I ran community driven Art game on Tiktok!

5 min readJan 10, 2020

Starting Jan 1, Mack came to me with an as usual weird idea.
How can we build an evolving art project utilizing social media? 🤔

And boom, Schmelt on Tiktok was born!

Schmelt is a community driven art experience that evolves an outcome every 24hrs, based on community polls. The story, art, and production is created one hour before the cutoff time each day, and has been running Jan 1, 2020.
And guess what? It ENDS TODAY! 😱

This is how it started

Day 1

I painted a small faux amazon box (jungl) with a simple statement.
“A Mysterious package has arrived, what would you do?”
and a Poll to Open or Kick It.

The post received
- 534 views
- 14 hearts.
- 159 Votes

*Note this is all Organic Growth Data.

—

As a result of the majority vote, the follow up day was to display an Open Box containing something “mysterious”.

Day 2.

It’s a baby Schmelt!

I continued the narrative and drew the inside of a cardboard box with a small eye-less blob smiling.

The next point in the story asks, “Where it should Live?” At this point I was using this question to change the setting of the character.

Space won the vote, and Schmelt evolved to a new location. I decided to show a little bit of evolution by giving the peak of some space tentacles under his body.

Day 3

Once Schmelt found his new home, I wanted to start to evolve the character a lil bit more. I asked a simple question. What should he Eat? Pizza or Watermelon.

This is where things got interesting, in the first 16 hours of the poll running. Watermelon was running the lead. And so, I drew up a watermelon evolved Schmelt.

😰

But in the last hour, Pizza won the majority vote. So I had to quickly come up with a solution.

In that last 30 mins of having to upload a new variant of Schmelt, I decided to give him a pizza slice triangle head with some pepperoni cheeks. It worked!

—

We’re now on the last day!

Schmelt has evolved into a lettuce headed, dino pajama wearing, little dude with a video game joystick poking out of his head.

And its amazing!

But what is next for Schmelt, and how will the story end?

It’s important to note.

None of this art or story line was planned.

Every part of the Schmelt 10 day story has been completely random and based off of community polling.

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In total here’s some interesting numbers to look at.

Theres a few take aways that I’d like to add on this experiment, and get your thoughts on.

All of the art/animation was created using my iPad.
I wanted to try doing a project that wouldn't require me to fire up my macbook and run some expensive software. So using my macbook, I’d draw up the new Schmelt and animate the transitions using the native Tiktok editing tools and iMovie.
TALK ABOUT EFFICIENCY
The power of Tiktoks Foryou content algorithm is what gave Instagram/Twitter/ and Youtube their spice 3 years ago. And since then Tiktok seems to be the only way to get organic eye balls on your content… How long will this last?
Is this a DAO? For all of you Blockchain heads reading, would this be considered a dao. How does something like this give us insight on how brands, characters, and influencers will be created in the future. Is the best product, the product designed by the community?
Should each image of Schmelt’s evolution be minted into an NFT?