This week is extremely special as we are celebrating the 2-year anniversary of Redlion. A big, big milestone in NFTs where projects disappear over a few weeks. This is a statement that we envision Redlion to be here through thick and thin. 

The discussion for the anniversary cover artwork was interrupted by the passing of Queen Elizabeth, who was for a brief period a competitor for the cover’s main theme. After gauging the sentiments of the world at large we decided that our Anniversary and the upcoming PFP release should be the highlight and the passing can be referenced in some manner.

At first, we thought of a collage of all our 103 gazettes placed over Bahdoon PFP. This wasn’t appealing, so we decided to go straight to the PFPs and show them as they are. Dudly had created the mouth traits keeping in mind the vowels and how the lips would be when pronouncing them. This gave us the idea of the REDLIONS rapping–why not? 

The concept was clear: we show a few of our legendary PFPs rapping some hot bars about the Redlion project. This idea was exciting as it was something completely different from what we had done so far. The next question was, naturally, who was going to rap… Fingers pointed in different directions including mine, but they all eventually turned towards Harry Lately! 

Harry came onboard super-ready to spit some hot rhymes, and mind-blowingly our dude presented us with some bars in a matter of few minutes. This got our excitement to rise to another level. We were all anticipating how the track would be at the end of it all. Once Harry sent in the track, it went straight into Dudly the musician’s studio.

We had to recreate our PFP generator inside Adobe After Effects and bring all our current trait assets in - to be able to shuffle the traits progressively and not just change the full combinations. As you might already know, our PFP is built from 17 layers, among which are spread around 350 traits. Once all was set we combined all 16 PFPs, where 15 were our rare legendaries and 2 were random.

For the best background, we chose one track from an artist, but it wasn't too catchy and quite emotionless without a melody. So we mixed in another track and match the tempo, so the final track sounds like a single song.

-Dudly

As you can tell, we give our best week in and week out to produce these Gazettes. 2 years and we are only getting started frens. We keep rolling. Thank you to all those who support us in this endeavor. ✌️