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The Nounish Professor
Last week, NounsDAO held the first Nouns Short Shorts Film Festival, a culmination of animated short films funded via proposals and distributed as mintable nfts. At first glance, this may not seem like a big deal but thinking through the potential disruption, it’s apparent that this is a novel way to support creatives.
A series of proposals funded these films, with some curated by the Nouns Stories team and others voted on via Prop House, a mechanism for distributing funds via voting by token holders. The prompt to the artists was simple—just make it nounish! Other than that, the animators had full creative control.
That may not seem revolutionary but if you think about the creative process, it truly is. No one was looking over the shoulders of the creative teams doing the work. (except when they gave us sneak peeks.) No notes were given; no approvals needed. Create whatever you want with inspiration from these characters and these Nouns glasses aka noggles. ⌐◨-◨
What resulted was brilliant works where most look like the beginning of much bigger stories, and happy artists that were paid to make art in their own style with their own artistic direction. The film makers over and over again said how much they appreciated this creative freedom.
The distribution was done via mintable nfts as well as YouTube, with most of the work produced deemed cc0 and now in the public domain, with opportunities for other artists to incorporate and build off that work. Potentially revolutionary if you consider the possibilities.
Nouns Short Shorts Season 1
Could this same aim be accomplished via other crowdfunding methods? Absolutely, and it certainly has. But if you combine all the factors that went into this approach, it may be the most crypto native effort we’ve seen to funding films:
⌐◨-◨ Proposal goes to NounsDAO for funding and voted on by holders
⌐◨-◨Funds are distributed via USDC
⌐◨-◨ Films are created inspired by cc0 assets and most are also cc0
⌐◨-◨ Films are distributed via minting the videos as NFTs
⌐◨-◨ Funds from minting are shared between the DAO and Artists
⌐◨-◨ Since they are NFTs, videos are also displayable in metaverses (e.g. oncyber.io)
I spent some time creating an OnCyber Gallery with all of the animated shorts as well as the film festival live stream. You can also find a playlist of the shorts here: https://www.youtube.com/@nounsstories
You can also mint your own here: https://zora.co/collect/eth:0xd64ce3231839fed12c0ee132d6b33b4238ff9929
Take this a step further and the NFTs minted can also be utilized to connect the artists with their collectors for future work, or even for future collaborations building off their own cc0 work. The potential flywheel is explosive if you play it out.
I can’t wait to see Season 2!
I’ve enjoyed these shorts so much, I’ve decided to give one away to one of my subscribers this week. I’ll do a random draw tonight so check your wallets tomorrow.
And thanks as always for reading!
Links:
Nouns Short Shorts Season 1 collection on Zora.co: https://zora.co/collect/eth:0xd64ce3231839fed12c0ee132d6b33b4238ff9929
Nouns Short Shorts on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nounsstories
Nouns Short Shorts on OpenSea: https://opensea.io/collection/nouns-short-shorts-season-1
Nouns Stories on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nouns_stories
Prof’s Short Shorts OnCyber Gallery: https://oncyber.io/nounsshortshorts
Nouns Short Shorts Film Festival recording:
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We love Short Shorts! ⌐◨-◨ Had fun creating the collectible for this with NounsAI playground. Also created an oncyber gallery for the animations. Enjoy! https://paragraph.xyz/@nounishprof/shortshorts