The Emmy Award-winning animation studio teams up with the Nouns DAO digital art community to usher in 2023, designing and building a 65-foot-long float manned by greater than life-sized memes Cone, Pickle, and Shark – some of the digital figures sold in daily NFT auctions.
Emmy Award-winning animation studio Stoopid Buddy Stoodios has moved far beyond the hilarious Robot Chicken hijinks they’re known for to bring their stop-motion production fabrication expertise into the “real” world with a unique New Year’s Day challenge. As stop-motion animation specialists, the studio boasts of its physical fabrication and construction capabilities – typically used to build wild and amazing things like sets, characters, armatures, and costumes – but usually, all pretty tiny. But for this special project, the team went BIG to bring the digital arts community Nouns into the 134th Annual Rose Parade in Pasadena, California, with a stunning float that reflects the signature talent of the SBS’ “Buddies,” a team of world-class builders and artists.
Conceived, proposed, and designed by Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, along with float builder AES, the giant 65-foot-long float will help the Rose Parade kick off 2023, reflecting this year’s theme of “Turning the Corner” as it introduces millions of viewers to the Nouns. The float, called “Meet the Nouns,” features 50-foot-tall figures of “Cone,” “Pickle,” and “Shark,” three of the digital art figures sold in Nouns DAO daily NFT auctions (non-fungible tokens). Money collected from the NFT sales funds a world of artistic and public works ideas and projects that the Nouns holder community votes to support.
One such project is the Nouns Noggles, the real-life wearable glasses designed and produced by Bigshot Toyworks through a grant from the Nouns DAO. Paper "Lo-Fi" versions of the Noggles (also produced by Bigshot Toyworks) will be on the smiling faces of many of the spectators at the Rose Parade.
“Nouns” are artistic, digital representations of everything Nouns is about, a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO – a path to the future of an online culture that is moving into the new Web3 world.
“We’re always looking for new ways, new ideas, and new entry points to express ourselves creatively,” notes Stoopid Buddy head of development Chris Waters. “We share important common traits with Nouns – we’re at the intersection of emerging technology, artist empowerment, and a vision of community-run organizations. So, the more we learned about Nouns, the more excited we became to put our creative skills to the test to tell the Nouns’ story.”
“We love our broadcast and streaming partners, but as intermediaries we don’t get that one-to-one relationship with our fans on their platforms,” Waters adds. “NFTs provide a new way to create and deploy IP and to build direct relationships with our fans where they can feel much closer to us, the creative process and can actually own a small piece of the worlds we create together.”
“No one else blends the creative vision and physical production capabilities – along with the vision of being an artistic collective – quite the way Stoopid Buddy does,” agreed studio co-founder Eric Towner. “What Nouns is doing is totally new and only possible because of blockchain and web technology, so we understood that the parade organizers might be hesitant. To their credit, they immediately loved the idea, and we are incredibly excited that we’ll be introducing Nouns to the parade’s global audience.”
Towner continues, “Our more recent costume work for The Masked Singer has been the perfect gateway drug to tackling something as ambitious as a 65-foot-long float for the Rose Parade. This has been a massive undertaking with plenty of challenges, but it’s gotten us to stretch creatively and we’re hopeful it’ll bring a smile to people’s faces when they see it rolling down Colorado Boulevard!
Speaking of the challenges encountered by Stoopid Buddies on the project, Towner explains, “The first big challenge was explaining what Nouns is as a DAO and Web3 company to a very traditional volunteer-led institution like the Rose Parade. To their credit, they were very patient, asked all the right questions, and embraced us. The other challenge as a first-time participant has been wrapping our heads around logistics. This is a massive, coordinated event, and we’re constantly feeling one step behind.”
Towner further shares the daunting logistics of getting hundreds of thousands of flowers on the float, prepping the dance crew and DJ, and ensuring their team knew where to be amongst the madness of over a million people who line up along the route. In addition, the design and build of the float and the character costumes were a huge undertaking. The Stoopid Buddy “Builds Team” also designed and fabricated six walk-around character costumes that will ride on the float on the day of the parade.
“Nouns hopes to become a ubiquitous brand, or as they refer to it, meme,” Towner says. “Stoopid Buddy Stoodios wanted to create something that was big and absurd that captured the boundless energy and spirit of the Nouns community, and that would be seen by millions. As Stoopid Buddy’s head of development, I also grew up in Pasadena and worked the parade selling programs as a kid, so I thought it would be a great event to bring Nouns onto the national stage.”
Stoopid Buddy is also producing its first-ever documentary about the experience of connecting with the artwork-based NFT company Nouns, developing, designing, and bringing to life the float for one of the most well-known parades in the world.
The 134th Rose Parade Presented by Honda can be seen nationwide beginning at 8 a.m. on Monday, January 2, 2023, live from Pasadena, California.
Source: Stoopid Buddies Stoodios
