Our first proposal! I’ve been digging in here and in Discord (Matto#1231) and very much appreciate the warm welcome so far. Thank you for taking a look at this and sharing your feedback, tips for iteration or anything else you care to!
Best,
Matto
“WTF are Nouns?” Nouns overview explainer animation
Created by: Thousand Ant v1 - 4/28/2022
TLDR: We’re asking for 20 ETH to create a 3-5 minute animated video which provides a fun, concise and stylish overview of the Nouns protocol to help people quickly understand the core ideas.
Proposal Objective
To provide a framework that details the scope of work and commercial terms to be submitted to the Nouns DAO proposal process
Goal
Nouns DAO seeks to proliferate the Nouns meme. One challenge to proliferation is understanding. By creating a concise, stylish and informative animation we can give interested folks a quick way to understand the project.
About The Team: Thousand Ant
Thousand Ant is an agency with a focus on realtime 3D and game development. We work with clients like Unity Technologies, Google, Microsoft 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, real-time 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 and the Chief JPEG Officer at OfferbotDAO.
Some of our relevant video and animation work can be found here.
Project Phases
Phase 1: Briefing, Proposal and Voting
Initial discussions to explore proposal viability in Nouns Discord #proposal-ideas channel by Matto#1231
Thousand Ant shares proposal on Discourse for feedback
Nouns community reviews, feeds back and votes on proposal
Proposal is approved
Scope of work signed
Phase 2: Art Production
Script brief
Thousand Ant team gathers script reference materials from Nouns DAO members
Existing script drafts
Other marketing materials explaining the project
Script writing
Thousand Ant creates a first draft of the video script and shares for feedback
Nouns community provide comments and edits on script document
Thousand Ant finalize script draft based on input
Gather art assets
Thousand Ant sources existing art assets from Nouns community
Nouns NFT pixel art images
3D noun models from various extension projects
2D derivative noun images
Existing nounish animations and drawings
Storyboard
Thousand Ant to provide storyboard which will convey basic beats of the video, shot framings and an idea of camera movement based on script and approved concepts
Nouns community to provide feedback on storyboard
Thousand Ant revises storyboard based on input
Storyboard finalized
Voice over recording
Thousand Ant suggest voiceover artists, gather community input
Record finalized script voiceover
Music creation
Thousand Ant provides a musical mood board / playlist of stylistic references for community input
Thousand Ant composer creates 3 original musical sketches and shares for community input
One musical sketch selected for final arrangement, mixing and video scoring
Animatic creation
Thousand Ant provides rough blockout / animatic with voiceover and rough music for review
Nouns community provides feedback on animatic
Thousand Ant revises based on feedback
Animatic finalized
Final Animation Creation
Thousand Ant creates final animation and music based on finalized animatic
Phase 4: Review and Delivery
Complete draft of animation shared for Nouns community review
Thousand Ant incorporates community feedback into final animation
Final animation video render delivered for publishing
Assets open sourced
All video source materials made available under CC0 license for creation of future Nouns related projects including:
Video footage
musical parts
animation files
Final project delivered
Revisions
Up to 2 revisions per asset
Timeline
Approximately 9 Weeks from signing of SOW
Payment Terms
50% at signing of SOW and 50% on delivery and approval of final deliverable.
20 ETH
Next Step
Thousand Ant to post proposal for voting via Discourse
i think it’s is a great idea, and i appreciate the super thorough timeline breakdown. i also liked the Juicebox video from your channel.
i think nailing the tone is going to be the most important piece, since it’ll serve as a true “intro” to many new folks. will you try to work with the script from 4156 or write a new one?
Thanks for taking a look cdt! We’d definitely want to find an appropriate tone, and are open to feedback and collaboration on it. I spoke briefly with 4156 and would be happy to use the script he’s written as a basis for this. Normally we have a few rounds of feedback and rewrites to incorporate folks ideas so I think basing it off what he’s written would be a great place to start.
a lot money for a short period of time. Would love this figure to be challenged. (alternatively Mad realities can produce something much cheaper I believe)
Thanks for taking the time to read and reply, really appreciate it.
We ourselves could also quote a much lower price if we had the sense that this was an organization with limited funds where something simple, cheap and quick was what was needed. My intuition, however, is that Nouns is a premium brand/meme and would want the same level of treatment that our clients at Google, Microsoft and Unity are looking for.
Investing more in making the animation means that we can profitably spend more time, effort and money on raising the quality and iterating on it with the community. There are many ways to do things that are really cheap, in this case we are proposing a budget that will allow us to create something high quality.
If the consensus is that something much smaller with a lower investment is desired I’m happy to submit something much simpler.
This is by no means a big budget for this kind of video from my point of view. Obviously pricing depends on the quality you are aiming to produce. If i was making this proposal I would be asking for more ETH.
Great idea! Much needed! I also love the juicebox video, I feel like something similar, with an aesthetic that takes inspiration from the nouns website could work really well. I dont think the ETH amount is shocking, and if anything I would ask for more (ETH is at 1700USD today). This could help get the word out and explaining nouns in 4min isn’t an easy task (requires an understanding of crypto, smart contracts and DAOs). I would go for something that works with or without sound and with subtitles.
Thanks Orca for your support. And yep, with continuing dip in ETH prices we would need to ask for more since we’d be incurring fiat expenses to produce the video. Something that works with subtitles is definitely possible as well.
I would estimate a budget of around 50k USD for this in Eth equivalent for a 3-4 minute video that includes a mix of animation and motion graphics, roughly around 40 ETH at today’s prices.
This would be great. We need more explainers in this space and we also need to make sure it’s marketed properly at the end. Would love to see it happen. Glad to see the revisions as well, so it can be reviewed and critiqued by the community.
This is a much needed asset and tool for onboarding and we need more of this. The ask is not a lot especially if we get to see a look/style proposal before a full commitment. I think it is a mistake to say “X can do it cheaper” because everyone has different strengths levels of quality work. Pushing on creators and builders to compete on pricing their vision against each other is very much a web 2 view of working and will drive away established builders that we want to work with
Proposal Objective
Goal
About The Team: Thousand Ant
Project Phases
Phase 1: Briefing, Proposal and Voting
Initial discussions to explore proposal viability in Nouns Discord #proposal-ideas channel by Matto#1231
Thousand Ant shares proposal on Discourse for feedback
Phase 2: Art Production
Phase 4: Review and Delivery
Final project delivered
Revisions
Timeline
Payment Terms
Next Step