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I began this process this morning before zero six hundred. A snafu with the transparency cost me the entire day (I was also delivering). Thus, it’s going live well after twenty hundred hours on the East Coast. Luckily, Holidays come round again so hopefully, we’ll all see this one again next year!

Happy Flag Day, America! –Mad squid

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If you’ve followed me from before the pandemic, you may already know that I have been working on a 100% solo and independent documentary film about the disappearance of my grandfather in 1987. His story is both enchanting and difficult to believe. It ends, however, in tragedy.

Here is the very first trailer that I mocked up to announce to my audience on an old Twitter account–long since deleted by that service at the height of Trump’s power–that I was beginning real work on the project, rather than just opining and pontificating about it.

This trailer is crude, and not very complete in the sense that you don’t actually come away from it with a sense of the story behind the film. That’s why I decided, shortly thereafter, to craft a better trailer for the potential film. At the time I was flying many drone missions, both for myself and for gig services like Drone Base and SOAR. As such, my confidence was growing and I was really getting a feel for the project. Not to mention that I was capturing some sweet footage!

But I have begun, and paused, and begun and paused this project so many times now that I lost nearly all of my inertia when the pandemic hit, and really believed that the project might be done forever. Until today. Today I had a reawakening.

#TheGreatUntold caught my attention. Check it out here:

https://t.co/DYK1OwBNuT?amp=1

“Stand by to stand by.” –Mad Squid

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After making three NFT that were kind of all over the place–and which mostly used old models rendered at new resolutions, if I am being honest–I have decided to launch my very first, all original, NFT Collection on Opensea.io!

While surfing another popular NFT site, I was very impressed by a collection of “toys” created by an artist named Trym Ruud. The Collection is called “RUDE BOY’S.” These collectible digital toys come in the packaging, as it were.

This made me think of all the fun and innovative forms of packaging that I have seen over the years. You know, the kind that makes a product stand out against all of the others on the same shelf. RUDE BOY’S was that way for me, only with NFTs.

Not wanting to mimic Trym Ruud so precisely that it might be considered intellectual theft, I set out to find a form of packaging that was both easy enough for me to model and was invoking of a sense of childhood nostalgia.

I quickly settled on the acorn capsule toy machines that I used to see at every grocery store and gas station in my youth. You still see them here and there, but not like back then. The toys you would get inside, which were usually cheap and simple, would generally cost either 25¢, 50¢, or 75¢. Sometimes they would be $1.00, but I couldn’t afford such high stakes in my youth.

I decided to make five colors, plus a silver and a gold for rare and ultra rare toys. The colors are Emerald, Sapphire, Ruby, Amber, and Amethyst. I haven’t decided if I will depict rarity with groupings of the primary colors and secondary colors, or by the rarity of the gemstone names I have given them. Leave a comment if you want to weigh in!

Here are the seven I have so far:

If you would like to watch the modeling process in time lapse (sped up to ~2750% of the original speed), as well as a preview of the very first toy, and thus NFT, that I will be releasing, you’re in luck:

Sculpting the acorn capsules and a quick preview of FlameBoy!

Stand by to stand by. –Mad Squid