Proposal: Create “Intro to Nouns” Video

NounsDAO NounsDAO Proposals
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TLDR: Create an “Intro To Nouns” 3-4 minute animated video explaining what Nouns are, how the protocol mechanics work and how new contributors can get involved.

Goal: To onboard people to Nouns and help them grasp the basics as quickly and clearly as possible. This video could be embedded at the top of the “Intro” page on nouns.center or be an approachable resource to send to a friend who is curious about Nouns.

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Video Content Outline:

  • What are Nouns?
    • Generative PFP NFTs
    • A protocol dedicated to the propagation of Nouns
  • How does it work?
    • Nouns Auctions
    • Nouns DAO governance
  • Why is it important and interesting?
    • CC0 IP
    • Decentralized funding of projects
  • How to get involved.
    • Learn more at nouns.center
    • Get involved, contribute and make a proposal

What will it look and feel like?: The video will use multiple visual approaches to showcase the diversity of Nouns. Animation techniques will include pixel art animation, motion graphics and 3d animation. There will also be a variety of Nouns extension projects featured.

Our Work: Some of our relevant video and animation work can be found here.

The Team: Thousand Ant is a digital agency with a focus on realtime 3D and game development. We work with organizations like Unity Technologies, Google, Microsoft, Terraforms by Mathcastles and JuiceboxDAO to help them create games, animations and educational content to inspire developers and creators.

Matto (aka Matt Schell) is the Managing Director of Thousand Ant and a generative artist working with code, realtime visuals and procedural audio. He’s released music for respected labels like Warp Records and also formerly served as the global head of online evangelism for Unity Technologies. He is a member of the Friends With Benefits DAO and is a community contributor to web3 projects including Crypts and Caverns, Terraforms by Mathcastles. Thousand Ant has recently released our own first NFT collection Hypercastle Explorers, a project which is building a game engine SDK for Terraforms.

Suspicious Seaweed (aka Tom Schell) is the Head of Operations for Thousand Ant.

Rough Staff Plan: Creative director, video producer, 2D character animator, 3d character animator, motion graphics designer, video editor, music composer.

Timeline: It will be delivered by the end of September. There will be bi-weekly community check-in calls that will serve as opportunities for people to weigh in on video progress. It will be “built in public”. Since we hope it will become a key “community resource”, we will work with the community to make sure it’s an accurate & worthy onboarding tool.

Funds Requested: Ξ45 (~$50K as of Jun 29, 2022)

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I’m not sure if you’ve chatted with the person who made this other prop: Proposal: Create "WTF are Nouns?" Animated Video - #13 by AndrewLaddusaw

I don’t know you’d be interested in another collaborator or not, but just thought it might be helpful.

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As far as your prop here, I love the idea of more explainers in the space. One question about your proposal; which video/s from the list you provided most represent what you’d like to create for Nouns? Many of your videos are quite technical in their language. Is that what you’d like to make here or would this project differ in style from what you’re used to?

I’d also love if you would incorporate a couple of revisions in the video if needed. That way the community can see the final product, give feedback, and improve it more over a couple of iterations.

Anyway, that’s my feedback. I hope to see this move forward!

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hey Andrew, I am in fact the person who made the earlier prop, this is a revision of it with the help of @cdt.eth, he recommended making it a new separate thread. That being the case, we plan on an extremely close and in-depth collaboration :wink:

With regard to which would be the closest example, I’d say something in-between this video we did for JuiceboxDAO and this video we did for Google’s Android marketing team. Importantly both of those are all 2D animation and we’d like to use a variety of media here including 3d animation as well, so neither is a perfect example.

Based on advice from other prop makers we’ve tried to keep our Discourse post as concise and clear as possible but I’m happy to expand on the production and revision process.

In short, there will be a set of check-in points for feedback where we’ll share work and request input. In each of those we’ll accept suggestions and make changes. Broadly those will be:

  1. A text based draft of a voiceover script
  2. A sketched non-animated black and white storyboard that illustrates that script
  3. An animatic (think slideshow with voiceover and music)
  4. A series of rough cuts leading to a final edit

The key point is that we gather feedback on broad direction in the early, lightweight and easy to change phases and are making finer and finer tuned changes as we move into the more labor intensive phases of production (ie: actual animation).

There will still be the opportunity to make more limited changes at the animation and editing stage however, we use a tool called Frame.io which allows anyone to comment and draw directly on the video itself and we’ll make those links available in Discord for feedback.

Transparently, we’ve worked a bit with DAOs before but I assume this will be a learning process for all of us, and we’re committed to making sure that folks can participate and share their ideas while being as open and collaborative as possible within the practical realities of producing a video like this.

Hope that’s helpful, thanks for checking it out and sharing your thoughts!

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That is indeed very helpful! Thanks for the response. Hopefully it will help clarify for all of us and we can get this on chain ASAP for a vote.

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Love this idea! Would be so helpful when I’m explaining to anyone --even NFT natives! But especially my normie academic colleagues.

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I think this is a great idea, I am glad CDT brought it up in our Nouncil meeting.

I fully support this.

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Agreed! In fact the target audience for this (as currently conceived) would assume basic knowledge of web3 and therefore probably be most useful for NFT natives, but ideally phrased in such a way that those new to web3 could get the high level concepts as well.

I do think that given the unique mechanics of Nouns there are plenty of people in NFT land who might have seen the Noggles or know “it’s a DAO” but not actually understand the uniqueness of the whole system. I know it took me multiple encounters with Nouns before I fully “got it”.

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Thanks for your support Sam! Much appreciated.

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