacity for more.
Okay — I bought my ‘Grow-A-Frog’ kit. Now what?
One of most consistent pieces of feedback that we’ve heard from newcomers and our community — both active and inactive — is how massive and overwhelming Frogland can be, especially the lore. Not only a fair opinion but an accurate one. Even internally we can get a little lost between what was tossed around or ideated, what became canon, and where each of the hundreds to thousands of community stories and interactions fit — both with each other and into what we’ve created.
Capturing, tracking, and weaving the myriad of stories, ideas, and lives of our Notorious Frogs’ characters into a single, harmonious world is not a small job, nor an easy task — but the importance of doing so is paramount.
By virtue of being an active participant in web3 — skating along the bleeding edge of technological development and shoved forward by the socio-economic renaissance — one could say that the efforts we’ve put forth to capture and catalog all of the contributed data are simply what is expected of us. That is, after all, what the leading projects in the space promised incoming users: “develop your own IP as part of our brand”; “learn how to monetize your ideas, your art, your NFTs, your IP”; “participate and bring value to the brand so we can bring value back to you (but our NFTs aren’t a security — don’t @ me, SEC).”
But how many have delivered on that promise? And that’s not throwing shade — simply the reality of the situation. Teams received a massive influx of funding from minting and used it according to the skills, experience, and predictions they could make with the knowledge and intentions (good or bad) they had, with varying levels and definitions of success.
It’s incredibly complex to manage a single company’s brand, IP, communications, and growth — let alone trying to capture and assist the development of several thousand community members’ brands, IP, and content. And, for Frogland, not just capture but weave the individual stories together within the company’s brand to form a single, harmonious stamp — the vibe by which we are each recognizable as part of a collective unit, a community — without losing the individuality of our members or the importance of their impact on our world.
Branding, while necessary for concise product recognition and thus revenue, can present a tendency to remove the outward individuality of users — to describe anyone under a brand’s umbrella as one of the faceless many, “one of those types”. When so much of our vibe, our stamp, our brand rests on the easy recognition of individual community members and their IP within our world, the production of content that supports our ethos must be a priority.
By utilizing the serial drama as a targeted medium to build our collective brand authenticity; engage and empower our community members; and produce consumable long-form entertainment, we create an accessible and compelling user experience in a story-rich world, full of inspiration and potential for more.
Step 1: fill tank with crystal clear expectations, then add a tadpole.
Build Brand Authenticity
Let’s revisit the ethos of Good Ribbit Productions — a refresher for those who may know and an introduction for those who may not — as our vision and future is as strongly rooted in web3 as our experience and past is in web2.
The founders of Good Ribbit Productions have always seen the concept and the technologies that comprise Web3 as a pivotal moment in history, one where the users of technology become the beneficiary of social change — not simply the consumers for a centralized system based on one-way financial flow and extraction of personal data. This newer world has to be built to guarantee original attribution, enable a system of tokenized royalties, and allow contributory or derivative work to propagate in other manifestations envisioned by those who want to use it as a component in their own creations.
Working in the open and with our community, we’ve committed ourselves to a path centered around co-creation, around elevating and empowering artists, builders, and creators. The gardens of opportunity should not live behind walls of privilege and affluence, but open to all who chase a dream down the path of inspiration.
As a Web3 production company, entertainment and engagement must be built around the idea that the audience is not just a consumer, not just a spectator who paid for a ticket, but an active participant who needs to be a beneficiary of the world they support and help form. As we build the tools, infrastructure, bridges, and production pipelines necessary to weave user generated content into the fabric of the lore-rich and gamified metaverse, our community has tokenized access to all of our resources, knowledge, and skills. Combined with the verifiable ownership over their IP, assets, and data, the metaverse will present a harmonious user experience across multiple platforms, engines, and chains where attribution is automatic, confirmation is instant, and participation is trustlessly verifiable.
Now that’s a mouthful — but if you break it down, our ethos for the way we’re building our lore-rich, gamified metaverse comes down to three key points:
- Utilize blockchain-based tech for membership, attribution, and royalties for our community members and contributors.
- Build decentralized tools, pipelines, platforms, and skills for our community to leverage, and open source the codebase.
- Educate, elevate, and empower our community’s artists, musicians, and creators to use our production pipelines to build and connect with their fans and communities.
Even simplified, it’s still a very grand and complex ethos, one that will take years to fully execute — which brings us to the pilot of our serial drama.
Step 2: Add props and set dec so the tadpole feels at home.
Engage & Empower
The Frogland serial drama sprung from humble origins — originally intended as a small project to add some narrative content to the radio in the Dragonfly and other audio integrations, the idea quickly proved suitable for much more.
A true representation of co-creation, the serial drama has it all. Nineteen different people had a hand in this creation: 5 members of the Frog Team, and 14 members of the Frogland community. 6 people took part in the “hands off” phase: the ideation and gameplay where the idea, story, characters, and content was created. 13 people took part in the “hands on” phase: where the ideas, story, characters, and IP were pushed through the Frogland production pipeline and transformed the intangible to tangible, where the IP, story, and fun can be consumed by others.
First, a massive thank you to everyfrog who contributed in all forms to this production. This is the comprehensive list of all contributors and contributions to the pilot and teasers.*
- Storyline developed by Bugs for the inaugural Frog Role Playing Game (FRPG) in September 2021. (Frog Team)
- Gameplay and character interactions created and shepherded by Timefrog during the actual FRPG gameplay. (Community)
- The characters of Croak McFrogchain, The Mad Frogger, Sir Croaksalot, Frog Capone, created by Brock McBlockchain, Orion, Cryptonite, and Wils, respectively, and the choices they made for their characters through the gameplay. (4 Community)
- The adaptation of the gameplay to a script written by Lollihops. (Frog Team)
- The vocal talents of Horny the Toad, Callista Croak-Heart, Bullish Frog, MotherFrogger, Barefoot, Danicus Prime, and Gamabunta, some as more than one character. (6 Community and 1 Frog Team)
- The audio and musical directing, editing, mixing, and mastering by Ribbert301. (Frog Team)
- The visual still frames created by Frogzilla. (Frog Team)
- Hazer’s use of an Ai to massage some of Frogzilla’s imagery. (Community)
- The visuals for the LSD ad created by Donkey Frog. (Community)
- The KHOP radio recording in the second teaser from LeighLeaps. (Community)
- The animation, editing, and production by Lollihops. (Frog Team)
A proof-of-concept for our production studio, the serial drama hits every point of our ethos and vision at our current scale. Additionally, the framework and pipelines we’ve developed while doing so provides the structure and groundwork to iterate and scale. From start to finish, this shows how IP can be created collaboratively from people with all kinds of backgrounds, talents, and engagement style — from simply suggesting ideas; playing a game with friends (or soon-to-be friends); writing a character’s backstory; creating visual art, music, or audio; using AI to fine tune existing works; voice acting; animating; video editing; audio engineering…
By utilizing our community’s wide range of passions, natural talents, and learned skills present in their contributions, we achieve true decentralization of creation — all captured for verifiable attribution to the NFT character/holder who contributed.
Step 3: invite friends over and enjoy your new frog friend!
Movie Night, Anyone?
Storytelling has shaped the world for eons — but as the tools with which to create and tell stories have become more fantastic, so too has the distance grown between access to the tools and those wishing to use them. By bringing these individual creations to life and weaving them together into an easily consumable story, we enable far more people to experience the same fun, the same emotions, the same mystery, adventure, and magic that the originators created and felt themselves.
Especially with the current hot topics of ‘AI as a tool’ vs ‘AI as an independent creator’; VR/AR allowing deeper immersion in technology/metaverse; and the decentralized and open values of web1 and web3 vs the conglomerate-run web2, this type of creation fits our ethos. With decentralized co-creation, we produce value for our contributors, our community members, our gamers, and those who want to consume the media we create. Combined with the rapidly evolving technology, we can stay abreast of the latest and greatest breakthroughs, while continuing to highlight the importance of human connections, interactions, creativity, and choice.
By unifying the efforts of many contributors, mediums, and tools, we are able to empower creators on a scale that is finally proportional to the ubiquitous technology.
Most importantly, we believe this is the first step towards utilizing cutting edge technology for a social movement to improve the understanding of each other on the level of human connection from shared experience — even if that shared experience is wrapped in goofy characters, gameplay, and a magical, unreal world.
Notes
*Characters and contributors are described by their Notoriously Froggy nicknames, with the exception of using the twitter handles of those who created a character but did not play their character in the serial drama.
** For any who have not yet seen the serial drama, here is the visible link: https://youtu.be/CP2u5TsYQqo
