First Animated Film Funded by a DAO Brings the NFT Collection of Nouns to Life
Can a DAO also help with the production of films? From today’s perspective, the answer seems to be yes.
Atrium, a network of independent Web3 artists and creators, has released the pilot for its Nouns: A Movie episode series, turning the popular collection of non-fungible tokens (NFT) into entertainment.
Led by former Pixar, Netflix, and Marvel animators, The Rise of Blus: A Nouns Movie aims to be the first animated film to be funded by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The project has a budget of US$2.75 million, which will be released in tranches subject to the team meeting their goals.
According to a press release, the action comedy is set “in the bustling, floating cloud city of Blus, where a daring 13-year-old Noun discovers the aristocrats’ plan to enslave their citizens and must ally with an unlikely gang of misfits to save those too.” save those they love.
The NounsDAO community approved a proposal to fund the film in March. Atrium creatives William Yu, HKJay, Zen Doubt, 3DPrint Guy and Meta Ent are helping to write, produce and animate the film. The film was created by a fully remote team, speeding up processes that would otherwise take months.
“We’re accelerating the pace of traditional studios 10x because we can make decisions faster and move forward with more agility,” said Zen Doubt, who also co-directed the film, in a press release. One of the factors credited for the speed was that the film was produced entirely remotely, which also allowed it to be produced at a lower cost than traditional methods.
Zen Doubt regularly posts updates on this process on Twitter, including sharing information about what other projects influenced the film’s animation style, as well as inside information like the AI-generated Rorschach tests shown in the pilot.
Supriyo Roy, Founder and CEO of Atrium, told AskFX that by releasing the Nouns project as open source, the creators of the film would have the freedom to design an entire world and storyline for the 8-bit characters without restrictions create.
“There is no such thing as ‘canon,'” Roy said. “Nouns are an infinite branding machine. There is no official top-down instruction on how things should be done.”
The pilot section of the film can be viewed at the Nouns Movie website.
The NounsDAO community continues to fund creative projects to expand their ecosystem and recently approved proposals for a comic series with book publisher Titan Comics and NFT community ComicsDAO, and a second ArtBall NFT collection with Australian Open tennis tournament, OnCyber and Vayner Sports Pass.
In February, 3DPrintGuy created a short film funded by a previous NounsDAO proposal. All of the major characters from the short film have been released as collectible NFTs.
