PASS THE BATON | PACE VERSO/OPENSEA
Role : Design and animation
'Pass the Baton' is an NFT collection launched in 2022 on Pace's Verso platform and on Opensea. The idea was to create an NFT asset that would be able to distribute funds to different social justice organizations and efforts. Each Baton listed a series of different groups it would benefit. The project was part of a series of NFT projects conceived in the studio to benefit the iconic Olympian Tommie Smith.
The Batons were based on an old practice baton Tommie kept that had the names of his relay teammates and their splits marked on the side. We created 31K unique animations for this project.
To produce the baton animations, I started by modeling and organizing all of the components and shaders in Maya. Each component type would be labelled and rendered. from there, once we had all of the different component variations rendered into their composite parts, they were imported and layered in After Effects. Finally, a script for the final assembly was input into after effects. We had three Mac Pros running the final assembling, encoding, and archiving the final animations for 3 straight days.
Example of the animated Asset design