Rob McElhenney, co-creator and star of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “Mythic Quest” and owner of Wrexham AFC, has added another notch to his belt of titles: tech entrepreneur. Through his collaboration platform Adim and his short film “Cammy and Mike,” McElhenney and the Adim team hope to encourage creatives across the globe to work together to bring their ideas to life.
“We already have incredible distribution with traditional channels, as well as platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. They provide tons of opportunities for creators to build audiences and distribute content,” McElhenney said. “But what about building something new? Finding your Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton, Kaitlin Olson and Danny DeVito to make cool stuff with remains a major challenge,” he said, listing his “Sunny in Philadelphia” co-stars to illustrate what he sees as the work-sharing potential of the Adim platform.
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Co-founded and co-chaired by McElhenney, Adim is designed to provide filmmakers, artists, writers and podcasters an online platform to share their projects and staffing needs. Interested parties can then pitch their ideas to the project creators, who sift through the pitches and build their ideal team of collaborators.
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McElhenney emphasized that “storytelling is a long, collaborative process,” and said he “always felt that certain aspects could be improved.” By creating Adim, McElhenney hopes to make creative collaboration as accessible as possible and provide creators “the tools to launch, manage and monetize their projects.”
While officially soft-launching in 2022, the Adim team is issuing an official invitation to the platform July 9 with the release of their short film “Cammy and Mike,” which follows two alien robot filmmakers shooting a documentary about the animals of Earth.
McElhenney and his team conceived the CG animated short by asking 100 creators, “What is your favorite character and why?” The Adim developers broke into groups to create a range of potential characters based on the responses, eventually landing on “Cammy and Mike.”
“The responses blew us away,” McElhenney said. “It showed the depth of individual experiences with the beloved characters we see on the screen. We then modeled our virtual creator rooms on traditional ones, with each room lead giving prompts to develop characters and their backstories. Through an on-and-offline curation process, ‘Cammy and Mike’ was selected for further development.”
Following the premiere of the short, Adim users will be able to submit pitches for the future of “Cammy and Mike.” Those selected will be granted creative rights to the characters and encouraged to create content, products and media surrounding the IP. It’s a radical departure from the traditional entertainment industry focus on maintaining exclusive rights, full ownership and strict control of content assets, enforced by lawsuits when necessary. Adim embraces the open-source ethos found in the tech sector to spark a different approach to content creation.
“Our dream is to allow fans and friends of the IP to control its direction, growth, and monetization,” McElhenney said. “We hope this inspires new behavior around creative collaboration and fandom.”
(Pictured: “Cammy and Mike”)