On March 11, the community of NounsDAO, an Ethereum NFT project, passed a proposal to create a feature-length film about the popular blocky 8-bit NFT characters.
NounsDAO has partnered with Atrium.art, a network of independent experts specializing in screenwriting, concept art, animation, and music production. According to Atrium.art's blog post, the artists and creatives will help the NFT project "form the first feature-length cinematic content introducing Nouns to the world."
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The partnership between NounsDAO and Atrium is based on milestones that will also serve as checkpoints for the NounsDAO community to evaluate the progress of the project. If the development of the animated film does not appeal to the members of the DAO, they can stop funding at any time.
The initial production phase, with a budget of $125,000, will take 90 days to complete. After the pilot is released, NounsDAO will decide on the film's future, which is planned as a series of episodic content. For each episode, NounsDAO will submit a separate proposal.
This is not the first time NounDAO has collaborated with Atrium. Before working on a full-length film, Atrium released a short two-minute animated film on February 6, featuring Noun 1, a character with a fox head and pink glasses. NounDAO has used images of all significant characters for its new NFTs.
Atrium's team of creative directors Zendoubt and HKJay, executive producer 3dprintguy, and lead writer William Yu are excited to begin work on animated content for NounsDAO.
"Studios often have a particular formula or style that they prefer to stick to when creating movies. Disrupting the studio-focused nature of making cinematic content can lead to a more diverse subset of stories and perspectives being told. Historically smaller production companies and independent filmmakers are more apt to take risks to push the industry forward. This is what we are seeing with Nouns right now," Atrium said in the same blog post, emphasizing the stronger personal connection and passion that small creators have for their products.
Nouns NFTs are a profile picture (PEP) collection featuring little images of algorithmically generated pixelated characters. The very first auction of a Nouns NFT took place in August 2021. At press time, the best bid for the fox-headed character from Atrium's short film was 15.0001 WETH worth $25,414.97, while prices for other Nouns exceeded 70 ETH. Nouns have attracted a lot of interest in the NFT community primarily because of the unique features of this project.
First of all, the 32x32 pixel images of Nouns are stored directly on the Ethereum blockchain. Most NFTs only use a blockchain to store links to external hosting services.
Secondly, the supply of Nouns is unlimited, as new NFTs are generated and offered for auction every day. After an auction is completed, a new Nouns character is minted, while the funds are transferred directly to the DAO Treasury, which currently has almost 27880 ETH worth over $46 million. At the same time, all Nouns are equally rare.
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Finally, as an example of generative artwork, Nouns are all about fun. Any Internet user can explore the Nouns Playground, where they can generate random heads, bodies, accessories, glasses, and backgrounds, or use their custom traits to see what Nouns can look like. The results can be quite surprising, especially when it comes to Nouns heads, which can be practically anything, including a ship, a brick, an aquarium, or a cookie.
NounsDAO is actively expanding its ecosystem by participating in various projects, from working with the Australian Open tennis tournament to build an ArtBall NFT collection to designing and funding skateboard production for The Skatepark Project, formerly the Tony Hawk Foundation, which creates safe and inclusive skate parks.
Meanwhile, NounsDAO has already started creating the story of the NFT characters in the form of a comic book series titled "Nouns: Nountown," which will be released in collaboration with the NFT community ComicsDAO and publisher Titan Comics.
