I am hereby giving DigiByte a new nickname for use here at the plant.
...for all those that did not buy some. )
That is all.
Oh the plant? What do I mean by the plant?
Well, when I was preparing to launch my new visual effects company, "FLYfx", as we were working hard to meet our deadline setting up our "Autodesk Flame" suite for it's maiden voyage, Noah, my very brilliant associate at the time suddenly blurted out..
"Hey, why don't you make a venus fly trap part of your lo...."
He did not even finish the word logo when I suddenly froze in my tracks and screamed out...
"HOLY CRAP DUDE!!! HOLY CRAP!!!"
I had been struggling with the decision to keep using a "fly" as our logo and mascot from my previous company which was simply named "fly". But then, somehow, in that instant, before dude even finished saying the words, I visualized it in my minds eye. There it was! The answer to my logo problem! I could see it so clearly like a vision from another dimension permanently burned into my soul! (Yeah, like that...) I knew I had to make it so.
Noah, who I think was on the floor bolting together a piece of gear when he said it, looked up at me with a big smile on his face, more than pleased by my reaction. Me, hands out in front, as if to pause the moment, standing frozen, smiling. "DUDE!!!" I knew that Noah was an up-and-coming fine-artist at the time but I had no idea that he also LOVED to draw venus fly traps - so he got a real kick out of the fact that I was lighting up like sponge bob squarepants in total pie-eyed ecstasy over his idea. "Do you want me to try and render one for you?" he said with a big grin. "I actually love to draw them!"
I answered: "Dude, really? Yes! OMG! THAT WOULD BE AWESOME!" With a broadway style step forward and jazz-hands reveal I danced it out for him:
"This is I want: think Cartoon-Godzilla roaring into the sky as it towers over the word FLYfx like some city it was about to destroy, get it?"
I asked him if he could draw it with the Godzilla-yet-cartoony feel that I was looking for. He said he would definitely take a crack at it.
Up until this point, we were toying around with the idea of keeping our old fly mascot, which was being revised and tweaked for weeks already. I was trying desperately to make it fun, cartoony, something that would bring a smile to your face. Previously, I was working in a company loosely named "FLY" under the auspices of another company down near the Twin Towers in New York City. The concept was the "fly" (the impossibility of your visual fx project) wad a bad thing and we were there to "nail that sucker". Super-imposed over the fly was a somewhat over-the-top target icon, all 2 dimensional and just black and white. A bit of a conceptual stretch, but I loved it.
We laughed so hard one day when we realized the owner of the parent company would smoke cigarettes all day while using one of those old "fly" ash trays, like right under our noses, literally, and we did not realize it. Just goes to show how intense this work can be.
But then 9/11 happened and suddenly using a target on something was not really a good idea any more...
...hence the move towards making the fly more "fun" or "cartoony" as a concept.
I added hands to it, which were totally based on a Mickey-Mouse style hand and we even started to build him in 3d. It was hilarious, but at the end of the day, a fly is a fly and not too damn cute - no matter how you slice it.
So the idea of a venus fly trap was really a perfect solution to the challenge of wanting to keep the company name, which was now called FLYfx to differentiate from the former company - now that I was branching out my own - while still keeping the idea that: FLY = BAD. And FLYfx was there to, NAIL THAT SUCKER. Or rather, solve your very wonderful visual fx challenge. Kind of a stretch, but hey, it had at least the merit of having never been suggested before - at least as far as I know anyway.
On a mission
I wanted this done really well, and it could not happen fast enough, so I ALSO called in a fine artist friend of mine that is one of the most accomplished artists I know to also take a shot at it. I wanted something RIGHT AWAY(!!!) that I would start to incorporate into my logo ASAP!!!
Well, Noah showed up the very next day with his sketch book and what he called his "first attempt". He had drawn a multi-headed venus fly trap plant with several options. The "main" head, or should I call it mouth, was PERFECT. First try! NAILED IT.
"Dude, that's it!" I screamed!
I literally dropped everything and immediately started to re-create his drawing into line art in Adobe Illustrator. I went to extreme lengths to capture Noah's creation as close as possible. I was blown away by how he so perfectly created this whimsical graphic, which is at the same time 3 dimensional and 2 dimensional. Almost like and Escher drawing might be.
Anyway, "The plant", get it? )Since then, I've made t-shirts, mugs even some 3d printed stuff - some with just the "head". Our hero and mascot, I love it to this day. THANKS AGAIN NOAH!!!
OMG, I just realized, the venus flytrap needs a name! AND a nickname too perhaps...?
I think I am gonna send Noah some Would'a-Could'a-Should'a-Byte.
If you like this post and are feeling the love for DigiByte - we would LOVE it if you could send us some DigiByte to support Noah and FLYfx! THANKS.
