(Ancient Greek and Hebrew)
The word bimah refers to an ancient elevated podium from which prophets and orators spoke. A literal and ornate platform used as a medium to socially explore ideas within the community.
This seemingly normal inanimate object became a medium of communication and creation based on the WAY it was intentionally used.
This interesting transformation of use and power happens more often than we address. In cinema we’ve see many stories express this idea of empowerment of Mystical and Mythological objects that are mundane and ordinary at first glance, Telephone Booths (Clark Kent Superman, Bill & Ted, and Doctor Who), Mystery Box (JJ Abrams), The Delorean (Back To The Future), Dorthy’s Ruby Slippers (Wizard of Oz) and most recently the Everything Bagel (Everything Everywhere All At Once).
So in its simplest form, a Bimah is just a soapbox the speaker stands upon to deliver their message, but in its most mystic state, it’s the platform from which the prophets spoke, the platform where philosophy was born, the place where everyone had a voice. The place where thoughts were spoken and ideas become reality.
A timeless communication portal.
What are we attempting to do with Bimah?
We want to speak to a universal truth. For us, and maybe you feel this way too, we all want our Jobs and Hobbies to be the same thing. We want to love what we do and do what we love while making a living doing it. We want to build a healthier world. We want to play and be entertained. We want to create and encourage creation. We want to do all of these things without being taken advantage of.
All of this in hopes of giving it utility or purpose. To us these concepts are universal and so we want to be very matter of fact about this because this should all just be easy. No one wants to push pencils or fill out unnecessary forms or slave to a job that eats away at your vitality. Everyone wants the opposite of that.
We want to encourage everyone to…
Do what you love
Have a story to tell
Contribute to something larger than yourselves
Create experiences
Share experiences
Play
Be playful
Lift one another up
Bring value to each other
Build a better / healthier world through direct connection
and Make a living while doing all of it.
Economic Philosophy
To make money, the system that’s been in place for over a hundred years extracts value from the communities instead of creating it and the financial system rewards this method of so-called value creation. Usually loans are given based on a business’s ability to extract wealth and not whether or not the company is making any positive contributions. Corporations are really good at accumulating money but are increasingly worse at deploying money, or making money with money.
This doesn’t really work for us or the new third web, peer to peer, networked economy, where value exchange comes from creating and circulating value. You don’t want to sell your business, you want to run your business and make money by doing your business. It shouldn’t be about taking value from others, it’s about promoting the value of activity on a distribution network. The saying “a rising tide lifts all boats in the harbor” comes to mind.
With Bimah we want to help bridge the peer to peer networked economy with the creative economy. We want to help facilitate economic activity by engaging and doing the activities, while making it just as easy and possible for others to contribute. We want to be a source of exchange and value creation while encouraging value creation through exchange.
We asked ourselves “If a peer-to-peer network economy is a decentralized model, where individuals buy and sell goods directly with each other, AND the creative economy is the interplay between creativity, ideas, IP, and technology, then by focusing on creative activities like architecture, art, culinary, design, film, music, gaming, etc.. couldn’t it be possible to design the infrastructure that encourages creative activity, that can fund artists directly, that expands the value and utility of created assets, promotes larger endeavors and ideas, while giving value and reward to participants in a fun / meaningful way?”
How?
Example 1: The Cinema Chapter.
Although this example applies to all types of creative endeavors and projects we will first focus on the film industry use case, because It takes a village to make a film. We challenge you to imagine beyond this single use case like we have and remember it is a single example that we will harp on during chapter one of bimah.
A film project happens to contain all types of different industry creatives that come together to form the whole. From visual artists, photographers, musicians, designers, performers, high fashion, to advertisers and distributors. They all participate in creating assets that ultimately form the big picture(pun intended) 🙂 So currently, in this Industry, we are seeing a lot of folks being taken advantage of. There is a disparity of pay between male and female actors, crew is usually paid per project and animators and VFX artists are overworked and underpaid while the studios and producers are profiting off all the hard work. If you are a large name it’s possible to get points or royalties but what about everyone else employed doing all the hard work? What about the audience that ultimately makes a project profitable? What do they get?
Through these questions and concerns we saw opportunity. What if there was a way to take these artists’ assets that are going to be produced anyways and create utility and funding mechanisms that can fund projects, pay artists, and give audience members a meaningful way to participate and engage with the medium?
Here is a short non-definitive list of potential assets we believe can be utilized not only to bring a project to fruition, but to also create a meaningful experience to all those who participate with the medium all while giving the artists and creatives their due.
ASSETS FROM COLLECTIBLES AND MERCHANDISE
Props
Storyboards
Scripts (Director Scripts, Actor Scripts)
Animation Cels
B-Roll
Visual Effects assets
Music
Score
Foley
Color Lookup Tables
MOVIE THEATER META-VERSE EXPERIENCE
Box Office ticket sales redeemable or usable in meta/irl.
Concession redeemable or useable in meta/irl (popcorn/soda to toss around the theater)
Film Festivals (FFF/TBUFF)
Movie Posters as NFT & B/NFT
Lobby Arcade (claw like arcade games that you can win real world items with)
Projection Booth (Secrets)
Secondary dive-in theater experience
Advertising Space
Coming Soon Posters
Movie Trailers
On screen commercials
IRL EXPERIENCES
Scavenger Hunt (META/IRL)
Promotional (rewards participants promoting a project)
OTHER
Early adopters collectables: rNFT (Perpetual Royalties for ANY holder of the R/NFTs)
Merchandise and Swag
Bimah is a new style of experiential NFT marketplace for web3 adventurers and storytellers. We hope you come and participate with us on this long and magical journey.
-chiefdegen.eth
