Secret Ape Society
SAPES NFT Collection.
In Feburary ‘22 I was approached to create the art for an ape based NFT collection. NFT’s and especially ape themed collections are a very saturated market, with the big NFT boom in 2021 many people set trends and many more people followed them. I knew the art would have to be visually striking and high fidelity in order to stand out in this over crowded market.
In this project, I was responsible for everything other then the clay 3D model of the Apes, which was created by my talented friend Noir.gun
In order to have a successful NFT project, you need ways to market it and build hype around the project. Good marketing of course costs money, and NFT marketing costs even more money. People and organisations quickly realised how lucrative NFT collections are, many people went on to create collections and some others chose to build a platform promoting collections to a wide audience through twitter campaigns or paid shills by influencers. A few good posts by a couple of influencers could really get the momentum of hype going and in turn cause enough demand to sell out the collection.
The price of NFTs are all speculative, which are why they are valuable to collectors; pick a good project, buy a bunch cheap at launch and flip them for twice or even ten times the initial cost. This value of a good marketing campaign was clearly recognised in the community, therefore the top NFT shillers or marketers charge an arm and a leg to advertise your collection for X amount of time.
In our instance, a few marketing agents and shillers were charging around $20,000 - $100,000. It’s silly money, but if the collection were to sell out (at a price of $100/NFT) the total cost would be around a $1 Million.
The team of course didn’t have $100,000 lying around to hire the best marketing team so we needed to pitch the project to Venture Capitalists ~ Someone who would lend us the money and would take a large % of the total sales revenue. We had a few zoom calls with various lenders and it was looking pretty promising. They all commented on how striking the art was, so that was a big win in my books.
I commissioned my dear friend Keiran to design this kickass pitch deck so we could take it and present it to VC’s and marketing agents.
Building the generative collection.
As with a lot of my work, I created this in Cinema4D and Octane. I used the previous custom built 7 ape face types to be the base for each ape Ape V1 - V7. I then split those face types into 7 different skin tones including 1 rare zombie skin. Then, on top of that there were 10 different fur colours which gave the collection an initial 560 unique variations.
These will be expanded on further by other traits like, clothes, weapons etc. Which would be pre made assets from Turbosquid or Sketchfab.
Crypto Market Conditions.
There was a huge amount of work for me to do building this collection. I was the only 3D artist working on it, so I wasn’t able to distribute a large portion of the workload and the team didn’t have enough funds to hire a second artist.
All the VC we had previously spoken to, had backed out of the deal so the plan was to push on without funding and use what little funding the team had to hire marketers and influencers which in turn meant little funds for me.
With market conditions declining, funds drying up and work load ever increasing it was time for me to back down from the project. It was a really sad outcome as I knew what we / I had built was unique but it just wasn’t feasible to spend my time on something that wasn’t looking to profit.
The project is still running, and they have another artist taking the lead to deliver the collection. You can find SAPES here.
