A Million Eyes in the Daark


Night of the Lepus is one of my favorite movies. 

Concept:


A Million Eyes in the Daark is both a reference to the poster for Night of the Lepus(along with several other old sci-fi/horror posters like the beast with 1,000,000 eyes) and the old cliche of cowboys resting around an open fire at the end of the day.





It was a prime excuse to build a piece of art around observoors and campfire parcel installations. The cacti worked very well also.


The Process: 


I knew 2 things that I specifically wanted out of this piece of art:


1. It would be pixelated but also 3D. 

2. The flicker on the fire would be a lighting effect within the 3D environment. It was very important that the light not be represented in pixel form but as an overall lighting tone/effect. This was to sell the 3D look.


Obviously the eyes would glow, but to achieve the effect of the poster influence I needed the Observoors as dark as possible. This means that each observoor is actually 2 images: The glowing eye and the body, which was only lit with 3D lighting. 


It was also extremely important that the observoors didn’t look copy/paste. So I randomized their placement and off-set the timing for the blinking. I needed to show a mass of these guys surrounding our cowboy. The idea is that they are all piled on top of each other so there would not be straight rows of the observoors but rather mounds, or hills of them. And they would need to appear smaller at the back for depth. 


Every single eye blinks, if you stare at it long enough. I believe the GIF is 7 seconds long.


All the elements were made in photoshop and then put into a 3D environment. The light wasn’t strong enough to illuminate the everything evenly, so the observoors were all put into groups and then lit and placed. 


The campfire is probably my favorite thing I’ve made so far. It’s sad that I had to downgrade the detail - because otherwise it would’ve stuck out like a sore thumb. But it was also designed to be downgraded, if you look closely, some of the lines on the rocks on the original look like they don't make sense but it translates very well to the downgraded view.





This was the 4th piece I made and it was one of the most complicated. It took me about 2 weeks to figure out how I would put this all together. Because everything was made independently and put together afterwards. It also had to all match, or at least give the appearance of matching. 


This means I had to know the placement and size of every piece before I made it. 




The smoke was super fun to figure out and I’ll leave it a secret. But if you follow my processes you can probably imagine how I did it. 


The Supply: 


Continuing with the isolated redigit mint numbers, I settled on 33 for this one, as it would become the most rare utility NFT I make. It also served as a hardcap on the final prize for collectors. Because to get the final prize collectors would need to hold all 4 utility reward NFTs, meaning there could never be more than 33 people to win the final prize. 32 if you consider I hold 1 mint back for parcel display purposes. 


The Sale:


I decided to do something very different for this sale, the idea was to list everything for sale/auction all at once, basically as an experiment to see what would happen. 


What ended up happening was one user bid on every single NFT and ended up winning over 60% of the whole collection. I think it’s both hilarious and smart, they skewed the raffle % to their favor, as Million Eyes makes up roughly 30% of the available collection at time of writing. 


I learned a lesson to not list everything at once any more but to stagger. 


The Future: 


The final 2 copies of this NFT released/raffled out under special conditions later in 2023. 


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