Building Web3, Art and Animation with Robbie Shilstone

Today , I'm excited to welcome artist Robbie Shilstone , a Los Angeles-based animator , director and filmmaker . His work showcases a variety of styles , themes and techniques that align with each of his projects , and he pulls from abstraction , minimalism , music and philosophy to create worlds for his characters to inhabit .

He's about to launch his new project , public , which we'll cover on the show , and I'm just super excited to have him here , because your work is amazing and I think what you're building is really , really cool . So thanks for coming on the show , yeah thanks for having me .

Just give people an idea of who you are .

So to give a sense of my background , I come from a traditional illustration background , you know , went to art school to learn illustration design . You know anatomy drawing classes , all of the above .

I knew pretty much from the beginning that I wanted to get into animation , but the tools are not easily accessible to someone who's maybe an amateur just starting out .

So as time went on , I kind of taught myself , gathered kind of the resources and tools and yet , just like I figured there's no better way than just diving in and kind of really throwing yourself at the practice .

But it's like a picture of a jazz musician playing various instruments , right , and there's three of them . When you overlay the VR app , it like plays the music , which I thought was super cool . I consider web three actually like crypto , blockchain , stuff , ar , vr and AI . It's like all , all of those things yeah , all of the umbrella .

You kind of are dabbling in everything there with your art . How did you get into web three ? Like ? You're an artist , an animator , you've worked for some pretty big name brands like Disney , and how did you go from that to web three stuff ?

I think it's just what I naturally gravitate towards , and so , you know , I have been constantly looking for different ways and means of pursuing that .

I'm not one for really waiting for permission for people to tell me I can start doing something , particularly like an idea that I need to see fleshed out , and so crowdsourcing had always been this really interesting idea to me , but it never really felt serious enough to make a career on . It always felt very , I don't know , pieced together .

I didn't feel like a serious investment in a project , and so I naturally kind of heard about the people drop back in 2021 and his landmark sale that kind of like took over the public news cycle for a while , and my manager at the time was like hey , I think you're the ideal candidate for this space .

Like it's a place where creatives can kind of like use their you know , fandom as well as also be paid for their work which at that time in a digital landscape , had never been even on the table . You're talking about people just putting up things for , hopefully , social engagement , which then might lead to a financial opportunity .

But that is like was an unprecedented moment for the digital art world . So I heard about that and we kind of made a wallet together . We were making an Ethereum wallet . We're kind of fast-tracked on the Super Rare . Our very first piece was a one-of-one collab with Method man from Wu-Tang , so it was kind of a sweet way to just jump into the space .

They contacted us , saw our work and really liked it . So , yeah , it was kind of a haphazard way of getting into the space . I think most people can attest to being like your first steps into Web 3 might be a little chaotic a little .

You know you have to kind of fish through all the scams and the people that are just like DMing you or tagging you and you're like what the hell is this place ? But slowly but surely built this really great community here . That has been particularly on Solana .

That has been such a great way for us to just kind of grow together in this kind of bizarre ecosystem .

He had met Method man in Brooklyn back in like early 90s at a music production studio , and in a hallway he whipped out a boombox and cassette tapes and he essentially played him a track and there's a video of Method man freestyling on top of the boombox cassette tapes .

So they were like wanted to recreate that in a fine art sense 25 years later , and that's the name of the piece . So it's kind of like this abstracted hip hop version of that moment . And so , yeah , they just reached out and kind of like coordinated the whole thing .

It took a little bit to get it over the finish line because none of us knew pretty much anything about Web 3 at the time other than , hey , let's put something up and see what happens . And so it's sold for a pretty substantial amount . At that point I was like , okay , I think we're here to like hang out and see what's going on .

I can do this , yeah , exactly .

I think the writing is really compelling . So public is a character led animated universe set in a bustling mid century metropolis . It is public's belief that everyone is unique with a story worth telling . While more modern characters exist in this world , it is fondness of the past that will breathe throughout everything related to public .

Through short films and animated vignettes , we glimpse into the everyday lives of every citizen . Each hand drawn character will be a collectable cast member of this living , breathing world . Collectors will gain access to the animation production process , contribute to story ideas and develop these characters alongside the creator .

The gradual release of characters will support film development with the ultimate goal of screening at film festivals , pitching to streaming networks , securing a show deal and growing the IP . Number one . That's a great thesis . You heard the beginning of the show . My whole tagline for the index is we believe people are worth knowing .

It really resonates for me what you're trying to do and it's just so thoughtful . I just wonder like where did the inspiration for this come from ? Where's the inspiration drawn from ?

I guess I should touch on Offleash a little bit , because that it was kind of our proof of concept a little bit , and then I can delve into you know , where this concept really came from . Offleash was a film that I fundraised on Solana just over a year ago . We put all the characters in the film up for sale .

It's a film about dogs , so nine dogs went up for sale and it was over a three week period and we said whichever one of these characters sells for the most and is auctioned off for the most will become the protagonist of the film .

And that kind of kept me as a storyteller on my toes and kind of needing to be improvisational and willing to practice that philosophy of saying I could put the spotlight on any of these characters and I have something to say about each of them . And now when you see the final result , which the poodle ended up being the protagonist , her name's Isabella .

The collector got to name them . They got a little tag with their name on it as an airdrop was fun . If you were to look at the full cast there's a wide variety of different characters . Like there's a pug who is like super derpy and like really like you would never think to be a protagonist in a film .

They were always the comic relief , and so I found that exercising that and being open enough for that was something that stimulated me , just got me excited to think oh , what would the film actually be like with any of these guys ? So that was the initial idea and now off leash was actually our plan B of all things .

So we had an entire separate film and all the artwork and the actual like pieces to auction off were ready to go .

And I'm not gonna divulge what that film necessarily about , but we were planning on selling essentially vignettes that were like little animated scenes that would be kind of referencing what the film's about as well as kind of a seasonal interpretation of the city itself and then background characters .

And then as time went on , we were like man , these background characters , that is the whole thing .

Everyone is a background character and someone else's story and that's kind of how we like drifted over from being like no , we're gonna do one film at a time and really focus in on that , to then saying , no , it's crap , that the films shouldn't necessarily be the first thing that we're leading with .

We should lead with the characters , because that's what people care about . And then through that process we really like it's been , you know , now coming on two years of really fleshing this idea out and really like just honing it , creating all of the characters . Now we're pretty deep into it .

I'm excited to really practice what we preach and put something out there .

The normal way to do business is like pitch a production company , get a bunch of money , then like make the film right and this is like we're gonna develop the characters with the fans and like let the market kind of help tell us what thing is gonna resonate the most .

Like I'm really interested to see where this lands in a couple of years , where , like these characters that you're developing initially through like the sales , the auctions , and then through the vignette development and like this like iterative process , where is it gonna go ?

You know , like what thing is gonna be the most popular and will that have a meaningful impact on the longevity of the brand you're building around it Right ? Like I mean , look in startups , is customer discovery right ?

Like you do you go out and you like have an idea for a startup and so you talk to your customers and this is literally the best kind of customer discovery . You're literally selling them the content before you've actually made the film or the game or whatever it is . I mean it's really cool to watch .

to do the off leash film , what's to say , we can deliver the goods . We have delivered the goods . We've already done this on a smaller scale .

Now let's like take it more seriously , and I feel like there's a lot of projects currently that don't really like they launch just a generative collection or whatever it might be , and it becomes a huge success , and then they are like trying to figure out what to do with all these funds .

And for me , I really wanted to make sure that the goal was always super clear and , with the path of exactly what it is , we were trying to do .

Stuff always takes a long time to to get over the finish line , though .

He's just are you the only animator or you have other people helping you , or is it just you ?

So I animate on twos , which means 12 frames per second . Essentially , every time you look at a , you know , a frame of my animation is still frame . That's one of 12 that would , you know , have to be made of per frame .

So it's quite a laborious process and you know I've been able to Streamline my process quite a bit over the years and really , you know hone in on how to produce it in a way that's a little More favorable to my time and schedule . But you're still in the weeds , you know , scrolling through frames .

So it's quite a laborious process and you know , as far as the full production , it's like you design the characters , you storyboard , you know the actual like , beat by beat , how you time that out to music and in the off-leashers case , we , you know , commissioned a composer and you know performers to produce the score of the film , which is you can listen to on

Spotify . Now it's a full production process Animations a little different than , say , video , in the sense that you shoot Footage and then you edit it down . When it comes to live action , but an animation , you pretty much edit the entire film before you even start animating itself .

Just because there's no extra footage you don't like , you have to make every single bit of it . So it's a labor of love at the end of the day and you know , that's kind of the philosophy of wanting to do one-of-ones as opposed to , say , generative collections .

If you think about a thousand people , like you know it , over a thousand people , guaranteed right , it's like and , and they're all individuals , like a thousand kind of feels small to me , frankly , as far as like the variety of people in this world and different stories that you could tell .

So you know that that is a benchmark that I'm wanting to like hit as at least when we're , you know , trying to communicate about it . But it's definitely an ambitious scale , but we're planning on rolling it out slowly over a really long period of time . It's not something where it's like we're dropping a thousand at once .

So , for instance , if all the fine dining cooks were to drop at once and that kind of fleshes out like that little pocket of storytelling and location-based character collection , that within it , so you can kind of do like Different versions of it .

So it's not only one a week , but we want to like provide that cadence so that people know and can expect every single week when you return at this time you will see a new character that's in the collection and that's like a moment of entertainment that kind of takes your eye off of the floor price of a collection and just makes it about the fun , the

storytelling . You know , and there is an entry point you know every week it's not just like you can get in if the market's at a low point or if it's at a high point .

You know that , there's just like it's more sustainable in a long term and you know I've been able to grow my Instagram account over quite a long period of time without any gimmicks or tricks , like it's always it's been organic and it because of that it has , you know , flourished into like one of the most you know Fascinating communities on Instagram .

I think , as far as just the type of people that , a gravitate sword .

I have not seen an experiment quite like this yet . You know the slow drip , the actual creation process .

But just spontaneously , just doing that on their own every single post , pretty much I prompt saying what's their name and or if it's a building or a restaurant . Or this week I posted a sailboat and I said what's the sailboat's name ? And people write these crazy backstories for it .

I love it because it's like for me , art is a reflection of each of us , like it's that's where you find real values . You see yourself in it and are able to pull something from it that no one else would , and so whenever you get that chance to , you know see people's interpretations of this . It's a reflection of themselves .

You know some people be like that's my dad and he just passed away three years ago , and like I miss him every day and I'm like holy shit , this is awesome , it's just because it's beautiful .

It's a word from shillstone . I believe public can be a force for good in the world Outside of just being entertainment . Public can provide intellectual , emotional and financial value to its fans by making the brand and body growth , human connection and simplicity . I know public can stand the test of time . It's really powerful , what you're doing .

It goes back to the why , like you believe these stories are important in the people that are telling them are actually the fans . They're the ones , like , helping create and tell the story and there's just something really meaningful there .

And I'm like I'm thinking about you mentioned Like you're gonna roll out these thousand ish initial ones like once a week , with like potentially some bulk drops . It sounds like a handful as bulk , like five , ten maybe at a once .

It just strikes me that there's just like it's gonna be basically forever and it could be , and you've seen like some timeless classics out there that have like 15 seasons , you know , and this is like the beginning of one of those things . But it's a totally different Medium , isn't the right word ? It's it's , but it is a different delivery right .

It's a very different delivery of Something like this . It's really intriguing .

Obviously , more is better and in certain instances but like I didn't get into animation to make money , let's put it like that so I'm , you know , keen on making sure that this has like real Sticking value for people and becomes part of their lives in a way .

You know it's not just something that distract you from , you know , your , your everyday life , but it's something that hopefully helps you cope with life in a way .

There's just a lot of noise in the world right now and I think people , particularly on the internet , are really starved of soulful things that are like a piece of calm and Really like that slow them down for a moment , when I feel like that's something that the internet Certainly doesn't incentivize , but clearly there's a demand for it to some degree .

We're getting towards the top of the show here and I always ask kind of the same question of people but what have I not asked you that I should have asked ?

There's like a clear lack of value that's being associated with creators . Like I said previously , I don't want to wait for permission from someone else . I know there are people out there that want to see what I want to produce . I'm going to try and get to that as quickly as possible , because the idea is here and now and it needs to be made now .

The bureaucratic hurdles of traditional media to me is just too slow in today's world .

I think that having a fan base that can really support and hopefully gain something from it as well Not just the entertainment or like a Kickstarter , but hopefully can be rewarded for being early to culture I think that to me is like a really interesting and unprecedented opportunity .

But that direct connection between creator and the consumer , the audience , is really important and I think more and more creators are becoming aware of the fact that their core channel , their core ways , where they reach that audience , is not theirs . They don't own that audience .

And the nature of having your fan have a wallet that's composable across an open , permissionless blockchain that allows you to all of a sudden have that direct relationship . Technologies may change , providers of interfaces to access , the fans may change , but it's always there . The connection is always there . You can always find a way .

That's the future of the internet is that you have this connection across platforms and they don't own it . You own it .

Really look forward to seeing how you end up .