Beeple: An Inside Look Into His Art, Career and Life | NVIDIA Studio Spotlight

i definitely got in trouble as a kid there was one time where i drew a picture i believe it was second grade it was a picture of like a werewolf or something like that and i wanted blood on the werewolf and i actually used some blood but like then somehow the teacher saw it it was like oh man there's actually blood on this picture then there was kind of like uh okay we've gotta like tell people's moms and stuff i do remember that being like a thing and i don't know whose blood it was [Music] mike winkelmann aka beeple is an internationally acclaimed digital artist who works in film vj loops and mind-bending images he has gained recognition for making a new image every single day for the last 14 years today we catch up with him in his home in charleston south carolina to talk about his life his process and the future of digital art [Music] so when i was in fourth grade my teacher told my parents that it would be sort of beneficial to me to like get a computer and so that was one of the more formative things i think that they did i was just like oh man i am super super into this oh man you can like draw on a computer like that was not like a gimme that was like a cool thing and then my dad had taught me how to program the computer so that was a big thing and that's you know partially why i ended up going to school for computer science out of school i wanted to find a job doing web design just because it had a bit of the art as well as the like programming side of it i believe i worked for that company full time for 10 or 11 years so it was definitely you know quite a while having a day job had a great separation between like this is how i make money this is my art my art can be whatever it is because i do not need to worry about making money for that and i feel like people don't value that enough what ends up happening a lot of times is people will take jobs maybe doing their art but then their jobs are super demanding and they'll take all their time whereas if you just got a gay job you know it's not exactly what you want to do but it pays the bills then i think you might actually have more time to put into the stuff that you're really like super passionate about so while i was working at that web design job i started doing more and more freelance stuff on the side i had started releasing vj clips [Music] i had tried to do concert visuals for a while like live myself and i just did not like that it was not fun i still liked really making the clips or whatever and so i realized if other people could use those clips like great that's awesome i had probably about 50 clips at that time and i messaged through vimeo every single vj person that i could see be like hey here's the stuff you can use totally free any project no credit i didn't have any competition with those parameters it happened pretty quickly after putting out those clips that i really started getting a lot more paid work from them people looking for custom concert visuals so i've been at the web design job about three years before i started making the everydays it was just wanting to get better at drawing back then i obviously didn't realize how long i was going to keep doing it so we found this stuff some of these old prints these are some of the like very first everydays i've not seen this stuff in a very very long time so this is the very first everyday this is a picture of my uncle jim so i just cut out this part and scanned it this was the sketchbook that i used before doing every days this says up number two every day means every day yeah i feel like there's always been like an underlying frustration with not being able to articulate the ideas that i have as well as i know that they could be articulated that's always been like a driving force and that's even a driving force now of why i you know we'll do it today is because i want to get better and i see a lot of areas where i could get better i started using the name beeple in 2003. it's a stuffed animal from the 80s yeah so this is what i was sort of named after this people what do you like about it and nothing because i'm an adult it's like that was a decision that was made 17 years ago and i probably would have thought about it a little more if i knew i was still gonna be uh name that 17 years later but it is where it is this was just the the work i was mostly interested in back then i was interested in stuff that was more abstract and the other thing is just skill wise i couldn't make the work that i'm doing now like i physically had no idea any of the workflows of making the type of things that i do now these more simple images were how i learned about that maybe like this was learning about taking and exploding a piece of geometry like that this was learning about making a fluid sim like this and then applying a texture to it so a lot of these were just maybe a tiny little thing that i learned about the program that day and like explored that and then built that out into like a picture they're really just sort of like a combination of thousands of tricks at this a point is waging across the internet this film was just kind of talking about data privacy hacking into systems to sort of like weaponize them and the way the everydays were very helpful with that was building one or two little assets each day if you just did that for a month you'd have 30 different little robot assets that you could use to like build something i think an important part of the everydays is just learning to iterate on ideas really quickly i really try to figure out workflows to speed up my work and be able to like try out ideas as quick as possible in terms of like software obviously most of the pictures are done using cinema 4d the renderer has mostly been octane and that has been something that it's like sped up the workflow a lot rendering with the gpu was just like a huge huge like game changer and just opened up so many more possibilities of different ways to light things different ways to like set up scenes that i just wouldn't do before different types of materials that it was just like oh yeah you don't use a material like that it will just take forever to render now i was just like oh yeah you could use that brownie material that's so proud so this is another one of the everydays it's got these people discovering this giant soldier this one had like a model that was i believe from turbosquid and you can see you can move this guy's arms around or grab his legs and adjust those really feels like playing with toys it feels like i've got this kim jong-un action figure and i pop the head off and i put whatever head i want on glue that head on and then make it do this dumb thing it totally feels like a kid like just playing with toys like a two-year-old because with all your toys you're playing with i don't put making these every days up on such a pedestal that i need to be in this very pristine mindset or this very pristine environment i mean this table is a 30 table from walmart that i bought like 10 12 years ago like that's pretty much it like it's a table i think it's very easy to get caught up on you know the pieces of equipment for art that you don't have instead of focusing on what you do have and what you can build from that not getting caught up and like i need this beautiful space or i can't create work it's like you could create work you're just using that as a excuse to like not create work i do think that the table does have some cinnamon value because it is like as old roughly as the everydays and i do actually kind of want to get one of those standing desks but i'm also very lazy this room obviously was supposed to be a bedroom but it's got the bathroom right off of it and allowed us to put the computers in the bathroom that worked out really good being able to keep them in a place where they could stay cool we've got a fan in there and not be noisy at first my wife wasn't super on board with that but it's like okay these computers are paying for this house so it is what it is like we're putting them in there and we've got other bathrooms so it's not like we're you know in a bucket out back we're just very different i'm always very concerned about offending people mike is not so she never swears that's a big difference like obviously i swear a lot i've never heard her swear wonta i never have so yeah i try to be the the the very g-rated version of things yeah when i can be he's seeing some weird gross stuff but then every once in a while he'll throw in a cute little pig in a meadow or something sweet for me once in a while not often when he first transitioned to working at home i think he needed like i'm gonna get dressed every day and feel like i'm going to the office and he even put shoes on i mean he was like fully dressed belt done like really ready and i feel like i used to be a lot more like vigilant about keeping the kids out of the room and like okay when i'm working i'm working and then i you know as the kids get older it's like okay like life's short and the kids grow up very fast so you know i don't want to miss that stuff mike has been doing his everyday project since about a year after we started dating so i've seen it from the beginning with our first kid my wife was started being labor at like 9 00 p.m and so you started like watching the contractions or this or that and so finally at 5 00 a.m it was like okay well we should probably go to the hospital and so it's like i should probably get my picture done now though because i don't know what's going to go on at the hospital so i quickly did the picture before we went to the hospital and it was just like very very quick and super simple it is what it is on those days like nobody expects you nobody's like well that's the picture that's all you could come up with on the day your kid was born nobody expects you to even do it like if you do anything it's like a friggin plus so i think just managing expectation levels i i strongly believe is the the biggest way you can sort of stick with this there are two pieces to the project there's obviously the short term where each day you sit down and you make one finished piece and that piece can completely stand on its own but to me the bigger project is this long-term everydays project which is a project that i've been working on you know every single day for over 12 years and that to me was what was really cool about the gallery [Music] wait what the you guys do we're actually gonna shoot a porn in here is that cool whatever happens tonight like [Music] it'll be what it is like i can't control what's gonna happen tonight [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i think the entire resolution of this is like 200 000 by uh like 40 000 or something like that so you can like zoom super close in and see like tiny little details on individual pictures but then if you step like way back it also has like a different vantage point to it walking into the gallery and seeing like our life together i'm gonna cry about it now was really like emotional for me because like that was it was just a big deal to see it all in one place mimi are you guys so great doesn't it like super super big who's that who uncle scotty what's he covered in mud what flies around him maybe he's covered in poop does it make you think i very much view it as a show for the whole family because they've put in sacrifices as well to like allow this to happen [Music] it always catches me off guard when i go to events with mike because at home we we don't have an exciting life like we we don't go places we hang out with the kids so when i go to events it's very interesting for me to see people line up to talk to him and wait like a decent amount of time to ask him a question and i just want to like answer for them like i probably know it we saved you some time but to see people like taking pictures and hugging him and like i mean one girl cried to see how much his dedication to his work has has inspired them [Music] uh yeah the next day i mean i felt like i just like a train had like run over me like it was just it was a lot to process that show to me was sort of like a point that i'll remember in my career mike had planned for many more shows like toronto then 2020 hit with in-person appearances off the table he needed a new venue to exhibit and celebrate his art enter nft nfts or non-fungible tokens are basically certificates of authenticity tied to the cryptocurrency blockchain since nfts are one of a kind and can't be replicated these digital tokens allow collectors and fans the ability to own digital assets since 2017 people have been purchasing nfts to own virtual cats digital fragrances and tweets however in march of 2021 mike winkelmann became one of the most valuable living artists in the world selling every day's the first five thousand days at a christie's auction for a record 69 million dollars the main sort of secret of any of this is just taking the time to sit down and just sort of like allowing those ideas to come out i strongly believe it's a numbers game and the more times you sit down the better chance you're going to come up with that idea or that thing that really resonates with you or with other people i would like to have done these pictures until i die hopefully that's a long time from now and hopefully that's a lot of pictures you never know but that i would say is the like goal that i have right now [Music] um you

Channel: NVIDIA Studio

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Keywords: NVIDIA, NVIDIA Studio, RTX Studio, NVIDIA Creators, NVIDIA Design

Id: XKBtUe1E_I8

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021