Ryan Talbot

The artist.

Ryan Talbot, born in 1997, is a contemporary 3D artist raised in Southern California with a love for the cinema. At the age of 9, he was wielding iMovie and a point-and-shoot camera to make stop-motion movies involving Legos, sock puppets & anything else he could gather around the house. After spending a year in the Cal State Long Beach Film program, he decided that college wasn’t a good fit for him and began educational leave to pursue work opportunities in the field of animation. Around the same time, he gained an interest in learning the 3D software Cinema4D. Since then, he has earned his way to working with artists and brands such as Zedd, Lil Nas X, Nickelodeon, New Balance & more. In 2019, he secured the Grand Prize of Australia's Got Talent as the animator behind Kristy Sellar’s interactive dance acts. While all this went on, Ryan continued to develop his own style by creating personal artwork in his free time.

Since diving into the NFT space in January 2021, Ryan has exhibited work at Beeple Studios in Charleston, The Pellas Gallery in Boston, Art Innovation’s Floating Pixels at Art Basel Miami, The Medici Collection in Times Square & The SuperRare Gallery in New York.

‘Lighter Than Air’ is the latest installation in Lily’s Journey, a series focused on the whimsical adventures of Lily & Tank. The first animation was sold as a 1/1 on Makersplace in 2021, and has since gained widespread popularity on Superrare & Nifty Gateway with support from collectors such as Bharat Krymo, Keyboard Monkey & Cozomo de’ Medici. Each animation adds a new layer of story and world-building, introducing new locations, characters and events. The series mirror’s Ryan’s own journey as a film-maker & artist, giving a nod to the inner 9 year old who still loves to make home-made movies. The music was composed by Jonathan Richmond, whom Ryan has been collaborating with on short films since 2018.

Ryan’s creative process usually begins with sketching the idea in Procreate, then hopping directly into Cinema4D to begin blocking out the scene in 3D. From there, it’s a long process of rigging, texturing, lighting, and animating frame by frame until everything is just right. Frames are rendered using an engine called Octane, then final adjustments such as color grading are achieved in After Effects. Ryan records and assembles the sound design himself in a program called Logic.