Mutaant

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 it to look distressed, as if part of its nature was to decompose and mutate. 

So I took the really pretty clean-pixel version and made certain details rough and less defined. Allowing your brain to fill in the gaps in the missing places.

Much like Christmaas Gotree, the loop cut on this piece was extremely complicated. Mainly because of the third eye. 

The eye animation is a pixelated spiral/uzimaki rotating 360 degrees and cycling rainbow hues. The actual loop cut occurs when the eye blinks, meaning I couldn’t cut it anywhere else other than there or it wouldn’t match. 

To hide the cut, I actually stagger the other localized animations such as the growth and tentacles to loop cut closer to the middle of the animation. So when you hit the actual loop cut you can’t notice because you have multiple animations seamlessly playing over the cut. 

The cleverness of this effect is so subtle, I don’t think anyone would’ve ever figured it out unless I properly explained it. 

So that satisfied the mutaant loop but now I needed a background and I knew I wanted random pixelation, but I also wanted something that didn’t detract from the main animation. This meant the color, pixel size, and animation speed all needed to compliment the foreground and also perfectly loop. 

I tried a lot of different backgrounds before settling on the one you currently see. 

At the time I was trying to design video game levels using AI. I had these massive cities and landscapes that had been built with AI. I tried a few that had some nice textures before I found the piece I thought would work. 

So I pixelated it and changed the hue to make our mutaant “pop”, along with a slight drop shadow. 

But how to animate the background? 

It had to loop, have motion, and not be rotation based. I imagined a horizon BG for our PFP and I defined it by having the pixels fold into each other where the horizon meets the land. Color was chosen to mimic a “wasteland” palette. 

I couldn’t get a perfect loop however because the BG was not homogenous. Those pixels would never naturally align. So I doubled the animation and made the overlapping clip slow bleed into the next, off-set by 1/2 the length of the clip.

I faded the opacity on the top layer in a way that the loop cut would always catch the 1/2 time off-set and the pixels would align. So you basically move the middle of the animation to the loop cut on both sides creating your pixel perfect loop and the actual BG animation is a fade transition to the point where the loop has to cut. Did that make sense? 

The Supply: 

Again we are using repdigit numbers, landing on 66. This amount is both scarce but enough to allow a decent number of people to obtain this PFP. 

The Sale: 

The plan was to sell these at a steady rate to sell out by March. It faced the same fate as Christmaas Gotree in terms of declining sale price so emission rates were dramatically cut. 

In my mind, if the demand is not there, there’s no reason to rush to sell. It will only piss off collectors, and you will make less than the piece should sell for. 

Sales have resumed sporadically(March 2023) as there appears to be a growing demand for this piece. 

The Future: 

Mutaant is one of the few pieces I’ve released that is pretty straight forward. It’s selling slowly and offers Land Rights and raffle opportunities. 

I consider it to be one of the very few and first PFP Fake Gotchis and it doesn’t need to be anything more than that IMO. I’m very happy with how it turned out and what it represents: That gotchis can maintain their identity while paying homage to other NFT collections.