“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” — Douglas Adams
Tonight is “Yuri’s Night“, which was my original target date for releasing the rewards on our Phase I Pre-Production Kickstart. I already announced a one month slip, so it’s not exactly news that we’re not making the original deadline, but I am still slightly annoyed as I watch it “woosh by”. We’re still on for finishing in May, though, so that much is good. It’s also good experience for planning our production schedule.
Daniel is past three-quarters on the model sheets and should have no problem delivering in May. The hold-up now is me: I’m still messing with that lander design drawing. And there’s still work on the colony floor plans. Also, I haven’t really touched the storyboard animatic — I have an earlier version, but I’m going to be revising it significantly, especially as Rosalyn is making some changes to the script.
I will be creating a download site for backers and putting material up on it as it gets finished (this will become public later on — but early access to it was a perk for the Kickstart backers). Hopefully this will some material for anyone feeling impatient with us missing the deadline and give a little more confidence that we are in fact doing something.
I’ve tested out Kdenlive as a video editor. Although we’ll probably put together individual sequences using Blender’s Visual Sequence Editor, it now seems probable that the overall episodes will be assembled in Kdenlive, and we’ll also use that for adding sound. I will probably also be creating the story boards using it. Kdenlive has a more polished interface and is a little more logical for longer works (with scene and act structure) — the only downside is that it isn’t quite as stable as Blender yet (I’ve never seen Blender crash, but Kdenlive still does occasionally). On the other hand, Blender isn’t as flexible about video formats, and I’ve seen the VSE collapse to a pathetic crawl processing 1080p video clips, so there are performance issues, too.
I’ve had the dry version of the soundtrack (i.e. the music) for sometime now, although I may have to make some substitutions if I can’t get By-SA licensing on some of the “non-commercial” tracks that are currently in my temp track. On this temporary track, the voices are probably just going to be myself, Rosalyn, and maybe our children (it’s part of the concept that the pilot doesn’t rely too heavily on dialog anyway).
I recently did some prototype work, refining “Lib-Ray” — our concept for a fixed distribution medium for high-definition video. It’s basically going to be MKV/VP8 video on an SDHC card. It’s basically an HTML website on a disk with a large video file. In the future, we hope to provide HTML-based menu controls for audio tracks, subtitles, and all the other stuff you expect from DVD or Blu-Ray releases. As a result, I’m going to be offering the option of getting the pre-production data and animatic on a small Lib-Ray SDHC card instead of on the credit card USB for those who signed up for that on our Kickstart.
The production art-book and writer’s guide will also have one small improvement: a few pages will be in color. I found a supplier that will let you print a book with mixed black-and-white and color pages. This allows for a few pages (like the model sheets) to be color, without having to pay color-rates for the many black-and-white pages (such as the script and writer’s guide). That should be much nicer than having to do it all in black-and-white.
It’s also tax-filing time, of course, which is always loads of fun, but gets especially challenging whenever you make major changes in your business model, as we obviously did in 2011. I’m strongly looking forward to having that over and done with. But first I have to do them. Today, I hope.
