Create an audiovisual adaptation of any scene from Vitalik Buterin's new novel, Snowmoon.

Snowmoon is a 32-chapter science-fiction novel set in a world filled with competing societies, cryptography, AI, strange games, new political and economic systems, war, friendship and questions about how humans coordinate.

Pick one scene. Make it real. Show us what Snowmoon could look and feel like on screen.

Read Snowmoon: Read online | Download EPUB for Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, or other e-readers.

The challenge

Choose any scene from any chapter of Snowmoon and turn it into a finished audiovisual piece.

You have broad creative freedom over how you interpret the story.

Your submission could be:

• live action
• traditional animation
• 3D animation
• AI-assisted or AI-generated filmmaking
• machinima
• motion graphics
• mixed media
• something we haven't thought of

There is no required visual style, we want filmmakers and creators to experiment.

What we're looking for

Your piece should feel like a genuine attempt to bring a specific moment from Snowmoon to life.

We'll be looking at things like:

• Storytelling: Does the scene work as a piece of film?
• Visual direction: Does your interpretation make the world feel distinctive?
• Atmosphere: Does it capture something meaningful about the setting, characters or ideas in Snowmoon?
• Technical execution: How well is the piece produced?
• Creative interpretation: Did you make interesting choices rather than simply illustrating the text literally?
• Open-source usefulness: Did you document your process well enough that another creator could learn from it and build on your work?

Open-source your production pipeline

Snowmoon is published under GPL v3, and Vitalik specifically says his intent is that people can create movies, anime and other adaptations as long as the important non-commodity production materials behind them are open-sourced so others can build on the work.

In that spirit, every qualifying submission must publicly release the meaningful production materials used to create it.

Your public repo or project page should include the relevant materials from your production process, such as:

• scripts
• prompts
• storyboards
• workflows
• task-specific harnesses
• custom tooling
• reusable assets you have the rights to share
• documentation explaining your process and the major tools/models used

You do not need to redistribute third-party software, commercial tools, foundation models, stock assets or anything else you don't have the rights to redistribute.

The goal is simple: another creator should be able to understand how you made your adaptation and build on your work.

How to submit your claim

First, publish your finished video on any social media platform of your choice.

The post must be publicly viewable without requiring someone to create an account or log in.

Then submit a claim on poidh with:

• your favorite screenshot or still frame from the video as the claim image
• a link to the public post containing your finished video
• a link to your public repo or project page containing the required open-source production materials

AI is allowed

AI-assisted filmmaking is explicitly welcome.

So is filmmaking without AI.

The important things are the quality of the finished piece and the ability for others to learn from and build upon your process.

Winner

Submissions will remain open until Sunday, October 18th @ 11:59pm PST.

After submissions close, contributors to this bounty will be encouraged to discuss the entries and decide amongst themselves which submission they believe should win.

Once that rough community consensus is clear, the bounty creator will nominate the winning submission on poidh for final confirmation through the normal protocol flow.

The winner will be nominated shortly after the submission deadline.