DIME TRAP

Short List
TitleDIME TRAP
BrandGRAND HUSTLE RECORDS
Product/ServiceHIP-HOP ARTIST T.I.
Category A06. Overall Aesthetic Design
Entrant SUPERHERO CHEESECAKE Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
Idea Creation SUPERHERO CHEESECAKE Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
Production SUPERHERO CHEESECAKE Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
Credits
Name Company Position
Rian Verhagen Superhero Cheesecake Managing Partner / Director of Interactive
Niels van Esch Superhero Cheesecake Managing Partner / Head of Production

Describe the creative idea

Renowned hip-hop artist T.I. released his 10th album Dime Trap in 2018. DimeTrap.com gives users an interactive journey through T.I.’s world and his inspiration. The brief was to ‘mark the release’ of his new album in a short documented and digital narrative. To make this an immersive experience we transformed the album artwork by mixing and sampling from a number of diverse technical creative solutions. As users explore the album art, they hear firsthand accounts from T.I. including stories about the Trap and the major events that have impacted his life. In the 3D website we focussed on storytelling and lighting by natural camera position to let the interactive experience feel intimate overall. Dime Trap became the culminating album of T.I.’s career and DimeTrap.com the B-Side that gives you a raw picture of the man and the stories that have made him.

Describe the execution

In the 3D website we focussed on one particular aspect: storytelling. You’ll start the journey by hearing T.I. talking about his art and his album with sound at its core. The interactive story begins with a completely black environment with a floating 3D giving the audience the opportunity to discover it in greater detail. Starting with such a beautifully sculpture with breathtaking details, the biggest technical challenge for the project was to preserve the overall quality. The geometry of the artwork would be way too detailed to render into a performant website, using WebGL. The solution was to leverage a form of compression of all this visual information called ‘deferred shading’. This process involves parceling the entire scene into a sequence of layers, each describing something specific about the forms and the environment (or lighting). This process uses transcoding various types of data from the 3D model, (positional and textural) into color and eventually back into 3D information within the application. We put a lot of work on the lights. When freely navigating and when focusing on a particular scene the light comes up the most. A high-definition irradiance map was created to capture the environmental lighting conditions in the scene. We used panoramic HDR photographs including layers of different exposures within a single file which gave us increased control over the final exposure and gamma of the light. Dime Trap was released to critical acclaim and so was DimeTrap.com. Dime Trap debuted at number 13 on the US Billboard 200 and received an ‘universal acclaim’ at Metacritic. DimeTrap.com was acclaimed with a FWA Site of the Month plus many other mentions of digital excellence. Also it was featured in numerous critical blogs that all together put the extra mark on the universal success of the album.