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'2008' #NFT is dropping March 1st @makersplaceco.
Leading up to the drop, I'll share some behind-the-scenes looks at my creative process for this historical #bitcoin
art piece here.
Leading up to the drop, I'll share some behind-the-scenes looks at my creative process for this historical #bitcoin
art piece here.
Firstly, The Chronicles is http://NotFungible.com 's inaugural series, created to tell the story of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency through artworks minted into Non-Fungible Tokens. Big thanks to @FungibleNot for selecting me for the very first piece. Truly an honor.
The Chronicles series is focused on commemorating each year in the history of #Bitcoin , beginning the year a big idea was turned into code: 2008.
Before jumping into the subject matter the art itself, I'll say I consider 2008 to be my most complex animated art piece to date.
, beginning the year a big idea was turned into code: 2008. Before jumping into the subject matter the art itself, I'll say I consider 2008 to be my most complex animated art piece to date.
Creating 2008 challenged me in many ways and forced me to learn a lot, including a new system for organizing all my illustrated art elements and work on them actively while creating the animations in after effects.
Longer animations require more art elements, more layers, more organization. A solution I adopted while creating 2008 was Adobe's creative cloud Libraries. Here, I work on each art element in isolation, preparing them in individual layers for animation.
The beauty of Creative Cloud is it syncs my illustrator files with after effects. I make changes directly in illustrator to my art, & they are reflected automatically & almost instantly in after effects. This improved my workflow so much, my only regret is not using it sooner.
I organized some key information and contributions from each cypherpunk on one of the sides of each block, as well as the white papers or other academic papers each cypherpunk wrote, which made key advancements in cryptographic technologies, helping to make bitcoin possible.
The process of creating the cypherpunks was a bit lengthy, as I first tried a couple concepts that were more closely related to the matrix movie & characters. Eventually landed on a more retro-futuristic look for each. First, I selected some images and text to represent each.
The cypherpunk portraits combine aesthetics from old-school depictions of futuristic people with a bit of gear with how I see each character fitting into the greater scheme of bitcoin's creation & the role they played in that.
For each of the government and banker characters, I found videos on youtube of each making public statements during 2008 in reference to the financial crisis.
Here is the clip I used for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke:
Here is the clip I used for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke:
From these clips I selected key statements & used my 'Banker Buddy' AR mask to create alternate videos of each character. The mask itself, I designed using illustrator & used it as a face texture in facebook's Spark AR program, which is open for creators to create & publish.
So more about the concept itself: '2008' is designed to tell viewers a complex story involving the government, banks, and the damage done to the U.S. economy when a monstrous debt bubble exploded in the hands of banks that were deemed "too big to fail".
Satoshi put it so perfectly:
"The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust."
So, he created Bitcoin.
"The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust."
So, he created Bitcoin.
On a personal level, this is a subject I'm extremely passionate about and from the onset of creating "2008", I set out to create a hard-hitting historic piece that hits home with people who were directly impacted by the actions of the banks who caused the financial crisis.
