KEEPER OF THE WEB3 INN
Julie carries a surname held in reverence in Hollywood. As Al Pacino’s daughter, it is no surprise that she’s a creative artist. Filmmaking runs in her veins. As an award-winning photographer and filmmaker, she’s turned to NFTs to self-fund her directorial debut film, ‘I Live Here Now’, by minting and selling pieces of her movie as NFTs.
She explains her web3 journey: “I entered the NFT space with that series of photos. They did really well, and then I got inspired to raise money for the movie in the NFT space with another collection called “Keepers of the Inn,” a more large-scale collection of 3,356 photos I took during the rehearsal process of that movie.”
Her genesis collection – “I Live Here Now” – sold out within three weeks. It became the first film to be funded by NFTs.
None of this could be made possible without the community. From a modest following pre-NFT days, she’s grown an active and supportive community on social media that has generated fantastic opportunities for this artist. “The community aspect has been so interesting to me. When I started in the space, I heard about ‘community’ and didn’t know what it meant. Now I get it, and I’ve been participating almost non-stop. It is so important.”
As it pertains to her film project, she says that the process has been incredibly fascinating. “While I set out to make a movie, what wound up happening was I created a brand. This community has turned this into a brand. It’s so much more than a movie: the movie is now just one component of all of these different things that we want to do under the “Keepers of the Inn” umbrella. Watching that develop has been a miracle and fulfilling as an artist.”
The web3 space has empowered Julie in a myriad number of ways. She explains that when she found the space, she took advantage of the fact that she could be herself and that it was ok to be herself. She found she could lean into her quirks and her sexuality and being queer. “I took ownership over those things, and I found that my voice as an artist has blossomed since doing so. It’s where I like to create my art, a place of vulnerability and openness – and that is what I can be 100% of the time in this space with my community.”