Christmaas Gotree

This was the first Fake Gotchi piece I created. Found here.





The Concept: 


To make a frenly, amusing, ubiquitous GIF that would become the staple Aavegotchi Christmas NFT. I imagined gotchis who wanted to celebrate Christmas only to find a lack of trees in the digital gotchiverse. One brave gotchi volunteered to be a tree, only to keep getting shocked by standing in the snow wrapped in Christmas lights. 


It is inspired particularly by 2 things: 


1. Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation, getting shocked while wrapped in Christmas lights.

2. “Christmas Troy” from the TV Series Community. Which Chevy Chase is also in.




The Process:


For a Christmas release it felt topical and funny but there were a host of challenges to pull off this GIF. 


As simple as the piece looks, it was actually devastatingly complex to put together. Most of the heavy lifting was done in the editing. 


The main issue was the loop and the snow. How do you make the snow fall continuously at a slower rate than the actual animation?


It takes 6 seconds for the snow to go from the top to bottom of the image. The GIF is only 2 seconds long. 


Also, once I compact the snow animation, how do I keep a perfect loop without the snowfall messing it up? (It had to be perfectly aligned)


I divided the 6 second snowfall animation into 3 parts and laid them on top of each other. There are only 6 snowflakes but when layered there are 18. You are seeing the same snowflake represented 3 times simultaneously over the course of its animation.


That was the hardest part about the entire piece. 


The actual pixel art was all done in photoshop, based on two sketch’s I had drawn. One sketch of the gotchi and one of the shock.


The sweater has dual references: 


1. To celebrate the Aavegotchi Christmas Sweater they were selling. 

2. It’s another Christmas reference to my favorite holiday film, Die Hard. “Now I have a machine gun, Ho, Ho, Ho” wouldn’t fit, so I just put “ho, ho, ho”.


The Supply: 


The supply was set to 99 for a few reasons: 


1. I wanted as many of these as possible, in as many hands as possible. I wanted this to be THE Christmas NFT that the most people had for visibility purposes. 

2. I didn’t want the supply to be 100. It felt lazy and like a cash grab. (At least that’s what I think when I see someone mint the default 100 pieces)

3. I decided that I wanted as many mint numbers of my collections to be isolated repdigit numbers. So the highest possibly mint using that approach would be 99. (And then 66 for Mutaant, 33 for Million Eyes, -you see the pattern)


The Sale: 


One of the things I love about NFTs is getting to try different distribution methods. For my first release(and most others honestly) I wanted people to define the price organically so I settled on auctions. 


IMO, a well made animated GIF should have a baseline market value of about 20$ and the first few did sell for that much. 


However, the price started to fall, and the decision was made to stop sales once the final bids started to dip below 10 ghst. 


This was done for a variety of reasons, the least of which being financial. The most important thing to me was to cultivate a loyal fanbase and that can’t happen if you allow them to take a financial bath after buying your piece. After all, scarcity should be one of your guiding principals IMO.


I also realized that at the time, there are just not enough people buying Fake Gotchis to realistically sell out of Christmas Gotchi and there were only a few days left to Christmas, so I quit selling. 


Since my NFTs came with land rights, it felt right to kneecap the circulating supply as a gift to early adopters. It was a seasonal NFT, so that made it easy to justify stop selling.


The Future:


Christmaas Gotree is/will be the highest number mint Fake Gotchi I make. There are too many remaining to not flood the market at Christmas so I devised an epic event for mid-2023. 


As a film student, I studied the Screwball Comedies of the 1930’s-40’s. One of my absolute favorites is the film, Christmas in July. It is a perfect vehicle to explore charity, goodwill, and the connections we form with others when capitalism is taken out of the equation. It also features a fresh and unique concept that has been explored and referenced by many other films and TV shows over the years.


So I will do my own “Christmaas in July”. 


I’ve been intentionally keeping the amount of Fake Gotchis I sell very low, to create demand. In July I will auction off a set number of Christmaas Gotree and hold a special raffle for those winners and holders of my other Utility NFT’s. 


Around Christmas of 2023 we will repeat this with another set of raffles happening on Christmas Eve. 


I hope you learned something new today and gained a deeper appreciation for this piece. It’s one of my favorites. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Fakes Museum

Image
Inspiration/Origins: First Off, Huge shoutout to Grim R of Grims Gallery. He’s been doing this long before I did. It was actually the first place I visited/researched when I was deciding on making a museum. The first thing I noticed however is that a spacious parcel can barely hold enough fakes to cut it for a museum. So I started devising a plan to secure 2, possibly 3 spacious parcels side-by-side. Especially considering that you can eventually connect parcels.     I like to do firsts, and to my knowledge no one else had a side-by-side parcel museum. This museum would also serve as my tribute/contribution to the Fake Gotchi Project as a place for artists to get exposure, as well as advertise my own NFTs. I already have land rights tied to my NFTs, so if I was to make this a desirable, popular spot- then land rights for the museum could also get tied into NFT rewards. Ultimately for the holders of my four utility Fake Gotchis. Considerations: The idea for the approach to this...
Read more

Mutaant

Image
Mutaant was the first piece I conceptualized for the Fake Gotchi project(found here ), however it was designed after Christmaas Gotree.   The Concept:   Being the first piece I envisioned, I wanted something that could serve as an introductory piece and a PFP. Thinking about PFP’s and how they would fit into the Fake Gotchi Collection, I decided to draw on something familiar and universally recognized but with a “gotchi twist”. I wanted do make something that payed homage to the original crypto punks. There’s an argument to be made that it could’ve easily been a “zombie” gotchi but making it a mutant like MAYC gave me a lot more creative license to incorporate some of the weirdness I was imagining in my head. Like tentacles, a third eye, and a smaller gotchi “growth”.   The Process:   This piece walks a very fine line between being both polished and unpolished in the same breath. My initial pass of this was too perfect, I wanted certain pixel ratios but I also wanted...
Read more

Americaan Gotchi

Image
  Americaan Gotchi is a piece that closest represents what my animation style is(found here ). Thick lines with masks that reveal localized animations, typically stop motion sometimes 'treated' video clips. The majority of my Fake Gotchis have been pixel based animations, this is a reprieve from that.  The Concept: The idea came to me one night as I was smoking and watching the stars outside of my apartment. I was thinking really hard about the Gotchi Lisa and what other famous painting could make a similar transition into the Fake Gotchi's Collection.  Americaan Gotchi hit my all at once, especially once you realize that we have pitchforks already in the universe, that gothic to gotchi is just rearranging the letters. It felt natural. The Process: American Gothic is an impressive work of art and I wanted an equally impressive Fake.  I knew it had to be IRL painting of some type, so I fell back on the stop motion paintings I had made for my music videos and personal ...
Read more