Hello peoples of the world. I’d like to present this animated short I finished earlier this year, called ‘SMASH!‘ in which my Nifty League Degen aka COOLFROG is smashing his phone because, in his own words, “It tell me how to think and feel – so – SMASH!” whereupon he meets the Nouns ‘Heart Guy’ who shows him how to access his inner truth. And then, as Charles Bukowski famously quipped, “Find what you love and let it kill you” and CoolFrog learns the hard way that if you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
Of course, that’s all nonsense (jks not jks) – I just did this straight ahead and had a lot of fun doing it. I saw the call for animated short applications on Cartoon Brew (“Nouns Fest To Distribute $1 Million In Animated Short Project Financing“), and decided to throw my half-baked idea in the ring for consideration. My idea was literally a single drawing with some description along the lines of ‘I don’t quite know what this is going to be but I have a really good feeling about it and think it’d be fun.’
The image I used for the pitch, some kind of smash battle between my Nifty League COOLFROG and Nouns Heart Guy. That’s all I had, but I thought it’d be cool.
It’s not often I get that fragile warm fuzzy excited feeling, but I’m learning to trust it. It’s an absolute joy when someone takes the leap with me and puts trust in a creator to just let me/that creator ‘do their thing’, because the work itself is enough energy, I only have enough fight for convincing or for the work, but not both 😅. Personally, the finished short is one of the pieces of which I’m most proud of this year.
All selected animators got their full production budget before work commenced, and according to this Cartoon Brew article, we get full rights to our work! Huzzah!
‘Nouns’ is one of a relatively new-ish phenomenon called a DAO – a ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisation’, where Nouns owners/members (one new Noun gets minted on the blockchain every day I think and people bid for it) propose and vote on ways to spend their huge treasury. It’s an interesting idea, a good use of blockchain, and while I can imagine DAOs don’t always work (eg ‘death by committee’ and sometimes ‘decentralised’ in Web3 is anything but), it seems to be working well for Nouns. I’m guessing this animation festival was one such proposal that got voted through, and I’m happy it did!
Friend and collaborator Pete O’Donoghue did a fantastic job on sfx, voices (which he wrote the lines for himself), and general audio direction. He put me in touch with Wayne Simpson who did a brilliant job on the original music score, I believe he played a lot of real instruments to make it. I wasn’t really trying too hard and both Pete and Wayne just nailed it with very little input from me, what a pleasure working with competent collaborators who run with an idea and just ‘get’ it! I believe they too enjoyed working on this, the seed of ‘do your thing’ was good and that fruit carried through to us I think.
Watch ‘SMASH!’ below:
Nouns asked animators to answer some questions so I made this little video below that shows some ‘making of’ and the answers to those questions:
A trailer for the festival:
They screened all the shorts at The United Theatre in Broadway in LA, nice. Pics from the NounsFest Twitter:
A slideshow of images:
Thanks for peeping this, I’d kind of fallen out of love with animation before this and am still a little fried from years of varying degrees of burnout, but this one was nice – clear scope, large degree of trust and autonomy, not taking itself too seriously, quick turnaround, end result – stoked. ❤️