During the production of the credits for Lackadaisy: The Animated Short Film, I was approached by Iron Circus to produce an ident for Iron Circus Animation, to appear at the start of the film. The prompt was "scrappy, DIY, rusty metal, weirdness and tenacity."

At the time, I was still hard at work on the credits sequence, but I knew time would free up by the first week of February. The plan was to set time aside to sketch thumbnails and concepts for the ident, and then when the time came to switch tracks, all the concepting would be done and I could hit the ground running.

This plan mostly worked out! I needed time to derust; Having worked on Lackadaisy's credits for six months meant that I also hadn't drawn in six months. But ideas came together fast, landing on a set of mechanical tin toys with gear motifs, all of which were designed to be animated with limited mobility and treated like stop-motion models. The next four weeks were spent modelling, texturing, and rigging everything.

There was also a ten-day stretch in the last week of Lackadaisy's production where I knew I'd have to return to add the final list of crew names to the credits, and complete the remaining transitions. This did cut into the time I would've otherwise used to complete the ident in time for the film's private showing for Kickstarter backers, and we didn't want to show the film without having something for Iron Circus.

It was at this point that I made a decision:

I would make two idents for Iron Circus.

The second ident would take the final element of the originally-planned ident, and turn it into a "simple" variant, the absolute bare minimum to represent the brand:
A single gear zooming out into view, turning like clockwork, and then revealing the logo. This work could then be used in the final shot of the "full" ident.

Following the film's private viewing on March 22, I spent the final week putting the rigs to work and animating everything. The final day, I was literally rendering from Blender and compositing in After Effects at the same time. The laptop I was using had never been pushed so hard. It was an hour and a half overdue, and all that time was spent waiting for Blender to render the final shot.

And it turned out good and everyone liked it, the end!