[Art making of] Fast Food, Burger Bytes
How I sat a burger through a rollercoaster ride and didn't even give him a seatbelt
Good morning burgers — today we’re riding a rollercoaster that is certified to be 100% structurally unsound (trust me I’m an architecture graduate)
After being told about art competition ‘bounties’, I was eager to try out some new animation tools in Blender3D as an art submission. One major thing that I haven’t been exploring much is the camera — sometimes as a beginner, you get caught up modelling and manipulating the objects themselves that you forget the camera/POV is also an object to be manipulated.
I thought about the key message of the art — OPOS to mean ‘Only Possible on Solana’, and thought why not make a rollercoaster that is literally in the shape of OPOS? After all, a rollercoaster is a perfect metaphor for the journey: fast (transactions), and a wild ride of market ups and downs.
With a few parameters like a base curve and cross-sectional profile, I was able to make a procedural rollercoaster track with supports that spelled out the word OPOS.
Initially, I thought I would just make an animation panning across the word OPOS while Bob the burger rides through it. But I thought, why not turn it up a notch and give him a selfie-cam?
I positioned the camera squarely upon his face kinda like a Gen-Z selfie (with the perspective lens). With the camera fixed on Bob throughout the journey, I was able to intimately bring the audience along the ride, which was a key part of experiencing the journey of ups and downs.
With the camera fixed, I then went on to do some character rigging. It was not too difficult given that Bob was seated in the same ‘position’ and I could focus on animating the head and hands — from being jolted as he goes down the first major arc of the ‘O’, and raising his arms in reckless abandon as though resigning his fate to this tumultuous journey, to cowering in fear and anticipation as he enters the WORMHOLE of the journey, which was the last thing I added!
The wormhole aptly represents the cathartic moment of the journey, which you could draw the parallel to market ‘capitulation’. POV: you’re just an innocent burger thrust into this rollercoaster ride with death loops and no seatbelts and the experience has been wild but you feel kinda like puking now … You puke and basically get rid of all the negativity. You emerge from the bear physically unscathed but emotionally scarred, and you realise you’re just a burger who survived.
It’s a journey of ups and downs — and it goes in cycles (the burger looks the same from the last frame to the first), as an infinity loop, and an eternal recurrence.
Fun fact: Bob doesn’t have a seatbelt because his chonky body fits perfectly in the burger box. In burger physics, that means that he wouldn’t fly out of the box during those death loops.
Another piece done and dusted! Available to buy as editions on Exchange.art ❤️