I’d been working on some X-Particles simulations with dynamics and trying to work out how get the dynamics side of things working through some tutorials when I started putting together a couple of shots based on an old famous hiphop tune from 1999 which I’d found in the classic skate video Modus Operandi.

“I got pistols, pills, acid, bomb, crank, crystallized coke and lines, I don’t give a fuck…”

I always loved that line from Korupt’s Trilogy in Mike Carroll’s part – and it all seems like a mean list of things to stockpile (especially given the timely Covid-19 clusterfuck) along with the ever-necessary dildo helicopters / dildocopters and confetti cannons…

I left it marinade for a while and then Covid-19 reared up and we all know what happened there.

Panic buying loo roll.  Lockdowns.  Travel bans.  “Working” from home.  Then spring rolled into summer, everybody started buying bikes and gradually the economy started opening again.

(Gotta say, I’ve really enjoyed this 5-6 month sabbatical.  I planted a ton of spinach and rocket, got the balcony garden sorted, swam more, trained more, skated more, cycled more.  While it would be nice to have more cash coming in as I haven’t won the lottery just yet, I’ve used the downtime productively I think.)

So, everybody started shitting the bed panic buying all sorts of shite and for me anyway, this is a short list of essentials for when you’re holed up in a bomb shelter underground hoping for the apocalypse to pass.

NSFW if you don’t like drugs and dildos.

All of this was painstakingly researched online to find out exactly what pills, acid, bomb, crank, crystallized coke and lines should look like, and also finding out what it was.  I used X-Particles dynamics systems to get the crystal shards to break apart accurately and to get the bags of acid tabs to bounce somewhat realistically when thrown on the table.  Trying to figure that out took ages and loads of tutorials to get it working, before I decided to make things even easier for myself by texturing it all in Redshift and animating everything in time with the tune.

Stringing it all together was some topical news cuttings and FUI Covid-themed animations to give it a bit of context, y’know, narrative…