Today film-maker Dan Hartley has launched a new website which will give film fans the opportunity to purchase unique film frames as NFTs.
His production company Rogue Runner, who are behind the lock-down sleeper hit Lad: A Yorkshire Story, has today confirmed that all 130,000 frames of their film will be available to be purchased as NFTs via the new platform, Rubric.
This is the first time that fans will have the opportunity to own a piece of celluloid history and then be able to trade these assets as their rarity increases their value. This is also the first time that an entire film has been made available in this way and each frame sold will be uniquely numbered and only one copy will ever exist.
The film itself, Lad: A Yorkshire Story, which was released in 2013, was overlooked by distributors upon its initial release and became a sleeper hit in 2021 when it was released through Amazon Prime, gathering over 500,000 streams to date.
WHAT IS AN NFT?
In economics, a fungible asset is something with units that can be readily interchanged – like money.
With money, you can swap a £10 note for two £5 notes and it will have the same value.
However, if something is non-fungible, this is impossible – it means it has unique properties so it can’t be interchanged with something else.
It could be a house, or a painting such as the Mona Lisa, which is one of a kind. You can take a photo of the painting or buy a print but there will only ever be one original painting.
NFTs are “one-of-a-kind” assets in the digital world that can be bought and sold like any other piece of property, but which have no tangible form of their own.
The digital tokens can be thought of as certificates of ownership for virtual or physical assets.
Film-maker Dan Hartley was delighted to announce the launch of Rubric, saying:
“What we’re seeing in film-making is exactly that which we saw in the music industry, in which the tiny percentages shared by the streaming giants mean only the biggest actors can survive, so we want to broaden the options available to the film-maker by giving them a platform to create their own merchandise so that smaller more personal stores can continue to thrive.”
“The aim of Rubric is two-fold; To empower content creators to keep ownership of their media as part of a new revenue stream and to give audiences the opportunity to become stakeholders in films they love and to then have the opportunity to trade these assets as rare and unique collectibles.”
‘”I see NFT’s as a huge game changer in the industry, on the same scale as home video and I think they will start to play a prominent role in the way that films are funded and distributed and I want Rubric to be at the forefront of that.”
 Lad: A Yorkshire Story will be coming to My5 early 2022 and NFT film frames are available to purchase at rubric.media
Dan Hartley Biography:
Dan was born and raised in the Yorkshire Dales and attended the local comprehensive school in Settle, North Yorkshire.
In 1999 after graduating Newcastle University with a law degree, Dan was hired as a trainee in the video department on Harry Potter and subsequently rose to the position of video assist operator and set editor where he continued to work over the following decade,
As such he was responsible for providing the ‘first cut’ of many famous action set pieces from Quidditch flights to Dragon fights and the Knight bus chase, before leaving the franchise to work on a number of high profile studio films including Star Wars, Spider-Man, Dr Strange and two films with director Ridley Scott.
Alongside his work as a crew member Dan had early success with his first short film Love You, Joseff Hughes, which was nominated for a BAFTA Cymru and made his progression to feature film with multiple festival award winning debut Lad : A Yorkshire Story.
After being rejected by every distributor in the UK Lad was eventually self-distributed by Dan and made the headlines in 2021 when it became a pandemic hit on Amazon Prime with over 500,000 streams and the higest IMDB rating of any debut feature film.
Dan is now developing a reality TV show starring the lead actor from Lad alongside a Sci-Fi TV series and several documentaries.
Dan is a father of two and lives in Buckinghamshire.
