Galverse #13 - Going Supernova!

We all made an anime music video! A massive month in the Galverse with our first anime drop, cosmic inventory upgrades and our first VTuber eSports team!

Aug 30, 2023

Welcome to the thirteenth Shinsei Galverse monthly newsletter, shooting across time & space to make the galaxy a better place! Here’s the rundown this week:

1️⃣ Tove Lo x Shinsei Galverse music video! Our first anime release!
2️⃣ New upgrades for all Gals! The Cosmic Inventory is live!
3️⃣ GalForce1, VTuber esports team, kicks off!

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Tove Lo x Galverse -
I like u Official Music Video!

We partnered up with international superstar, GRAMMY® Award nominated artist Tove Lo to create the official music video for her summer smash single ‘I like u’.

The video premiere was a major moment for Tove fans and the Galverse community, with thousands tuning in from around the world to see our first anime production.

‘I like u’ has soared past 200k views and shows no signs of slowing down.

This is a major achievement for Shinsei Galverse! Not only is it the first animation release from our project, but we believe it’s the first time an artist has collaborated with a web3 project in such a meaningful way.

From day one, we saw the music video as a trailer for the main anime - a way to introduce hundreds of thousands of new people to our world, while giving our community a first look at the animated style of Shinsei Galverse and what it represents.

A message from Tove Lo!

We got in touch with Tove Lo and her team late last year and got to work right away on coming up with a story and visuals that perfectly melded our two worlds together.

Tove was amazing to work with - agreeing to step into the world of Shinsei Galverse and be transformed into a Gal character herself. She had a special message for her fans and the Galverse community:

I'm so excited for all of you to enter GALVERSE; a powerful and beautiful creation by Ayaka Ohira. I'm so honored to have the final chapter of me and Annie take place in this Universe.
It's been such an amazing experience watching this come to life by Ayaka and her team, and the fact that my character gets to be a part of the heroines in Galverse is so god damn cool. I hope you love this video and feel all the creativity and hard work that went into it <3 R.I.P Annie.

Meet the incredible anime team!

Ayaka and the rest of Team Galverse were dedicated to reviving the 90s anime aesthetic, way beyond just lip service and grainy filters.

We brought industry legends onboard as key staff for the music video production, with shared credits on iconic anime ranging from AKIRA and Ninja Scroll to Spirited Away.

Over 40 people worked on the Galverse music video for over six months. Hand-animated with love in Tokyo, Japan, we think it’s a fitting first look at the nostalgic x futuristic Shinsei Galverse style.

Backgrounds by Hiromasa Ogura!

We hired legendary background artist Hiromasa Ogura and his studio, Ogura Atelier, as our art director and background artists.

Ogura-san has worked on so many incredible anime including Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor, Spirited Away, JIN-ROH, Summer Wars, Gundam and more!

Few people have such an outsized influence on the style and substance of modern cyberpunk anime, particularly his work on Ghost in the Shell.

Ogura's dense, weathered imaginings of future Tokyo (modelled on the streets of Hong Kong and the walled city of Kowloon) still resonate across cyberpunk media of all forms today.

Character Design + Layouts by Satoshi Ishino!

Satoshi Ishino was responsible for taking Ayaka’s original character designs and polishing them into final character sheets for the team of animators to work from.

Ishino-san has worked on amazing anime like Death Note, Magic Knight Rayearth, Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Yu Yu Hakusho, Bleach and much more!

He also brought his crisp style of layout direction to bear, working with Director Ayaka to ensure each scene landed with the visual impact it needed.

Ishino-san’s involvement even made it onto Anime News Network, the biggest anime news outlet there is!

Amazing Director Ayaka!

Let’s not forget about Team Galverse’s own amazing director, Ayaka Ohira. She put an incredible amount of work to make the music video as good as it could be.

You can deep dive into her creative journey in the great article linked below - covering her training under old animation masters, her early work directing music videos, to creating Shinsei Galverse, and most recently directing the Tove Lo music video.

Community Characters Come to Life!

The video was also a great chance for Team Galverse to immortalize our most dedicated and beloved community members in to the animated world of Gals!

Anyone had the chance to pitch their Gal and their look to appear in the video. Over 20 characters from the Galverse community made it into the Brink of the Universe scenes!

One amazing Gal community member, soyjoy.eth, made this great video of their reaction!

Music Video - Studio Archive!

Our goal has always been to create anime as transparently as possible, and teach our community about the process along the way.

While we had to keep Tove and her character a secret before our big announcement, we can lift the lid on all of the amazing behind-the-scenes works that were created as part of the music video production.

All Gal Holders have access to the Studio Archive, a collection of all the works from the making of the anime. We don’t think we’ve seen anything like this from an anime production before!

Inside you’ll find amazing hand-drawn and digital art from the Galverse music video, including:

Background art by Ogura Atelier
Character designs by Ayaka and Ishino-san
Storyboards
Layouts
Key Frames
Screencaps and Clips
Promotional material like posters, logos and artist pics

Overall, it represents an archive of thousands of files from the 119 cuts and huge amount of pre-production creative work that went into creating the animation.

Gal Holders can access the archive by heading to the holders channels in Discord today!

The Anime Train is Steaming Ahead!

We’re on a tight schedule to deliver the main Galverse anime - production didn’t skip a beat even after the release of the music video!

Right now, Team Galverse is working with the expanded anime team of artists, writers, designers, producers and animators to push further on the production.

Ayaka is designing characters, props and worlds, we’re reviewing scenarios and scripts, and storyboarding will kick off very soon.

Ayaka is already pushing ahead with the next round of character designs.

Everyone involved in the process learnt a lot from the music video, so we’re confident the final result of the main anime will be on an even higher level.

In the meantime, Gal Holders are able to help out on the production with more assignments active than ever before on the #studio-floor in Discord!

Help us cast voice actors, design the look of key scenes, planets and backgrounds, and even design spaceships and weapons the characters are carrying.

Enter the new era of Web3!

Cosmic Inventory - ERC-6551 Upgrade Live Now!

Every Gal NFT now has their own wallet in which they can hold tokens, digital assets and other NFTs. What the hell that does that mean?! Let’s dive in!

ERC-6551, also known as Token Bound Accounts (TBAs) is a new Ethereum upgrade which turns NFTs into wallets, allowing an NFT itself to keep custody of items and assets as well as interact with contracts and dApps on the blockchain.

Team Galverse thinks this is a monumental shift in the potential of NFTs and Web3.

You can imagine it like your Galverse NFT becoming a videogame character with its own inventory! During a game, your character collects items like weapons, gold, skills and more.

Until now, the owner of the NFT would hold all these collectible assets in their wallet alongside the Gal character - like our previous launches of Galverse VTuber upgrades, special drops like Christmas Cards, and POAPs from attending events.

Now, the Gal character itself is accumulating assets, upgrades, and on-chain history.

Token Bound Accounts allow every Gal character to develop their own on-chain history and reputation. When a Gal is traded, sold, or sent, their entire inventory and on-chain records travel with them.

What’s more interesting and valuable to a collector -

A Gal; or
A Gal with 20,000 followers on Lens and a year’s worth of social content?

The Character Comes First!

We’ve been building with the idea of ‘each Gal is a character and identity’ since day one.

Instead of numbers, every Gal has a unique name. Instead of generic metadata, they all have unique backstories. Cosmic IDs emblazoned with the Gal’s name, ID and achievements are generated in the Galverse Discord when they contribute to the anime production, show up to events, interact with friendly projects and more.

People already form their identity around PFPs - there are hundreds of Gals on Twitter and other socials, some taking on the name of their character. There are hundreds of VTubers in the wild making gaming, lifestyle and social content as their VTuber Gal.

We think NFTs are moving towards self-sovereign identities. People will be able to navigate the online world as their Gal - trading assets and art, voting in DAOs, signing into their favourite social services and more.

6551 expands the use cases for NFTs beyond simple collectibles, unlocking endless possibilities:

Airdrops delivered directly to NFT’s
PFPs with embedded DAO vote history
PFPs that dynamically update based on NFTs held within
and much more...

Long term, there might even be a world where AI-driven NFT identities interact with the web3 world just like regular people… but we’re not there yet 😲!

WAGAMI AI upgrade - Cosmic Frequencies!

Any Gal Holder can easily summon their Cosmic Inventory address by using WAGAMI AI in the Discord. It’s been upgraded with the ability to dive into cosmic frequencies and retrieve your Gal’s wallet address at will!

We’ve got even more cool plans around ERC-6551 and Token Bound Accounts, so keep an eye out on future developments.

A big shout out to ther ERC-6551 team, including Benny Giang and Jayden Windle for their incredible work on this new development!

You can read more about ERC-6551 in our launch thread too:

Galverse AI Achievenments!

Our AI researcher, JarvisSan, has been steadily working on improving Galverse AI. Our mission is to be able to consistently reproduce Ayaka’s art style across a variety of prompts.

New tools and technology are speeding up progress every day.

For a while, we’ve been able to create front-on Galverse artwork in the original PFP style, very consistent with Ayaka’s original artwork, with the AI often generating entirely new traits that look like they could belong in the original collection!

Interestingly, the AI consistently recreates subtle stylistic elements of Ayaka’s work - the line thickness on the character’s chin below is spot on - so are the eyes and eyelashes rendering above any hair, just like a classic heisei-era anime.

AI research continues - it might not be long before we’re looking for beta testers to help us refine some tools we’re working on for the wider community!

Shinsei Galverse Website Relaunch!

We’ve relaunched the Galverse website! The old site was beautiful, but didn’t reflect the wide cultural impact Galverse has had since launch day + amazing video content we have now.

This new site highlights our major releases like the Tove Lo x Galverse music video, IRL events, Origin Story Videos and more.

It also gives a spotlight to the amazing, unprecedented WAGMAA experience that has been underway for anime fans in the Galverse community. We want to welcome everyone, including those who aren’t deep into the world of web3 but just want to deep dive into the 90s anime nostalgia we’re creating.

All the special features you love are still there, like the Vending Machine and Manga Reader!

We’ll be rolling out more content and quality of life improvements on the website as time goes on. Stay tuned for new Gal profile pages too!

GalForce One! Galverse eSports Team!

Time for a special shout out to an amazing community initiative! There are over 200 unique VTubers out in the world now, and a lot of Galverse community members are regularly creating content as their Gal online!

This includes dedicated Instagram accounts like Moon__Cath and Rei.Trace, and Twitch streamers like Ikumi and Risa.

The latest initiative out of the community is GalForce 1 / ギャウフォース1!

A dedicated team of Twitch streamers meeting up every week to jump into Fortnite and other multiplayer games to VTube together and make awesome videos!

Led by SallyDanger, Takesu and JarvisSan, GalForce1 have been taking the online world by storm.

They’re also taking signups for their regular weekly game nights - with plans for a special team uniform in the works too! Jump in and check them out!

Give Them a Hand!

Inspired by their gaming efforts, Ayaka went ahead and drew gaming hand props for every Galverse VTuber out there!

Created in all of the Galverse skin tones, they can be easily pinned to your VTuber using most VTubing apps available today. Fun!

We’re also revamping the VTuber 101 guides in the Discord - if you’ve wanted to give it a try, or need some help on advanced techniques, check it out today.