Apeshit Studio

Inspiration

We are two good friends - an engineer who plays the drum and a designer who plays the piano. Obviously, we both love music. We remember the days when we all had neatly organised rows of LPs, tapes, and CDs, and album art was something we'd proudly hang on our wall. The satisfying feelings when we finally track down that missing album from our favourite artist and complete our collection. It quickly became ancient history. We wanted to bring that back, using the blockchain.

Hypothesis

We found that there is a disparity between the number of NFTs listed in art and music category in NFT marketplaces. We believe that the current NFT market is less accessible to musicians and that a major barrier to entry is the ability to create high-quality visual art for their music.

What it does

Apeshit Studio enables musicians to create NFTs with beautiful, bespoke visuals. It provides a high-quality 3D graphic shape to start with. Musicians can simply upload their music, generate unique visuals animated to the beats, and mint NFT on the platform.
Our next step is to facilitate collaboration, giving musicians and visual artists a platform to create art together and split the rewards. Visual artists can upload their visuals to the shape library and set their own commission rate based on sale price. Every time the NFT gets resold, a one-time collaboration turns into a lifetime of shared earnings. It supports formats(.glb, .glft) that are compatible with the majority of 3D design tools including Cinema4D and Blender.
Our vision is to provide a new way for music fans to support their favourite artists by collecting beautiful artwork. Apeshit Studio can make music collecting great again!

How we built it

3D Graphic: we used Blender to create a shape with displacement effect
Website: React app using the excellent react-three-fiber library to render animations. There is no backend code and we are not tracking anyone using the site.
Testing NFT minting: Pinata on IPFS, the Metaplex NFT manifest standard, MintUI

Challenges we ran into

Creating mp4 files in the browser is hard: we initially looked at ccapture but settled for a manual screen capture approach due to the animation and audio getting out of sync. Probably the best solution would be an AWS Lambda function (as open-source code) that processes both the animation and music to deliver an .mp4 as download.
Documentation: there is space for a lot of tutorials and high-quality documentation e.g. on how to properly interact with the Solana chain in a React app. Most of our learnings came from reading code inside repos on Github.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making a tool for musicians: we could not find an NFT creation tool specifically aimed at musicians. We hope what we built will inspire musicians to create beautiful NFTs and also inspire technical teams to build tools serving musical and visual artists.
Rendering 3D graphics in the browser: there was a lot to learn about Blender, animation file formats, three.js and its use in React. In the end, we successfully managed to display the animation we designed on our site.
Providing comprehensive NFT minting instructions for NFTs using .mp4 files: though it's only a 5 step process, we believe this will be helpful to creators everywhere, whether they use our tool or not

What we learned

Minting NFTs is hard: there is infrastructure to be built for Solana NFTs, e.g. an NPM module that implements the Metaplex standard, interacts with the chain and supports more file formats (like .mp4). This would unlock building great UIs to mint Solana NFTs, regardless of technical knowledge.

What's next for Apeshit Studio

Win a hackathon prize!
Continue building towards our vision of a fully-fledged collaboration platform for musicians and visual artists. We want to encourage creativity in the NFT space and create new revenue streams for artists.
Sell our first Apeshit NFT!