Here’s a novel idea: an animated shorts festival that pays you, the filmmaker, to be in it.
Anyone who’s ever tried to make a short film knows the drill — you struggle to find the money to make your dream project, and then you struggle to pay costly entry fees to festivals in the hopes that they might, just maybe, screen your film.
Nouns Fest turns that model on its head.
This is a shorts festival that paid 50 animators $7,500-$20,000 each to produce their films, with complete creative control and almost no strings attached. Nouns, who partnered with L.A.-based Stoopid Buddy Stoodios for the event, claims to have spent one million dollars on the films, which were typically 30 seconds to five minutes in length. They screened in a two-hour program October 10 in a magnificent, hundred-year old theater in Downtown L.A.
The results? Fifty animated shorts in every imaginable media, overflowing with shameless beauty and gleeful inventiveness. These shorts were consistently hysterical, outrageous, ground-breaking and utterly-inspiring. Add another dozen superlatives of that sort to that sentence and you’ll get a sense of what this film festival was like.
How did this happen? Well, it all comes down to three letters that had fallen into disrepute as of late: N-F-T.
Million Dollar JPGs
Remember Non-Fungible Tokens, the unique, blockchain-related jpgs that used to sell for absurd amounts of money a few years ago? At one point, it seemed like everyone was trying to promote a project with a digital asset that would make everyone rich. Most of those projects collapsed under the weight of their own pointless hype, scams and “rugs” (slang for a type of “pump and dump” scheme that left buyers with completely worthless assets).
However, a small segment of those early NFT collections — or as they like to be called now “Web3 brands” — are still quietly thriving, and even growing in value. Collections like Bored Apes Yacht Club, Pudgy Penguins, Cryptopunks and Nouns, the sponsor of this festival, routinely have NFTs selling for five figures or more. (Full disclosure: I do creative work for Pudgy Penguins, and several other Web3 entities.)
Many of these brands also currently fund a variety of animation projects, video games, live events and retail concepts related to their brands. The reason for this is that real-world activity related to the brand and the associated hype tends to enhance the value of the digital assets.
In other words, if you’re a Web3 company, you make a toy, video game or a film festival related to your brand, and your NFTs will probably be worth more.
Noggles Help with Vision
Nouns is a collection of more than 1,200 NFTs that feature a variety of different characters, all of whom wear square eyeglasses known as Noggles. Started in 2021, Nouns appears to follow this Web3 value-enhancing formula as well. However, Nouns is bit different than other profit-maximizing NFT entities. In addition, to its original collection of NFTs, a new Nouns NFT is auctioned off every day (prices are often $11,000 or more). The proceeds from these sales are put into a collective fund. Anyone who own a Nouns NFT can then propose and vote on creative projects to spend the money on. So Nouns is more than an NFT investment vehicle. It is sort of a community-led “art financing” project.
One of the events it financed is the Nouns Fest in 2023 and 2024. While Nouns provided funding, film-makers retained all rights to their films. The main requirement for receiving the Nouns Fest grant was that the shorts include some visual reference to the Noggles worn by the Nouns NFT characters. There were more than 400 submissions.
Stoopid Buddy Is a Noun, Too
Nouns teamed up with the top creatives at Stoopid Buddy to produce and curate the event, and the festival boisterously celebrated the type of “melt your face” aesthetic of Stoopid Buddy productions, like Robot Chicken. There was an overabundance of stop motion, claymation, puppet animation, mixed media and genres beyond easy description. Traditional 2D and 3D seemed to be in the minority.
Standouts at the festival included Decapitation Vacation from David Lauer, which won the award for Animation Excellence. The film depicts a society where people cut their own heads off and send them on virtual vacations. Midnight Kiss by Millie Holten won for Best Short Short, with its story of a woman who must get a kiss from her date before midnight or she will turn into a mouse, but as the hour approaches her spell demands increasingly salacious activities in addition to the kiss (like “hand stuff” and “inside the pants”). The Holy Nountain by Mike Greaney won for Best Tall Short, for its story about a video game character who must reach the top of a mountain while his head turns into a fish bowl, a skateboard, a version of Microsoft’s Clippy, and other bizarre entities.
Other non-awarded standouts included Hydrants and Hounds by Lachlan Pendragon, One Little Thing by Ainsle & Wren Henderson and Mello’s Funk by Stoopid Buddy Stoodios. But overall, the vast majority of the shorts were entertaining and inspiring, featuring a level of quality and consistency that is not always assured in a collection of so many different films.
The 2024 Nouns Fest was held October 10 at the United Theater in Downtown L.A. For more information, visit nounsfest.tv.
John Derevlany is a writer, creator and showrunner of hit TV shows for children. He has written or co-written more than 20 pilots that have been greenlit into series. He most recently worked as head of story for the prominent Web3 brand Pudgy Penguins, developing multiplatform worlds and narratives.
