Gav – “Hey Ciaran, I’ve done this 50-50 x Diamond graphic, think you can animate it for the launch night?”
Me – “Yep, no probs, hit me up with the .AI file and I’ll see what I can do…”.

What I did:

Took Gav’s flat 2D AI file, pulled it apart, modelled, extruded, melted, learnt some new tricks along the way, rendered, composited, edited.

How I did it:

With great patience and baby steps.

As it happened, I had a couple of weeks free between projects when I started working on this, then picking it up again after another job and wound up spending about 15 days on it in total, all taken up with modelling, design, animation, compositing, editing and the first version of the sound design. So yeah, essentially a massive job, which all started off as a print-ready Illustrator logo.

Getting the crown to look the same head-on in 3d as how it looks in the 2d graphic was quite a ballache, largely as I’m not great at modelling. Still, it turned out looking badass. Check me out and chill.

I’m always keen to do some work with this kind of scope, particularly when there’s no real brief, which is what went down for Droplets, Take the Keys and a couple of others way back aeons ago.

Personally I’m digging the refraction & reflection parts at the beginning. We projected it out on the walls of the building across the road and had it looped on TVs & monitors in-store for added sexiness – check the instagram nerd-fest for more.

As it happens, the close-up shots of the diamond from 0.39 – 0.49 took up to 22 minutes to render a single multipass frame, and that’s on a dual Xeon E5 3.1Ghz workstation – those main hero shots alone took 52 hours to complete all 500 frames. Compositing was super quick with AE bringing the multiprocessing ruckus and flexing all available 64Gb RAM when necessary, despite the heavy amount of Starglow and Optical Flares.

Sound editing by Ben Ridley at Eye On The Wall Recordings.

For more info and all manner of dopeness, check out 5050store.com and jam-factory.com.