Bonjour amis! Everyone was at NFT Paris the past week, drinking champagne, eating croissants, and enjoying the romantic rendezvous of NFTs with Paris. 

NFT events continue to grace every significant city in the world; this time, it was in the beautiful city of Paris, France. Many degens from around the world poured in and alongside representing even Red made it to the grand event. We had live reports coming in about the long queues and how Red skipped them to go elsewhere. The highlights of the whole event in the 2 days were the long queues and the parties organized by the different projects. 

We took to the drawing board to discuss the concept. Red chipped in with the idea it should be minimalistic and feature important landmarks of the conference. Dudley sketched the concept out showing the different locations such as the Grande Palais, NFT Factory, and Pompidou, along with elements such as the Citroen CV2, wine, cheese, croissants, and macaroons that instantly remind you of the french culture. Snaking through these landmarks is an endless queue of crowds. For animation, we chose to make this an endless scroll as it would imply long, long queues. 

It took us 3 days of heavy vector work to pump out this cover. Below you can see how complex this “minimal” artwork was. Dudley will swear by how the Pompidou and Grand Palais are artworks of their own going by how much effort it took to create them. Once the objects and landmarks were created we moved on to creating the crowd.

We sourced the people from stock vectors but tuned them to fit with the palette we were using. The next big task was randomizing them and placing them on the long winding road. Without the help of a god-send plugin, Astute Graphics would be a 2-hour job. And at 2 AM in the morning (for me) this would not be the happiest task to undertake. The plugin helped us place the crowd so well, as you can see in the video below. 

It was the fastest we have animated artwork for the Redlion Gazette. A good 20 minutes mostly because of some funny hiccups, and we were ready to blast the Gazette out of the machine. A great week calls for a legendary Gazette. We deliver that week in and out.