The Creative Spark: Beeple, Everyday Artist - Film

(MUSIC) This is Neenah, Wisconsin, also known as the Paper Valley. Population 25,000. Average temperature in January, 25 degrees. This is my street. This is my house. (MUSIC) My name is Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, and I make art everyday. (MUSIC) This is my workspace. This is my cheap old PC, and this is the blank canvas that I've looked at everyday for the past six years. (MUSIC) I started posting things online as Beeple right after college. It's this little toy that sort of responds to sound and light. So I kind of (SOUND) like that interaction with sound and light. And that kind of represents a lot of work that I do is sort of that interplay, you know, between video and audio. (MUSIC) So that's what sort of drew me to it. About six years ago I started doing Everyday Project. I wanted to get better at drawing. So I was like, well, I'll try doing a, a drawing everyday and post it online. At the end of the year I'd noticed that I had gotten a lot better at drawing. Still not very good, but I'd gotten a lot better from where I started. I realized obviously this is a, a very good way to learn a bunch of different things. So, I've been doing it ever since. It helps me focus on just getting a little bit better each day. (MUSIC) Posting your everyday work online is important for a couple reasons. One, just because it helps you get better at putting out work, and I think that sometimes, something people have a problem with, just releasing work. It's a good way of just sort of getting ideas out there and, and you know, seeing what works. (MUSIC) Each year, I sort of have a focus and I use that program in at least part of the process. This year is Cinema 4D again, but I'm sort of using ZBrush and emphasizing that now. So I'm sort of, everyday I'm trying to use Cinema 4D and ZBrush. (MUSIC) This is something that I'm right there at the beginning, watching tutorials everday and struggling with it. The beginning is definitely tough, especailly if you're starting with something new that you have never used before. (MUSIC) In college, I had started out making short films and little videos like that. And I had slowly realized that I didn't have as much fun shooting videos and there's so many unpredictable things with actors and that. And I realized If I was working, you know, more with computers, I had control over everything. So that sort of appealed to me in terms of being able to, you know, work at my own pace and try more experimental things. (MUSIC) I also started being very into electronic music that I sort of began exploring some of the possibilities with synching music and video very tightly. I thought it'd be cool if you could sync up every single instrument in the video. What would that look like? (MUSIC) If you could see every high hat high, every snare hit, every kick. (MUSIC) How would that change the way you looked at the music? (MUSIC) I was trying to make music videos for music that was already made. But when I started, you know, trying to do that with a, you know, squashed out wave form you can't see the individual instruments. It's all compressed together. And so I realized if I was making the music myself, I could see each kick and each snare drum, and I could synch things directly to it that way. (MUSIC) I'm trying to make something that I like, but the underlying goal is to learn, is to get better at something. The actual end result is sort of a by-product of that process. (MUSIC) VJ clips are just basically like a short, sort of ambient, abstract visual, that VJs, who are video jockeys, will use as visuals behind a music performance. (MUSIC) Most of the ideas have come from every day is where it starts out as something I built in Cinema 40 and I realized, oh you know, if I move the camera around or if I animated this sort of property on it, that it'd be you know, were cool as a 20 to 30 second little piece of video. (MUSIC) The goal with it is just to, you know, make something that people find useful and, you know, incorporate it into their, their music sets or anything like that. With releasing them through Creative Commons people are, you know, they can do whatever they want from them. People can download all the project files and edit them however they want. And people have used them in commercials and student projects. And it's definitely interesting to see, you know, the different ways that people have used these. I'd watch so many tutorials out there and stuff, that people had posted for free. And it taught me so much that I felt like, if I can give back in some way and, and help others, you know, maybe learn from some of the work that I have. (MUSIC) I wouldn't say there's really any goal and to just keep working. I'm more focused on just trying to get better. In terms of things I want to learn, I mean there's, there's definitely tons of stuff. Like I know almost nothing about rigging. Modeling is definitely something I would love to learn more of. More Cinema 4D stuff, Expresso. I know almost nothing about Expresso. Thinking particles I know almost nothing about. Body paint. I mean there's, there's plenty of areas. (MUSIC) I just don't want to like take it too seriously cause this is just some like crap I made on my computer. It's the best I can do that day and it's like hopefully it'll be a little bit better tomorrow and that's, that's all I can hope for. This is, that's it. (MUSIC) (MUSIC)