Chronological
History of Episodes
“HolyStrokes”
2003 Pilot
The pilot episode from 2002/03. The concept for the entire show was dreamt up during a fever-dream induced beach walk that weaved through coastal sand dune beaches. All lip-sync was keyframed BY HAND and all characters were scanned from paper drawings. This was my first ever character animation. Adobe Character Animator would not exist for another15 years.
One of the reasons for the poor quality was that it was made on run-of-the-mill hardware for its time, which made waiting for renders quite frustrating. I was a broke college student living in an unfinished basement that looked like an opium den full of spiders and illegal Japanese energy drinks called "Shark." The animation was made on an "HP Pavilion" factory build, core-duo 1.2 GHz CPU. Unknown microphone. Unknown Soundcard (Some type of non PCI-e card, perhaps firewire).
I recall lugging around a desktop computer and a sack of audio cables to record the band. The musicians had seen a low resolution draft animation. They composed musical ideas ahead of time. They were more prepared than I was.
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One of my most vivid memories is screening this episode to a quadriplegic after dinner in a deep suburb. She did not require assistance to dine as she could manipulate knife and fork with her arm "stubs" and face. She was a software engineer; she owned her own wine distribution company. The entire evening, I did not realize she was also blind because of her direct eye contact and the fact that I was distracted by her eating an entire pork chop.
“I didn't realize I was screening an animation to a blind woman.”
She said she appreciated the message of the animation based on the the dialogue, especially the "Foundation for the Injured and Poorly Balanced."
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A recent dashcam video of a high speed chase involving the Amish Mafia reminded me to dig through the archives and start documenting the origins of Holy Strokes.
“incomplete set”
File saved 2003 [ uploaded Dec 27, 2007 ]
Originally authored sometime in 2003. It was a preview render for some set concepts. I forgot this existed until going through the archives. The literal filename was “incomplete set for holy strokes_ Compressed DRAFT.mp4”
It was basically proof-of-concept and learning work. And ugly af. Most if not all of these original 3D model files were lost in the great HDD crash of late 2006 when a hard drive was stepped on at a raging party at which I was projecting video. This was the sole surviving render. I'm guessing it survived the crash because it was saved to a different drive. Ever since then, I've made sure to backup all source files to the cloud.
Every Month.
A New Episode ANALYZED.
Only at HolyStrokes.com/Lore
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