Some of you may be wondering where this “Phase I” Kickstart (and the work it’s meant to support) falls in our overall plan, and just how far it will take us. I don’t know exactly how fast we can progress — whether we’ll be able to keep getting enough people interested in contributing directly to the project or how many rewards, pre-sale DVDs, or merchandise we’ll be able to sell to keep the project funded. That’s really going to depend on the fans.
But I can try to give a picture of what the next year or two will look like if things go well. First of all, we break the year up roughly into 3 “blocks” — with deadlines of April 12 (“Yuri’s Night”), July 20 (“Moon Day”), and October 4 (“International Space Week”). We might as well use proper space holidays!
The first year will be weird, though, as you’d expect. We can’t realistically start out at full tilt, so we’ll be ramping up over the entire year of 2012. Our goals are roughly this:
- April 2012 – Fully-produced “Teaser Trailer”, Full-length animatic for “No Children in Space”
- July 2012 – Principle animation finished with temporary soundtrack. A longer “full trailer” released
- October 2012 – RELEASE of “No Children in Space”, “Earth” already in production
- December 2012 – RELEASE of “Earth”
- April 2013 – Finish “Block 1” episodes (3 more episodes) By this time, we are meant to be at our full, sustainable production rate
- July 2013 – Finish Block 2 (episodes 6-11)
- October 2013 – Finish Block 3 (episodes 12-18 — end of Season 1)
- April 2014 – Season 2, Block 1
- … and so on …
This is an aggressive time-table, as a series must have. There are a number of technology innovations and funding/recruiting cycles that must succeed in order to keep this up. If they don’t, we’ll slip the dates or find “creative” solutions.
Basically, for each “block”, we’ll be fundraising for the next one as we release episodes. Getting the first/pilot episode out, though, is going to basically take four phases to get through:
- Phase I (Dec 2011) – Character/Pre-Production Design (i.e. this one) — Rewards include the art book, writer’s guide, posters, etc.
- Phase II (Feb 2012)- Software integration (pay Brett & Mark for getting Pyppet2 and Monet ready-to-use for our production, also me for writing manuals) — Rewards will be software disks, manuals, and video tutorials
- Phase III (Apr 2012) – Production (Character modeling, set & prop detailing, principle animation, original music commissions, etc — going to need some help for this) — Rewards will be the “Special Features” DVD
- Phase IV (June 2012) – Voice Production and Finish Animation (“Post-Production”) — Rewards will be the final production DVD.
So that should give you some idea as to how far along we’ll be if we can complete this Kickstarter and the work it supports.
