This digital, meditative art piece evolved from an internal t-shirt design competition that ChangeUp held to celebrate Earth Day and to wear at the company's tree-planting, volunteer event. After completing my illustrative design for the shirt, I wanted to challenge myself to create the concept in 3d using native Cinema 4D tools and model assets - knowing that I wouldn’t be able to validate ChangeUp’s ROI on a plugin license purchase of INSYDIUM Fused or RealFlow for this single, non-billable project.
Though this wasn’t the winning design chosen for the t-shirt, the static 3d render that I included in my PDF, sparked interest in displaying a simple, animated loop of the floating island for ChangeUp’s Instagram account on the day of the holiday with photos of the volunteer event to appear the next day.
T-Shirt Design Contest
The entry requirement for the contest was to create an illustrative, 3-color design that contained the ChangeUp logo and the words “Earth Day”. My concept extruded the “upshift” rectangle of the ChangeUp logo into a landmass with a lake behind the “Up” and winding creek that ran forward from the lake into a waterfall that visually completed the descender of the “p”.
CREDITS
- Tree & Plants:
Turbosquid, C4D Library - Music:
Deep Green Forests
by MVM Productions - Water Sounds:
Soundly - Everything Else:
Mark Gerlach
And of course…
I just had to make another fake NFT in the same fashion as my quote poster animation. This animation provided an opportunity to make a more dimensional composition with the waterfall alternating between foreground and background while the fake certificate maintained the midground; however, that did require a re-render of the project with a wider camera orbit to frame the length and falloff of the waterfall.
And although the irony of celebrating Earth Day by taxing my GPU and symbolically making an environmentally unfriendly NFT was not lost on me… I’d like to think Jean Baudrillard would’ve smirked first before facepalming at this endeavor.