Exciting times, and the recent rise of Bitcoin, with all the talk about going to the moon inspired me to my first piece with the cryptocurrency as the theme.

I love mechanics. Stories by authors like Jules Verne, Stanisław Lem and the like always inspired me to create my own fantastic vehicles.

This one seemed the perfect fit to haul around a giant bitcoin:

It is based on a drawing made on glass several years ago, so the first task was to "extract" the vehicle from the painting:

Like I said, the original, now in a private collection, is on glass. On the backside to be precise, done in my special Hinterglas technique. I also made the frame with doors you can close... just in case one would get tired of looking at it 😉 This is also a feature I originally used to protect my glass paintings during transport to shows far away. With time the protective aspect became more and more of a decorative element like in this work for instance:

Ok, back to the drawing. I used a scan of the original and in Photoshop I masked off the parts I didn't need. For that I put a layer of solid green underneath it, to see exactly how the elements will get cut out.

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The job is quite tedious, particularly when there are many small details to take care of.

The scan wasn't the best, so the drawing needed some cleaning up too. Plus I put certain parts on their own layers for more control. Ok, this is a bit like watching paint dry... and the video is already 6 times faster than the original speed!

For the bitcoin I purchased a file from Adobe Stock and the moon is from Pexels on Pixabay. I reworked both files to match the look of my drawing. Once I had prepared all my pieces, I put them together in Photoshop as usual. Each element on its own layer. The vehicle and the moon also got a thick stroke of orange around them. I also added a drop shadow to the vehicle to bring it forward a bit.

For the background I created a layer with an orangish gold color and added a subtle texture. Once all the elements are prepared and after a final color correction, I put each of them on its own layer and have my file ready to export to After Effects:

The propeller I wanted to be 3d, so I created and animated it in Blender and exported it as a sequence of images to be used in After Effects:

Finally, all the parts were ready to be imported in After Effects to be animated. I created a sort of bumpy ride for my bitcoin transporter, while I made the coin itself and the wheels turn, each at its own speed.

Then I created the smoke to come out from the chimney with the "Particle Playground" effect in After Effects. It can take quite a bit of twitching to get movement and color right.

The background consists of 3 layers woven together to create an upward movement in the upper area.

The fire coming from the little jet in the back was created with the saber plugin.

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Once all the parts were playing together nicely, I exported the file as a lossless avi to add the sounds in Adobe Premiere.

There it played back as a perfect loop. But since I wanted to make it a video, not an animated gif, I tested it in several players first. Problem is, that all of them hesitate just a moment before playing the clip again and that tiny break, no matter how short, is very annoying. For me the only solution was to create a clip that starts and ends with a still image and no sound. That way, the interruption is not noticeable.

So, I thought, why not move it all onto a kind of stage and have doors open and close at the beginning and end. I created those doors in Illustrator and Photoshop based on the background of my clip. I left a hole in the middle for the moon, which plays an important role after all. In addition, I made it disappear and come back in a way that resembles the moon phases. Together with the doors opening and closing I had a sort of story line that starts and ends and then starts again without the ugly break.

Back in Premiere I was finally ready to finish the micro movie.

The underlying music was created in garageband, and then I arranged it with some sound files from zapsplat.com. Their library is huge, and it takes quite a while to find what you are looking for, particularly when you have a certain sound in your head. To get exactly what I wanted, I edited some sound files in Adobe Audition and then arranged them on individual tracks in Premiere.

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The clip was played countless times for tweaking, rearranging and matching the sounds with the movement of the video track. When everything felt right in the end, I created my final video file, which was then tokenized on Makersplace.