This week's Gazette was released in the midst of what we thought would be time for Crypto to take that long winter sleep. Everything looked dark and gloomy, and there was only one thing left to do -- to sleep.
The idea for the concept with a domino effect came actually pretty fast. Seeing the news about cascading solvency issues among crypto businesses everywhere was the starting spark. It started with Terra a few weeks ago and recently struck Celsius which paused all withdrawals of clients' assets. Did they unpause them yet?
Anyway, before presenting the concept I quickly tested the dynamics in Cinema 4D and found out it will be relatively easy to achieve the tiles falling. The track of falling dominos was supposed to form GN, the abbreviation of Good Night (Crypto).
So technically the playground was set for me to start playing with dominos! Yay. But how to create the tracks? I could ezpz distribute the tiles along the paths with the cloner feature, but I needed to draw the lines first. And drawing splines in C4D isn’t the most convenient procedure.
I called to arms Adobe Illustrator, inserted a screenshot from the top view camera in Cinema to match the tile scale, and created my custom brush simulating the placed dominos.
Then I chose a very condensed font to lay out gn letters first and draw the paths around it - in a more intuitive way than scientifically calculated, simply eyeballing the lengths of each line to be more or less similar. The red dots in the image are signaling the starting point of each line.
The logo and number were included in the exported vectors among the paths and were imported to Cinema. Here I let the computer do the hard labor of placing the tiles along the path in a matter of milliseconds and the rough domino track was done.
Of course, it didn't work the first time, it needed a lot of manual adjustments, moving and editing the lines, manually adding new tiles, and running the simulation over and over again.
The final task before rendering was to get the camera to move nicely and catch as many moving tiles as possible. I let the render work overnight, but as the scene is very minimalistic, all 700 frames took “only” about 5 and half hours to finish.
I ran to the computer in the morning like a kid to the Xmas tree on Boxing Day and yea, I was very happy with the result. Finally, all left was only to compose the frames into animation in After Effects and sound edit the falling tiles using multiple samples from YouTube domino videos. Hope you all like it!
AMAL:
Meanwhile, this beautiful and cinematic cover was taking form, I was in a little duel with Covid alongside my mom who dealt with a bad episode of it. We have come out winning through the worst part, but we still have a few days before we can say we beat it. Life can be quite terrifying at times, but for the most part of it, we are often overlooking the little good things in it. It's good to remember that it can all be over, like it never happened, in a snap, a GN!
For us, it's not GN yet, frens! We will sail this and even worse waters to see where this will take us! See y'all next week with another cool cover!
