Winning! Thanks and behind the scenes of my 60 Seconds of Steem Video

So I was one of five winners in the 60 seconds of Steem contest thrown by Hive account@surfermarly with my video titled "What is Steem?"

Congrats to everyone else who participated! My personal favorite was this video by Hive account@ashtv.

So I wanted to talk a bit about my video and show a bit of the "behind the scenes". If you follow my blog you've already seen a lot of the build up to the final video, but there will still be some stuff here I haven't shared previously.

So I'd actually been thinking about doing a Steem promotional video for a while. Some of the artwork I've posted in the past has been experiments and tests to try out different looks for this. For example

Maybe you can see the common theme of blocks. That's something I've always thought should be key to the illustration of Steem and blockchain. So when I started this project that hadn't changed. One thing though was that this project had a rather quick turn around at two weeks. All of the above examples require quite a bit of time to render these images in the software that I use and two weeks wasn't going to be long enough for me to come up with the concept, script, designs, animations, and rendering.

So I needed to adjust the look to something that could be computed much faster. With that in mind I started to research some "Toon Shading" in my preferred renderer(Octane). I did a few tests and came up with something I liked.

Here's a few of the early tests

After I'd figured out the overall look I went forward with designing styleframes. Styleframes are images that define the look of a shot or an entire animation sequence. Here's some of the styleframes I then completed over the next week.

Not all of these frames made it into the final animation, but most did, and more importantly, they defined a cohesive look that I could then use as my guide for the look of everything.

After that it was work on the animation which is actually probably the easiest part on something like this. The main work is figuring out the designs, after that the animation wasn't that laborious. This was also intentional because of the time constraint.

Here's some of the behind the scenes on that work

While I do believe that social applications are a good fit for Steem, I definitely think that's only the tip of the iceberg. In my message for marketing Steem, I wanted the viewer to not come away with a definition but with curiosity. "How could Steem be all these things? Let me google it or check out the website linked at the end"

In it's current state I believe if someone came to Steem believing this is a platform that rewards content creators, they'd be disappointed. Maybe one day, but not right now. Right now, to me Steem represents potential. it's like a table of ingredients that we're still learning what all we can cook with them. Social applications are the first good thing we made, but SO much more is coming in the future, Just look at Drugwars. It's a game from 10 years ago, but sprinkle a dash of Steem in with it and all the sudden it's blowing up like crazy. This is only the beginning for us.

So thanks again to Hive account@surfermarly and all the sponsors of the contest as well as everyone who participated as voters. Feb 20th we're going to have a media blast where the community shares these videos on other social media. You can find out more details here.

That's about it, thanks for looking peeps!