Free Macklemore
Every year at Signal we bring in a musical guest who’ll perform at the afterparty, but also using our API for a more experimental performance during the keynote. For Signal 2019 Macklemore rapped through his cellphone while using audio distortion. What the audience didn’t know was that Macklemore had also agreed for us to used way too many audio filters, eventually causing a catastrophic meltdown where he would be sucked into the cloud!
After Macklemore was glitched out of physical existence, Virginia, Aaron and I designed and animated him in 8-bit form with his initial reactions to being on the cloud.
We see him trying to escape by running off stage with no success before we realize that Jeff too was also glitched onto the cloud.
Macklemore’s avatar was designed to wear his iconic thrift shop fur coat, and his cactus green Jordan 6s.
Jeff’s avatar was in Jeff’s uniform, white button down shirt, black vest, jeans, and some colorful sneakers.
Macklemore in the wild
After being glitched onto the cloud, we had the 8-bit version of Macklemore appear on all digital signage and screens throughout the convention; he had been glitched out of physical existence until his after party performance after all.
Download Macklemore
After a days worth of have 8-bit Macklemore show up all over the convention, it was finally time for download him back into physical existence. We had a screen with a progress bar counting down to when Macklemore comes on stage for his big performance.
We created a series of animation as we made progress towards downloading Macklemore. There’s one of a character we decided to cut from the keynote, and one that references Macklemore’s wolf outfit from his music video, I added my fluffy beautiful boy Marshal for good measure :)
Ended the night with Macklemore surfing a crowd of engineers, my apologies for not supporting the dude, I had photos to take.