Note: I’m posting for Fedja, as his Discourse account seems to be spam-blocked at the moment. He’s a promising young filmmaker I met in LA with a knack for storytelling, and would be a great addition to the Nouns creative community.
My name is Fedja, and I’m a Montenegrin recent USC graduate, writer, and filmmaker. I was introduced to Nouns by Euwyn (Noun #122 and #341), and fell enamored with the genuine sense of community I’ve observed so far. Nouns DAO is the first NFT culture I’ve found who have a serious intent to produce quality art in the real world, and who understand the importance of working together in supporting each other, artists, and creatives. I’d love to help share this perspective with more people.
Myself and a small team are planning on pitching a short-form video series tailored for social media, starring a Noun. The TL;DR: With an origin story of falling out of their owner’s laptop, the protagonist Noun will be animated in stop-motion style and film their own journey home. In time, we wish to grow the Noun’s social media presence into becoming a seemingly-living, breathing, social media influencer and character.
Below is a draft of the proposal I plan on posting, I’d love to hear your feedback and answer any questions you may have. Thanks!
This proposal is for 75 ETH to fund the first 3 episodes (each approximately 3-minutes long) designed to tell the story of Nouns to a broader community in a format tailored for views on Instagram Reels and Tiktok.
Why?
The media landscape for creative, short-form content is changing. Where YouTube was once the platform for short videos, the market is shifting in favor of Instagram Reels and TikTok. Instagram is largely replacing the core of their product with Reels, and TikTok overtook Facebook in less than two years. With this shift comes opportunity to establish a new, viral, creative series.
Allow us to introduce you to: The Noun. An animated Noun, fallen out of his owner’s laptop and finding himself lost in the real world. Starting with three videos, and hopefully expanding into an ongoing series, audiences worldwide will watch the charming, adorable, and sneakily snarky Noun overcome obstacles, find and lose love, and much more as he films his journey home.
Modernizing the mold of fictional personalities like Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, or Annoying Orange, we aim to make the Noun into a viral, memeable, sharable character with the potential of growing into a virtual celebrity. The intimacy of telling his story from his POV, with his phone camera, will build a lasting emotional relationship with his audience that will transfer into future projects. Whether it be longer YouTube videos, a TV series, or even his own feature film, people will follow the Noun wherever he goes — in the world or online.
This proposal is for the initial 3 episodes, eventually leading to an ongoing series.
Partnership with Nouns DAO
We would like to create a long-term character and narrative which integrates with the philosophy of Nouns DAO. Along the Noun’s journey, he will inevitably interact with other Nouns in the wild, and the narrative will lead towards an ultimate message of the value of community and collective voice.
Additionally, this will open an opportunity for more creatives to build and expand upon what would effectively become the Nouns Cinematic Universe. Other writers, animators, directors, with their own backgrounds, aesthetic styles, and manners of storytelling, can build upon the framework Noun sets and expand with their own Noun characters and stories.
We’re not only creating a viral character who will bring attention to the Nouns project, but a platform upon which like-minded creatives can find opportunities to build art.
Development
Pre-Production
6-8 weeks
-Writing
-Location scouting
-Establishing workflow for animation
-Voice actor casting
-The casting will likely be the longest part of pre-production. In building a series based around the personality of one protagonist, re-casting throughout the process will be a large disruption to the relationship built with the audience. We do it once, we do it right.
Production
6-8 weeks
-Filming
-Recording voice lines
-Animation
Post-Production
1-2 weeks
-Hiring social media marketing specialist to maximize likelihood of going viral
-Setting up digital marketing strategy (trending hashtags, etc)
-Deploying the videos
The Team
Who are we!? We’re (mostly) recent graduates out of LA and Austin, Texas, trying to carve our way creatively. With backgrounds in literature, screenwriting, film production, animation, and design, we’re coming together to build something not only with catchy style, but with weighted substance. We don’t just want to work with Nouns to make something — we believe we can make something great.
Fedja Celebic.
Producer, Writer, Director
Fedja is a USC graduate with a degree that spanned all mediums of writing and a Masters in Literary Editing and Publishing, and has found his creative satisfaction in screenwriting and producing. With previous work in development with Cinetic Media and consulting on a debut series with WildcatterLA, Fedja also has ample experience in filmmaking, having worked at Port Media for 6 years. He has various awards and shortlists for his creative writing.
James Bristow.
Lead Animator
James graduated from the Radio, Television, and Film program of UT Austin, with an emphasis in animation. Some of his brilliant character animation can be seen on his online portfolio. He is currently an Art Director with Midnight Kids Studios, and is the lead animator on Mars – an upcoming animated feature film by the Whitest Kids U’Know.
Euwyn Poon.
Executive Producer
Euwyn (Noun #122 and #341) is the founder and CEO of Micro, a holding company that builds and invests in Web3. He is an avid NFT collector and was one of the founding members of PleasrDAO. He previously co-founded Spin, which launched scooter sharing in the US and was acquired by Ford. Among other efforts at Spin, he led the marketing and design teams created the brand and YouTube content. He holds a computer science degree from Cornell University and a law degree from Cornell Law School, practicing at Simpson Thacher before moving to startups and getting funded by Y Combinator.
Note: These are very rough concept sketches, scrapped together by the writer of the group. We guarantee a higher quality of animation with the finished product, promising on a realistically-rendered 3D character.
. Starting with a single short makes sense, and I’ve scoped the proposal down to producing a single short for 25 ETH, which should give us the momentum to fund future work. With regards to virality, in writing the short we’ll have a strong focus on creating shareable, meme-able moments, and will look to engage the Nouns community to create derivative content to take up more space on the internet and proliferate Nouns. -