Oi Hivers!
Last Thursday, @Enrique89 asked me to make an animation that we can use for the 3rd anniversary of Hive. It's a bit last minute, so I started working right away. This is great though! Celebrating Hive with animation would be a perfect chance for us to include interesting numbers. Speaking of numbers, I didn't have to think twice before going straight to 
Before you decide to read this post: at the bottom of the post you'll find a download link to the animation which you can use to upload and share OUR 3rd Hive anniversary on Twitter or include in your Instagram/Facebook stories! The file is around 98MB, so it should be possible to upload it on Socials.
Just a thought: If you're working on your Hive Birthday blog post, why not share it on Twitter, with #POSH, and instead of the Thumbnail you get, upload this animation to Twitter.
It's pretty easy to do:
- First upload this animation to your Tweet
- Copy/Paste your Happy Hive Birthday blog post
- Write your Tweet, including #POSH, #HivePowerBday
- Hit Tweet!
The same thing would work on Facebook, Instagram, and all the other socials that you're active on. We've made a lot of noise on Hive, let's make more noise on Twitter and let everyone that you know about Hive!
Cheers!
Storyboard time!
But first things first... to the drawing board! As time is of the essence. I figure I'd spend 10 hours on an animation. The rule of thumb is to spend 2 hours per 5 seconds of animation, excluding the actual designing (and designing in After Effects). I'm pretty excited to make something meaningful with After Effects, as an animation like this would be pretty nice to have as a blockchain.
So, kicking things off by creating a storyboard would be a bit more time-efficient, and it would give me some room to think a bit about the titles that I wanted to include. I started working on a few slides and sketches while working them out in After Effects at the same time. I figure 2-3 seconds for each "slide" would result in a smooth, nice, and quick animation that doesn't bore you after 10.
Another reason why I enjoy (and always should) starting with a storyboard, is my brain wants to work efficiently, but I also want the opportunity to re-organize some scenes later on. This isn't always the case, however, working with text and stats can be tricky to get the right "Customer Journey" (viewer experience).
- We're celebrating
- 3 years of Hive and Freedom
- So what did we do?
- We welcomed over 2.4 million digital identities to our family
- Who all have been upvoted over 285 million times
- Over $46M in rewards were distributed and with over $121 million secured funds on our network
- We make noise every single day with more than 2 billion irreversible transactions
- That's 1.860.827 transactions daily on average
- We've charged all our users ZERO gas-fees
- While they were playing more than 1.5 billion P2P games
- But more important: We celebrate 1095 days of freedom
- Thank you for being part of our movement, be free, join Hive
I know, just a bunch of text placed on a colored background. Nothing special, you might think. For me, this is an easy way to follow the storyboard, mix things up, and get creative during animation. The real challenge is to create seamless and smooth transitions with just enough movement. I hope I have enough time to add some elements, so the animation isn't entirely text-based (even our protocol is, righttttttt... right?). Joke aside, glazing at this storyboard just helps my brain to visualize the animation.
Time is of the essence
It was pretty late for me when Enrique asked me if I could make an animation to celebrate Hive's 3rd anniversary. This would give me 2 days, and 3 days if I didn't sleep the first night. Lol. So, I worked until 4:00 AM finetuning the first draft of the first part of the animation. This way, I could send HiveCreators a sneaky preview.
With just 2-3 days it would be a pretty tight deadline to come up with something possible, due to the amount of time I have for the concept, design, animating, and final rendering.
I know that I could just create a "generic" Happy 3rd cake day type of animation, but one of the things that I thought was important, is to utilize this moment to take a brief moment of silence and review all the things that we have accomplished, while at the same time, it could be something fun for all of our Hive users to watch. This is how the concept of "fun facts" came to mind while winking at the educational part of the visual concept that I'll be exploring for the visual concept.
Speedy GonDalz
Dalz was pretty quick with providing me with the numbers that I required. We brainstormed for a bit about how to implement the numbers. He had a few tables ready, so in case you're wondering "where do these numbers come from", you can rely on @Dalz! He has been providing our community with a bunch of metrics, and I often just scan through or look his posts up to see what and how our network is doing. I was pretty surprised to see $120 Million worth of HIVE being locked up in the entire network. In a good way, like, I can't wrap my head around the fact that we're still that small, and there is a lot to do on Hive. Holy shit... Hive to $100?! Makes me think that's pretty much possible in the future. Our numbers are pretty high in terms of transactions, and at the same time... there's a lot of room for steady and explosive growth. Can't wait to see that happen.
Ah! Before I forget; All the numbers are locked in at around 40 cents. Bear market prices. Geez... The #woke movement is looking at Hive with their eyes closed. Ha... a bunch of amateurs...
The future is looking bright Hive-fam!
Sketch-designing while animating
Due to the timeframe, I figured I should implement sketch designs while animating the whole thing to pump up that dynamic feel of the short clip. I could always add a little more sauce to the entire animation later on. The minimalistic look is maybe not perse the best I could do, but it is probably the best that I could do given the timeframe. I guess I'm trying to say that you could go bonkers if you'd want to, but that would be possible with more time.
Finishing touches
At this point, I have watched the animation so many times, I can dream of it. Well, if you get to a point when you can dream the animation, it can become a nightmare. You already know what's coming. This is mostly happening when you work continuously on a project without many breaks.
I asked @HiveCreators for feedback, and just showed it to @Dalz, @LordButterfly, and @Acidyo. Mostly because I'm excited to share it with others, but also to see what their response would be. A fresh set of eyes seeing something for the first time can notice a lot more.
Easter egg: I hid a fun, yet not too difficult easter egg in the animation. Not sure how it works with mentioning easter eggs (it's usually just a secret signature), but I guess I shouldn't spoil it. If you're a symbolic numbers type of person, you know when you see it.
Time registered
To whom it may concern, I keep a record of the hours that I have spent working on the animation. I haven't written down all of my hours, so that's on me. I usually work in 1-2 hour batches to stay productive. I take a break of 15 minutes or so, and I can highly recommend this habit to anyone who works daily behind a computer screen.
Thursday 16-03-2023
22:00 - 04:10: 6 hours
Friday 17-03-2023
09:55 - 12:03: 2 hours
13:45 - 15:40: 2 hours
16:05 - 17:45: 1.5 hours
18:20 - 19:32: 1 hour
20:55 - 23:20: 2.5 hours
00:00 - 0:45: 0.5 hours
Saturday 18-03-2023
09:40 - 11:15: 1.5 hours
I can't remember whether I notified 
The total amount of registered hours is 17 hours and 50 minutes (plus unregistered hours).
Total time spend + running to the store to get some cake
Well, the first day... erhm. night, I spend 6 hours on the whole thing. In total, I ended up with 15+ hours spent on the whole process, @Dalz also spend 1 hour of work on pulling all the data and we did some brainstorming about what numbers to pull. Other than that, there are a few hours of concepting, and pre-designing that I excluded just to round things up (and as a little present for Hive's upcoming birthday).
But dang, I'm pretty satisfied with how everything turned out, considering the time/deadline I had. I hope all of you like what you're seeing!
.Download here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GmZeLXweMh7N8eRdxvMzK16MedX6wcQs/view
Let's celebrate!
Happy third (pre) birthday Hive!
Ruben
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