The Strange & Unusual NFT set journal!

What’s up, Hive? I’m recovering from the last few weeks leading up to a massive NFT release for @facingsofficial on WAX. I’ve been friends with @joshbalz for almost 10 years. He’s always been interested in blockchain, at least since I found Hive in 2016. We’ve always wanted to work on something together. After Dark Pinup’s success on WAX earlier this year, we finally made formal plans for a collaboration. @joshbalz owns and operates an oddity parlor called The Strange & Unusual. A collection of occult, macabre and odd relics of life and death. A natural fit for an NFT set.

Paperwork was signed with @facingsofficial back in July and by early August, I flew back to Scranton, PA to begin shooting this massive collection. @joshbalz started his collection when he was still a member of Motionless In White, touring around the world and bringing back objects found from each city and country he visited. It began as skulls of cows, documentation and funerary items from the turn of century, but eventually became preservations of human remains and wet specimens. Over 100 individual objects were on the production list to be photographed for this set.

It’s been really cool to watch @joshbalz’s oddities collection grow in to an entire store, but it’s the items at his home that really venture in to the strange and very unusual. Not one but four human hands, human skulls, fetuses in jars, a human face, human testicles and even his dog Casper, who passed years ago. We set up and shot everything at the store in Kingston, PA, and then went to his home in Mountain Top, PA. Three days of shooting, included a preproduction shoot to solve some of the problems with presentation and formatting for an NFT set.

Once I was back in Minnesota, the real work began. Drew, our set designer and project manager imagined what this set would look like as far as supply, rarity and tiers. It started taking shape once we understood the collection. It includes tarot, base, entropies […looking like rust over the base image], twitches […subtle creepy animations], pepper’s ghost’s by renowned NFT VFX artist Schwarztbacca, and narrations with description commentary by legendary horror icon, Doug Bradley. We even have 1 : 1’s called clinicals and x-rays of @joshbalz’s head that can be achieved through crafting.

Amazing set. There was even more thought and work in this collection that there was with Dark Pinup. It’s a huge achievement. I poured a lot of heart and soul in to this one. For now, I’m collecting and trading on AtomicHub, and looking ahead to our next projects. Dark Pinup • Act Two is coming out in November. I’ll also be attending NFT.NYC, which I’m hoping to see some of the Hive community there. Hoping all is well and that I’ll be able to post more blogs here in the weeks ahead now that The Strange & Unusual is out there door. Thanks for reading. Have a great night, friends!