Stoopid Buddy Stoodios Brings the Nouns DAO Art Project into the Real World During the 2023 Rose Parade®
The creative minds at Stoopid Buddy Stoodios move beyond the screen and into the real world this January 2 as they bring the digital arts community Nouns into the 134th Rose Parade®Presented By Honda in Pasadena, Calif., with a stunning float that showcases the imagination, ingenuity and creative risk taking that is a hallmark of the creators of Robot Chicken.
Conceived, proposed and designed by Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, along with float builder AES, the giant float will help kick off 2023 during the Rose Parade and reflect the parade’s theme of “Turning the Corner” as it introduces millions of viewers to the Nouns.
Called “Meet the Nouns,” the float will feature 50-foot-tall figures of “Cone,” “Pickle” and “Shark,” three of the digital art figures that have been purchased in Nouns DAO daily auctions of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. Money collected from the sale of Nouns NFT’s funds a world of artistic and public works ideas and projects that the Nouns holder community votes to support.
It’s this very concept of the Nouns DAO as a global artistic collective that attracted Stoopid Buddy Stoodios to propose building the float to the Nouns community – and it’s Stoopid Buddy’s experience designing and fabricating intricate puppets and sets for its stop-motion animation projects like Robot Chicken that gave the studio confidence in its ability to create a real-world project on a grand scale.
“We’re always looking for new ways, new ideas and new entry points to express ourselves creatively,” says Chris Waters, head of development for Stoopid Buddy. Best known for its stop-motion work, Stoopid Buddy’s team of artists also has created 2-D animation, massive armature-based costumes for “The Masked Singer” and Riot Games, and a dizzying array of physical sets for its productions. It has also been on the forefront of digital innovation, originally creating Robot Chicken as a “web series,” pre-dating streaming and online content.
“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,” Waters said.
“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,” agrees Stoodios co-founder Eric Towner. To create the float for the Rose Parade, Stoopid Buddy first had to make the proposal to the Nouns community. Once approved, they had to bring the concept to the Tournament of Roses, which organizes the parade.
“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,” Waters said.
In creating the float, Stoopid Buddy used all of its production expertise to conceive and design the idea, and are working with float builder Artistic Entertainment Services to fabricate the 70-foot-long creation. In addition to the float, Stoopid Buddy’s “Builds Team” designed and fabricated six walk-around character costumes that will ride on the float on the day of the parade.
The 134th Rose Parade Presented by Honda can be seen nationwide beginning at 8 a.m. on Monday, January 2, 2023, live from Pasadena, Calif.