When Gallery asked if I wanted to make a Very Internet Person special edition piece for them to gift to users for the holidays, I, of course, said yes. I love Gallery because of the focus on displaying, discovering, and posting art, which is an underserved area in blockchain related media as most of the tools are focused on trading. Gallery is sort the social art sharing platform I've wished for since I got into the space (hopefully, one day, I'll also be able to display my Goool work from Fantom on there too!)

The deadline for the edition was short, as Christmas was only two weeks away. But I started getting ideas and dropped everything else to focus on it.

I don't really make many holiday themed works. It can be difficult to make something that's not just a disposable thing that people enjoy in the moment and never look at or think about ever again. So I wanted to pull together elements that felt in season but not too cliché or direct. For example, I didn't want to write a Christmas song. I had been listening to a lot of City Pop lately for no particular reason, specifically remixes on YouTube, and that sound struck me as very holidays-sounding with its dreamy and sparkling synths. So I started with that.

I made a simple drum beat to find a tempo I liked – I wanted something a little more up tempo than the average City Pop song just to give things more manic internet energy. I picked some random seventh chords that made a nice sounding progression, seventh chords being the sound often associated with City Pop and also Kawaii Future Bass. I did this in GarageBand on my iPad. Most of the software and hardware I use is the basic ware that come with my devices. I like the challenge of trying to make interesting things with the most common tools that everyone has access to. I suppose that's why I'm interested in the open internet and blockchain as mediums that empower the individual.

After I had the beat and chord progression, I needed to think about the lyrics some more. I knew the video loop would likely be 30-40 seconds long like my other videos, so I had to find the right words that wouldn't get too annoying in a loop. So while I let that stew, I went over to Blender to work on the 3D model on my Mac. (Blender, an open source software that is, again, easily accessible to anyone.)

The model I've been using in my music videos began as one of my Rainbow World Citizens by Adworld. Over time, I've been doing a Ship of Theseus on the model and slowly replacing all the parts with my own. For this piece, I made a chunky Christmas sweater to go with the festive theme. I drew the design with my pixel art tools in Procreate on my iPad, putting in references to Gallery, VIP, and the classic broken internet image icon. I exported the sweater model from Blender and imported it into Procreate to place the patterns. Then I brought it back into Blender and used particles to make it all fuzzy.

I also added ribbon bows to the hat to suggest a wrapped gift but it is also a callback to the Milady Migoko trait. BTW, I'm doing all of this while listening to the 40 second drum and chords track on repeat to drill it into my head in hopes that a melody and lyrics will emerge.

Once I finish the new parts of the model, I head back into GarageBand and add in the bass, the high chiptune synth (I like putting computer/video game sounds in my internet music), and flesh out/complicate the drums a bit more. At this point, I start recording different lyrics in Voice Memos on my phone, which is my preferred basic ware recording method (I like really imperfect and fuzzed out vocals – like Juliana Chahayed's phone mic recording techniques.) I don't listen to the music track when I record vocals because I feel like it makes my singing sound more robotic and less natural. At this point, I have the tempo and key pretty much memorized and I just need to find the words that fit.

I was thinking about the ways I use Gallery and I kept coming back to the way the platform calls "liking" a post "admiring." There is something very charming about that. I remembered one of my posts on Gallery about looking at internet pictures and that all came together with the music as "I'll admire your picture on the computer." The line has a nice open meaning that could refer to the Gallery platform or just about having an internet crush. I recorded myself singing that line a lot of different ways until it had a good flow. After I had that, I brought the voice memo into GarageBand and arranged it on the timeline and layered it multiple times, adding reverb, echo, telephone filtered sounds, and other random tweaks for the ethereal sound I was after. I also did some vocal chopping to add some percussive punctuation. Most of my process for making things is intuitive and instinctual, trial and error. The track was done and bounced after that!

Now that I had the final track, I could move on to the animation and choreography. The Rainbow World models are already rigged to use the Mixamo motion library so I selected some basic dance moves and imported them onto my model. I used a combination of editing the moves themselves in Blender and cutting up the timeline in iPad Final Cut to create the flow to go with the music. For the dance I wanted contrasting movements between very small shy dancing and occasional big spins and fancy footwork. Then I threw in some glitchy cuts to go with the percussive moments. I also snuck in a slight reference to Charlie Brown Christmas-style dancing at the 17 second mark for fun.

I built a small set with the Gallery brackets as the backdrop. I made a particle emitter to create the snow loop. Since this song was about "likes" and "admires", which is essentially a "click" in computer terms, I used computer cursors as the snow like an admiration snowstorm. I knew I would be deploying this on both Ethereum mainnet as well as Zora L2 and whenever I release an edition on multiple chains, I like to alter the piece to be specific to each chain. For a brief moment in the video, you will see it snowing either crystals (Ethereum) or orbs (Zora), depending on the version you have! Finally, I put a subtle CRT video filter with light chromatic aberration/ghosting on the whole thing to give it a bit of texture and that wraps it up!

I hope you enjoyed this look into my process! I'm sure I forgot a lot of stuff since working on this was kind of a whirlwind and I had a few sleepless nights to finish it on time (⌒_⌒;) If you use Gallery in 2023 or have VIPs*, you can pick up your own copy of this for free for the next few weeks to display in your own gallery! Happy Holidays! ♡

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*To access the free allowlist if you qualify, please mint using the Zora frontend:

Ethereum version
Zora version