Cage-A-Day with Madelin Woods

During one of our internal project chats, informal member Madelin Woods shared with us her latest NFT project, Cage-A-Day, a collection of 100 hand drawn portraits of Nicolas Cage, available right now on CageADay.com

Madelin has been designing and coding since she was a kid and has worked at Square, Ideo, Facebook and is founder of Burrito Pop, which she worked closely on with the informal team.

Woods started this project back in 2014 as part of #the100dayproject on Instagram, which is a call to create 1 thing every day for 100 days. Although she originally wanted to learn to oil paint, she decided to take herself less seriously and reduce the barrier to entry by sketching portraits on printer paper with a sharpie. Madelin’s inspiration came from using PlaceCage, a website that provides Nicolas Cage images at any aspect ratio for placeholders, which she used in her day job as a developer. Rather than asking friends and family to pose, she had access to an unlimited supply of expressive Nicolas Cage images. Over time, her drawings began to follow a method: starting with nose, ears and hair, and slowly all of her drawings began to look a bit like Nicolas Cage. After the 100 days, the drawings were displayed at a gallery with over 400 attendees and screen printed on t-shirts.

8 years later, in 2022, crypto, NFTs and what Madelin refers to as “Cageaissance” are all on the rise. She decided to use OpenSea, a platform that helps creators on the blockchain mint NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, to release a portrait per day with the help of Jana Lee. They were able to do this using a set of no-code tools such as MetaMask, NiftyKit, and premint.xyz.

Every 24 hours, you can buy a unique NFT image, which has a set of properties that determine its rarity and value based on what movie the image appeared in, the year the movie was made, awards it has won, age, eyes, expression, hair or props on the image. When the next days NFT is released, the properties for the previous day are as well.

You can get your Cage-A-Day NFT here!