If you love electronic music, art and animation, you’ll love the first series of Deadly Buda N.F.T.s. Each N.F.T. is not only a unique, collectible, creative work you can own, but also contributes to the ongoing development of the full-length Deadly Buda animated story.
“NFT” stands for Non-Fungible Token. Essentially it is a unique spot on a cryptocurrency blockchain that refers to a particular thing. An NFT can be associated with physical goods, digital art and other assets to show ownership of a particular item.
I have been hard at work over the years working on an animated movie inspired by my early years as a rave DJ: Deadly Buda. The development process for this project has spanned over three decades and wove through several of my creative disciplines. Aspects of the project first appeared on rave flyers I drew in the early 1990s and later appeared on the covers of the Deadly Systems record label in the mid-1990s. More concept art made a brief appearance in the Deadly Type magazine as we headed to the end of the Twentieth Century.
The twenty-first century brought a renewed fervor to the project and I spent several years working exclusively on the story’s screenplay. Progress halted when I became involved in a multi-year lawsuit. Shortly thereafter another period of intense activity began as I commissioned artworks and animations of various sorts to further the project’s development.
Once again, progress slowed because of family matters, only to be terminated in 2014 with the explosion of a transformer that rained flaming oil on the back porch of my Santa Monica, CA apartment. The fire spread inside, and almost all my personal and business belongings were destroyed. Me and my daughter are lucky to be alive.
After a couple years of piecing my life back together, I dedicated over 2-and-a-half years exclusively to creating an animated demo that was years-in-the-waiting. Finally, I had a cohesive development project to shop to studios.
Paradoxically, I have always been somewhat reluctant to shop the project to major or even independent studios. When I do, they never seem to appreciate the project’s concept, whereas my fans readily do. Sometimes I worry about the basic idea of the project being stolen. Other times I lament that the amount of work and soul-searching that I invested in the project could not be compensated via the traditional media system. Thus, I procrastinate in presenting the project to bigger firms that could speedily “finish” the project in some commercial fashion.
I have been quite involved with media-related cryptocurrency projects over the years. For example, I made the first-ever smart contract enabled DJ-mix, and was the Global Ambassador for an early streaming-music blockchain, Musicoin. In the back of my mind, I always hoped that cryptocurrency could help an artist like myself make a decent living from my art. I was intrigued with the NFT concept since its earliest days. As the Deadly Buda demo animation came into being, the 2021 NFT-craze was in full swing. As the technology and basic ideas of NFTs became more accepted, I increasingly thought NFTs could be a vehicle for the project.
There are many different approaches, blockchains, and markets for NFTs. After a long period of consideration, I decided that the WAX blockchain would best serve the Deadly Buda project and its fans, friends and supporters. It is easy to onboard new users. Platforms dedicated to the WAX blockchain, such as wax.atomichub.io, are fun and easy to use. It is fun to sell, trade and search for NFTs to your liking. I also appreciate that many of the NFT projects are priced to be readily accessible to an average fan or consumer. I have always wanted my art to be appreciated by many rather than a select few, and WAX seems more fluid and user-friendly in this respect.
Another aspect I love about WAX is that it is designed to make it fun to collect NFTs in a game-like fashion. I have spent years of my life scouring old record bins, boxes of comic books, and thrift shops for various goodies. I get that same buzz from WAX, so I want to make my NFTs fun to collect as well.
The first series of Deadly Buda NFTs divides the various scenes of the animated demo into limited-edition individual NFTs that can be collected in-full to represent the entire animated demo. Furthermore, extra NFTs will be my various creations that contributed to the project’s development over time. In this way, fans and supporters have a piece of art and become, in-a-fashion, backers of an already tangible idea and project in-the-making. In some cases, the original artworks are totally lost because of the 2014 fire. The digital file you have may be that artwork’s primary representation.
If all goes well, Series One will lay the groundwork for the entire screenplay to be animated. Each section of the story can be collected and enjoyed by fans and supporters who know in their heart they are an important part in taking a project envisioned to help all those that experience it, from dream to reality.
Everything on Earth, was a fantasy first!
Joel Bevacqua
a.k.a. the original DJ Deadly Buda
P.S. You may wonder why the very first series is “Part 8”. It is because the screenplay contains seven parts previous to this part of the story. Part 8 was chosen to be animated first because it contained many aspects of the story a viewer would find interesting.
