Beeple Appeared On ‘The Tonight Show’ After His Animation NFT Installation Sold For $29 Million At Auction

However one may feel about NFTs, Beeple’s success is a watershed moment for independent animators and digital artists, proving that a market exists for quirky personal animation. Long before Beeple’s work became associated with NFTs, he was making work for himself and sharing it online. In fact, he’s been making daily art pieces (many of them animated), mostly in Cinema 4D, for the last 14 years.

If anything, Beeple’s story should serve as a reminder that often it’s not the work that’s lacking, but rather the delivery mechanism by which it’s consumed. Most independent animators produce short films, which rarely return big profits (and certainly not millions of dollars). Beeple was in that same boat as countless other indie digital artists, but his embrace of technology allowed him to reframe the work he produces and to reach a new audience that otherwise wouldn’t have cared for his work.

In the last few years, animation has increasingly become a common currency of the tech world – the recent hype about the “metaverse” is another good example – and animation artists and filmmakers have a first mover’s advantage in these realms since the technologies are so deeply rooted in the process of animation. Those, like Beeple, who choose to embrace new tech may discover rich rewards on the road ahead.