Exclusive: Jim Carrey Secretly Dropped NFTs Under His Web3 Alias

The Alpha:

• On May 9, 2022, the iconic comedian, actor, and producer Jim Carrey secretly dropped an NFT collection on Foundation, according to information shared with nft now via Big Head Club, the Web3 studio behind the NFTs.

• Carrey released the collection, called Germinations, under his Web3 alias String Bean. It includes five animated, autobiographical paintings by Carrey, each containing audio of the actor narrating the characters depicted in the pieces.

• The NFT collection experiments with how society perceives and interacts with fame, art, and value. The collection’s reveal also hints at forthcoming projects from Carrey under his String Bean alias.

Why it matters

While Jim Carrey publicly dropped his “first” NFTs on SuperRare in June and August, it turns out he actually had already released an NFT collection on Foundation months before, entitled Germinations.

Carrey has remained a cultural institution in his own right for decades, and Germinations revolves around that very fact.

“We were trying to play with the audience,” explained Mack Flavelle, CEO of Big Head Club, in an interview with nft now. “You’re literally looking at Jim Carrey’s face. You’re hearing Jim Carrey narrate [these paintings]. And you don’t know that it’s Jim Carrey. That was part of the play. And it worked.”

The five animated paintings in the Germinations collection are 30 seconds to a minute in length and feature audio from Carrey himself as he inhabits the role of each unique character. Some are somber, others are erratic, but each is arresting. To create the NFTs, Carrey recorded short videos of himself in character, froze the videos, and constructed paintings from those video stills. He then provided the visuals and the audio to the Big Head Club team, which then animated the paintings.

“They are literally the voices inside his head,” Flavelle continued. “They are different characters that he hears. So, when you look at them, realize that every one of them is him painting himself. They’re all autobiographical paintings. They’re just isms of him.”

Flavelle, who co-founded massive Web3 successes like Dapper Labs and CryptoKitties before starting Big Head Club, noted that because Carrey is already an established public figure, they were free from the constraints of optimizing the project for financial gain. This allowed him and Carrey to explore project ideas that the two simply found compelling. After working together for months, Flavelle said he came away from the project struck by Carrey’s intensity and drive for the creative process.

“He has an imperative, a need to create,” Flavelle said of Carrey. “He has a need to produce art. And this new medium became…