50-50: Celebrating 20 Years

1997.

Remember that?  Course I do.  Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, The Verve, Oasis, The Prodigy, Spice Girls, DC Shoes, SuperEuroTour, the Celtic Tiger was a quickly growing cub, Britpop was king, Tony Blair, early days of the information superhighway (it’ll never take on),

So the homies at 50-50, Syd and Danny, set up the first incarnation of their shop on Park Row in Bristol in October that year, when everyone was still freshfaced and wrinkle-free.  Twenty goddamn years later and moving premises 3 times, they’re still going strong.  So strongly in fact, they left it till 2 days before their huge 20th anniversary party in Bristol’s Academy to ask me to get an logo animation together.  In typical we-totally-forgot-about-this-till-the-last-possible-moment fashion, pretty much anything would’ve been happily taken.  Expectations were low.

BUT…. Cue headwrecked stress.  How the living shit am I going to get this done?  The last big project I did with them had a lot of time – not a chance I can get close to that standard with such a short turnaround.  2D vector animation would be an obvious choice, so Thursday evening at home after work was spent farting around in 2D making it not work out – it was never going to hold up to the 3D splurge from the Diamond project, no chance, nor would what I had in mind match the 50-50 style.

Might Element 3d be the answer? Render times are way less and if I’m not doing anything with dynamics, Mograph or photo-real craziness, it’s ideal.  Plus, holy fuck, I can depth of field the shit out of it  – make the logo and the cameras do the hard work, not me.  Work smart, not long!  Yes!  A plan was afoot…  Friday night I set it up, made some camera moves and some variations on the materials and several hours later, I set it to render and went to bed and in the morning, it was all ready to go.  It goes without saying that Syd and Danny were beyond stoked with the 3 versions, running on a 2 minute loop on stage all night with DJ Die, Daddy G and Bash Money providing the tunes on the wheels of steel.

Before wanging it online, I thought I’d add some absolutely downright, outrageously over the top, yet leftfield and upbeat sound loops over the top, makes it sound FUCK OFF EPIC!11!!!