Trust How a Graphic Novel Uses Storytelling to Teach Web3 Anne Connelly

okay good morning everyone and um thanks everyone that made it here for first slot of the day it's going to be a good one um my name is anne connolly and i'm here with trust graphic novel and comic project um so i'll tell you a little bit about what we're doing essentially this whole project got started because we had the goal of trying to increase the number of people in the web3 space but also increase the diversity space um in my previous life i had spent a lot of time working in central africa and there's really incredible things happening in web 3 all across the continent we need more people working from africa building incredible projects there and that was really the goal of this project was how do we get more people involved um and so i partnered with chief niamoia who's this incredibly talented graphic novel art artist out of nairobi and together we decided that one of the best ways that we can get people on board is through storytelling through helping them see a version of their life but in a in a kind of fun narrative that helps them learn blockchain along the way so that's that's essentially what we've done um so we created the trust project which is started as a 100-page graphic novel that teaches kids about blockchain as they go through and has expanded now into also being a motion comic and what will be an nft collection um that's going to be launching in june of this year so i want to walk you through a little bit about the process of how we've gone through to create this book um first off it started with the inspiration that chief had around the wahenga necklace which is this very traditional necklace born in the messiah communities in kenya where he's from and one of the beautiful narratives that he came up with was really this idea that every bead in this necklace is an important part of that community's history just the same way that every block in the blockchain is this important record of our community and the history of those transactions and so based on that narrative was the foundation of the story that we started to put together so first he started to develop a few different characters who were they why were they important what were the challenges that they were facing and experiencing in their lives secondly we worked together on a script something that made sense about you know uh our lead person her name is mora what was she experiencing how is she going through these challenges in her life but then how do you actually weave the blockchain education throughout that story to make sure it's it's understandable but also really entertaining for the audience from there chief took the script and actually turned it into what we call storyboards or these little rough sketches of each of the panels that you're going to see in the graphic novel as it goes along so here you can see this is artwork of mora going to visit her grandmother in her home village next he takes those story boards and actually does a full pencil drawing of what the art will look like when it's finished so like a a next version of a rough sketch and you can see he's done a really good job of hiding a little bit like little easter eggs throughout the art so she's got her ethereum logo earrings just little subtle ways of kind of connecting with the community that's reading the book so the next stage then as chief takes his pencil art and actually digitizes it and shades in all of the artwork and i'll show you a little panel of what that sort of looks like so here you can see on the first panel he starts off with just the absolute background and then he starts layering on more and more levels of detail until he's got the final picture and this is an example of sort of one of the panels where we've woven through this blockchain education so we have one of our characters akini who's this technophile who's actually teaching at a meetup um you know kind of like this one where she's teaching everyone in the crowd about what blockchains are why they matter and how they're actually going to impact some of the the issues that they've got in their community so for example max is our villain and he's he's corrupt and he's got issues that he's causing within their community and so she's teaching them about how blockchain can actually help their community so now i'm going to show you just a 60-second clip of what we call an animatic which is essentially the rough draft of the motion comic so it's a way for the animators to sort of plot out what they're going to do before they get the final art and can work out any kinks around you know where people are going to go or what movement's going to happen and it's a very specific style of art emotion comic that's a little more like 2d type movement so i'll play this for you so here mara and akini are riding their motorcycle to the cosmos hackathon space you can still see the kind of sketchiness of the art here a little bit but it just shows essentially the rough movement okay and then i'll show you now the close to final version of the uh let me just make sure my sound is on here yeah the close to final version of part of the motion comic um this is a scene again that we had seen previous in some of the storyboards where mara goes to visit her grandmother [Music] your necklace is so beautiful thank you it is a map of ohanga history over many lifetimes a colored bead for every newborn and a white bead for each of our dearly departed with every new cycle around the sun our community grows this way no matter how far we live from one another we will always be family and always trust one another we actually set out an absurdly audacious goal with this project of reaching over one million teens and young adults across the continent uh with the hopes that you know of those million that read this book maybe a hundred thousand will go on to study more about crypto and maybe 10 000 more from there will become developers or entrepreneurs or crypto owners and have a meaningful role in this space and so some of the ways that we're doing uh we're going to try and achieve that is the book's going to be published in both english and swahili and we're raising funds to try to get both french and cosa and other languages that we can get the book out to reach more audiences and we're also going to be pushing it out in a very accessible way so we have a number of digital platforms we're going to put it out across so kindle webtoons um some of the more traditional ebook platforms but we're also putting it out in like a basic pdf so if you don't have really good internet access you can download it on wi-fi read it later so we want to make sure that anyone who wants to access it can do that but what's really exciting about this is this book really is to take people from zero to one to get them excited and inspired and to teach them some of the basics but we know that the journey to becoming a really uh integral part of the crypto community is a little bit longer and so we've actually partnered with educational institutions across the continent to help take them from when they get to the end of the book to get them into real training around how to become developers and entrepreneurs in the space so we have representation from blockchain centers in kenya ghana south africa nigeria rwanda um i think i've got most of them anyway um which is incredible and really exciting so we're really thrilled to have these partners on board with us and i do want to say a huge thank you this project has been entirely grant funded from the blockchain community number of our incredible sponsors al grand interchain foundation uh gitcoin grants all the community from the ethereum space there um and we're still again we're looking more for more funding to get translations done um and uh i think i think that's really it we'd love for you to read the book it's free to read it'll come out sometime in summer 2022 and um you can follow us on twitter at trustgraphic and uh uh hope that you'll all read the book when it comes out and share it with everyone you know thank you so much [Applause] does anyone have a question for anne i know it's early so don't worry [Laughter] yes first of all i really love this idea i i work with a demographic that's different but equally unknowledgeable i like the idea you illustrated the notion of the blockchain with the necklace what other concepts do you get across within this one one story so i just missed the last part what other concepts what other concepts do you get across in addition to the just the concept of the blockchain and trust in this one story what is getting from zero to step one yeah absolutely so we look at everything from yeah the basics of what a blockchain is uh what is decentralization and why does that matter we look at sending cryptocurrency and how you can do that we look at um we highlight a couple of uh examples like energy how you can do decentralized energy decentralized voting decentralized land rights and then the big focus of the story is this community creating a dow so that they can self-govern which fundamentally is the way that they governed before the colonialists came in and tried to impose you know these other governance mechanisms on them so part of what we wanted to do was to really just drop as many little nuggets that people could pick up on and say oh decentralized energy that's really cool i'm interested i'm going to go research about more about that later but the dow element was really the one that we we've dove into a little bit more more deeply all right thanks everyone so much really appreciate it