Xanadu x Nouns: Mega Episode + Real-time Nouns World Toolkit

Dear NounsDAO,

Welcome to Xanadu… a story world made by one dude with godlike creation powers forging a new category of entertainment that twists fiction with reality and collides pop culture with the coolest things on the internet. It’s a wild, novel genre that’s inspiring a new generation of creators, artists, and storytellers.

Click play to watch Blu present the proposal

We’re a team of two with a shared passion for bringing avatars and worlds to life. We want to help bring Nouns into the 3D metaverse with our unique storytelling and world-building skills. We propose a XANADU x NOUNS collaboration consisting of two parts:

Part One - Nouns Episode of Xanadu

We would create a mega-episode of Xanadu where Blu, the hero of Xanadu, teams up with Nouns in an action-packed deep dive into the Nouns Universe.

The episode features Blu questing through Planet Nouns desperate for the Nouns help to save him from a posse of intergalactic gangsters. To satisfy the bounty on his head, Blu must submit a winning proposal to Nouns DAO which kicks off a wild escapade through the Nouns City Center, the historic Nouner Capitol building, and the Nouns Underground. Along the way, Blu meets a master Noun who gives him a crash course on NounsDAO, how it works and why it’s awesome — education disguised as Hollywood quality entertainment. But it doesn’t stop there…

Part Two - CC0 Nouns Toolkit

Unlike a Hollywood feature where all the creativity and work vanish after the movie’s made, all of the Nouns assets created for this episode will be crafted into a Nouns World Toolkit that will live on in an innovative and powerful new way — in the hands of the community, available CC0.
This is more than a simple library of assets…

Because Xanadu is built in a game engine (Unreal Engine 5), it’s a story world that can be cinematic, interactive, gamified, live-streamed, or experienced in VR. So, armed with this massive toolkit of AAA animatable Nouns characters & pre-lit, animated environments — complete with how-to guide books & tutorials created by us — the Nouns community can inhabit a Noun for VTubing, Zoom calls, or create cinematic content, marketing materials, NFTs, or even build a Nouns VR experience, game, or metaverse. It’s our hope for this to become the beginning of a dynamic Nouns repository that grows over time and is contributed to by other builders.

Full list of Toolkit deliverables below in Extra Details.

How does this benefit NounsDAO?

  1. The Episode — Exposure for NounsDAO in a novel, powerful narrative – with analytics & insights (average results per episode: 2.7M impressions, 321K views, 12K watch-time hours)
  2. The Toolkit — 3D tools that enables Nouns creators, creations, remixes with other IPs, and continued proliferation of Nouns to a new degree.
  3. Our Vision — Inspire creators with the episode, enable creations with the toolkit, and catalyze a cohort of Nouns as VTubers and next-generation virtual avatars.

Community
Working directly with the Nouns community is key for this project in several ways:

  1. Help choose what Nouns derivatives to feature such as LilNouns, SharkDAO, skateboards from GnarsDAO, and art pieces from prop house. We love the extended Nouns community want to infuse this thriving ecosystem into the Toolkit and Episode.
  2. Help define the 3D style of the Nouns characters and environments, as well as how Nouns express themselves using motion capture and animation.
  3. Help choose Nouns characters to be featured in the episode. Some Nouns will be chosen for story purposes but we’d love the community to vote on what other Nouns get featured. Those Nouns holders will have the option to voice & motion capture their own Noun (assuming there’s dialogue).

The General Timeline

  • Phase 1: Concept & Design + Episode Writing. starts immediately (est 2 months)
  • Phase 2: Asset creation. Starts as concepts complete (est 2-3 months) Will overlap with Phase 1
  • Phase 3: Launch Beta Repository. Nov 2022 Assets are made available as they are created.
  • Phase 4: Episode Production Starts Jan 2023 *When assets are finished (est 3 months)
    Est Episode completion March 2023

Toolkit Repository Timeline

  • Phase 1: Launch Beta Repository. Nov 2022 Post assets as they become available
  • Phase 2: Create Beta How to Docs & Tutorials (these will roll out starting in Dec thru March)
  • Phase 3: Launch final Toolkit Repository March 2023
    We will be sharing fun BTS & asset creation along the way via YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram content.

Our Ask & Budget Breakdown
We are asking for a total of 192ETH (Converted to USDC immediately)

  • Toolkit Concept Art & Design — 12.8ETH
  • Toolkit 3D Modeling & Texturing — 61.9ETH
  • Nouns Character Modeling & Rigging — 20.9ETH
  • Toolkit Assembly & Episode Production — 88.3ETH
  • Toolkit publishing & maintenance — 8.1ETH
    Deliverables & production breakdown below

About Us
Cory is a two-time Emmy & Cannes Gold Lion award winning visual effects artist. Along with creating futuristic advertisements and Visual Effects for the film Minority Report, he was a part of the concept team that developed the look and feel of the future world. In his two+ decade career, Cory’s work has crossed a gamut of mediums from films like Minority Report and Star Trek, TV shows such as X-files, Deepspace 9, Smallville, and broadcast visuals for ABC, ESPN, Fox, Discovery & Disney. In 2013 he co-founded a Virtual Reality company named Kite and Lightning, who created virtual experiences for GE, NBC, Lionsgate and HBO. Before creating Xanadu Cory spent 6 years working on a VR game called Bebylon, a brawler where immortal babies battle for supremacy!

Stephen works with creators at YouTube and has helped support some of the largest pseudonymous gaming creators in the world. Outside of work, he’s helping a Blu alien build an empire D.I.Y. style.

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Extra Details

The Nouns World Toolkit Repository
The CC0 repository will consist of the cast of Nouns characters and environments made for the episode. Everything will be set up in the Unreal Engine (Free game engine software) and we’re going to include all the scenes, cameras, lighting and animation from the episode which means, the Nouns City center will be alive with ambient animation and amazing cinematic lighting. Additionally, the scenes from the episode will provide a starting point for making new content that looks amazing. All the Nouns characters will be rigged and ready for motion capture style animation (Both face and body similar to how Blu is setup in Xanadu). For those with the right gear, this means you can instantly puppet any of those Nouns for V-Tubbing or creating your own cinematic content. We’re also exploring ‘off the shelf’ webcam mocap solutions (Cheap or free but body motion quality not as good as the expensive mocap suites) to include, if possible, to make inhabiting the nouns characters more accessible. This would also allow using Nouns for Zoom calls, etc.

Nouns World Toolkit Deliverables

  • 12 Hero Nouns (Face & Body fully rigged for motion capture)
  • 24 Secondary Nouns (Body fully rigged for motion capture. Minimal to no facial animation)
  • Beautifully lit and fully animated environments:
    • Nouns Downtown City Center (exterior, like Time Square)
    • Buildings housing the Nouns extended family (Exterior)
    • Nouner Capitol Building (Exterior & Interior)
    • Nouns underground city / town (Exterior)
    • The master Nouns Dojo (Exterior & Interior)
    • General modular city assets *for building new structures
    • General nounish props & furniture
    • Nouns transport vehicles
    • Wide Establishing model of the Nouns Planet
  • Guide Book & Tutorials on using the Toolkit to create Vtuber & Cinematic content

Toolkit Technical Details

  • Unreal Engine 5 project - CC0
  • Assets performant in Real-time (Streaming)
  • Assets performant in VR
  • Fully animated hero scenes from episode included as examples
  • All hero Nouns characters ready for motion capture (Face and Body)

Production Team

  • Art Direction, Episode Writing & Directing
  • Producer
  • Lighters
  • Motion Capture TD
  • Animators
  • Cinematographer
  • UE4 Integration & Tooling
  • VFX Artists
  • Actors
  • Editor
  • Music Composer
  • Sound Designer

Episode Details

  • 20-30 minutes

About Xanadu & beyond
The heart of Xanadu is its zany stories and wild characters, but its soul burns to bridge and play in other universes. Thus Blu wants to help bring to life the budding spectrum of web3 Pop-Cultures from Nouns, cloneX and BAYC to small burgeoning Avatar projects backed by talented teams or individuals. All so they can collide on a bigger, more wild stage, with bigger, more wild crossover stories! Think Ready Player One and the Marvel Universe but creator content style!

FUN BONUS IDEA: Wild Story Twist!
Blu’s adventure with the Nouns will live on beyond this episode in a ‘first-of-its-kind’ melding of entertainment & reality; After this episode airs, Blu’s fictional proposal (The one he formulates in the episode with help from the Nouns) is actually a real proposal that he submits to the Nouns DAO… and the outcome of that proposal dictates Blu’s future storyline – Will his proposal be good enough for approval, or will Blu have to evade the gangsters and find another solution to survive?

If you haven’t seen Xanadu yet, check it out Xanadu on YouTube

Our original Proposal Teaser.

Thank you all for checking this out!
And thanks to those Nouners who’ve already helped us tremendously to this point!
Cory & Stephen

16 Likes

This is such a fascinating proposal and your teaser is out of this world. Obviously it’s a big ask, but there’s a lot of value to consider here as well. I wanted to get a couple of clarifications.

Your average views and impressions look higher than the raw numbers on Youtube. Do you cross post to other platforms? Do you market the episodes somehow?

It looks like you have 4 episodes so far, is that accurate? There was also a dropoff in the views for episode 4 compared to the others. Did that one have less marketing or is there anything you can attribute it to? I do some Youtube stuff, nowhere near this level of quality, so I didn’t know if you could provide any insights there.

The tooling is over my head, but it sure sounds exciting and useful to a whole host of content creation and game design, so I’m hoping a lot of other people will come and ask questions and give feedback. Congrats on an incredible prop!

4 Likes

Really looking forward to seeing more, also great to have you on NoC.

3 Likes

Thanks for the props and interest Andrew!

For the YT views we used the average of all the episodes. I’ve not done any official marketing for the episodes but I generally promote them on twitter, linked-in, instagram and a couple ‘avatar’ groups with a trailer. I also put episode snippets on TikTok but I’m not sure if there’s much crossover there?

For Episode 4, I’d say the biggest reason is the 5 month gap in uploads which we know the algorithm hates! The early episodes were going up a lot faster with short stuff in-between. My last thought is, I didn’t get to promote E4 at all thanks to a wacky health injury that knocked me on my ass for the first part of the year. Hence the crickets since E4.

Looking ahead, there’s a bunch of exciting content heavily in the works, both new episodes and lots of short content. And Stephen (my other half in this proposal) is the Hattori Hanzo of YT and brining a strong strategy for blowing Xanadu up!

Was your Youtube stuff virtual character oriented? I feel like the interest in virtual character content is rising, partially because all this ‘metaverse’ stuff flying around but also just because it’s super cool with endless potential and it’s actually possible now without big teams. Crazy to think what this space will be like in even two years.

Thanks again man :zap:

3 Likes

NoC was so fun Sam, such good energy!
I wanted that friggen Weed Head to drop but we got shanghaied :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

3 Likes

@AndrewLaddusaw Appreciate the kind words and love! We’re going to make video tutorials and guides to help beginners get started with the toolkit. Would love to check out the cool stuff you’re creating!

@Sam Vibes were immaculate, loved the positive energy from everyone at NoC. Thanks for having us <3

2 Likes

Welcome here you guys!! Noun226 is honor to be a part of your video. I have been waiting for such a fantastic high-quarity proposal! UE based video-proposal with Blu+Nouns is so cool. Already you have done great job!! I can’t wait to use the toolkits!

2 Likes

I will just post my tweet here as well.

This is amazing. This is the future. Can’t wait to follow your journey. All the best!

Cheers!

3 Likes

Epic prop! Can’t wait to see this happen :slight_smile:

3 Likes

I think Blu is able to help Nouns reaching new frontiers:

The first is 3d and the way he humanizes the characters. It is better than everything we’ve seen so far. Hollywood quality animation.

Second is bringing Nouns looks and lore into a different environment. From pixelated and cartoonish to a cinematic/gaming aesthetics. This is important to reach new communities

Third is the awareness blu channel already has.

Nouns is about ‘seeing differently’ (pun not intended, this is definitely a brand idea), and should support the greatest creativity around. There isn’t much left to discuss here.

:clap::clap::clap:

4 Likes

:facepunch: Appreciate it Leo! :facepunch:

2 Likes

:blue_heart: You’re hired!! :pray:
Love the unintended pun!

2 Likes

My YT stuff is just traditional vlogs around my small town. Not at all what you guys are doing. I’m just familiar with the algorithm and it’s finicky behavior. Haha. Looking forward to seeing the next steps in your journey!

3 Likes

I had the opportunity to briefly chat with Blu & Stephen about this prop and am really excited about it, this could be a catalyst for others in the community to start building in the UE/3D space

3 Likes

thank you oni-san! :pray:

1 Like

my first reaction was: wow
then I watched it again: still wow

can you please help me understand a bit better, if the first episode proves awesome for all involved and we want more, what would an average cost per episode look like?

3 Likes

As the resident genius troll, I do declare this the most sedulous post ever submitted to discourse.

You have done your research and are clearly a leader in your discipline. It is my hope that this post serves as an inspiration for other talented producers such as yourself.

P.S. Include Honk in your production or MDExMDEwMTEgMDExMDExMTAgMDExMDEwMDEgMDExMDAxMTAgMDExMDAxMDEgMDAxMDAwMDAgMDExMDAxMDEgMDExMDExMDEgMDExMDExMTEgMDExMDEwMTAgMDExMDEwMDE=

3 Likes

Thx verb-e :blue_heart:

Good question with a few answers…
Every episode cost is directly tied to the script and in the case of Xanadu, typically the biggest cost is designing and creating the assets (Characters, Environments & Props). Thus, if I was to create a second Nouns episode it would be significantly cheaper because I’d already have a huge pool of assets to work with. So unless the new story called for creating something new, you could automatically cut out the cost of concept art + 3d modeling & Texturing + Character modeling & Rigging.

The second answer is because the Nouns World toolkit would be CC0 and includes Unreal Engine 5 scenes with all those Nouns characters and Environments ready to go, other creators can make their own episodes with an incredible starting point – not just with the assets, lighting, animation & camera work that’s included in the scenes but the episode itself would have established the beginning of a Nouns storyline as well as developed many of the hero characters (personalities, backstories, etc…)

This is most exciting because different creators would bring different vibes and storytelling styles. They can riff off the story and characters I started or scrap all that and make up their own from scratch. They can also introduce other outside characters aside from Blu, like cloneX’s show up to Nouns Square… or Godzilla!

**What would be super cool is if you guys (maybe Prop House specifically?) ran a contest… calling all film makers & storytellers… (Interested in this style of content creation) and gave out Eth prizes for creating new Nouns Stories using the Toolkit. I imagine some wild stuff would come from this! Then those winners could collab on a bigger episode?!

phew… and you just wanted to know the cost of additional episodes :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

2 Likes

As if a huge bounty on my head wasn’t enough, I got Honk throwing down a MDExMDEwMTEgMD…!!!

Ok you’re in, BUT in my production I do with you as I will. There’s always a character that dies at the beginning, right?!

:pray: Thx for the love, and it means more coming from the resident genius troll!

2 Likes

So awesome! Really excited to see this come to life! Even better that 3D Nouns are included! Stoked!

3 Likes