Thank you very much to all of you who were willing to support this very ambitious project at this early stage! It has, however, been apparent for awhile now that we’re not going to succeed in funding the entire production process for the pilot episode in one go. So much for the “frontal assault”!
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean a failure for the project — we’re now switching to a more incremental process. We’re getting ready to announce a replacement Kickstarter campaign which at minimum will fund us just through:
- Voice and sound production for the pilot episode
- Producing an animatic to illustrate this (and serve as an intermediate step in producing the fully-animated version)
This campaign is currently going through the Kickstarter review process and will hopefully be launched in just a few days.
This eliminates some of the riskiest and costliest parts of the episode production (3D modeling and animation) and focuses on steps we are ready to do right away, and the cost (at just over $4000) is a great deal more attainable (we’d be at over 40% of that goal if we simply transferred the pledges from this Kickstarter to the new one).
If you want to hear what kind of voice-production work we can currently produce, I can invite you to listen to the sound production for our “Teaser Trailer” (attached below). And of course, if you enjoyed the “Lubo” video I posted in our last update, then you’ve already seen some of Timothée Giet’s animatic animation — which is what’s going on in the background of that shot with the Soyuz rollout (the gopher in the foreground is 3D animated, albeit very simply).
This new Kickstarter is on an urgent timescale — just THREE WEEKS — because this way we can complete it before we are currently scheduled to begin recording voices. This will allow us to avoid having to slip the schedule and possibly lose the opportunity to get all of the actors together at once to rehearse their parts.
I should mention that, although this clearly means a delay in when we can start 3D animation for the pilot episode, it does not mean we are giving up on fully animating it. It’s simply that we are breaking this down into smaller steps, and giving ourselves more time to demonstrate our readiness for the 3D work as well as the worthiness of the story we’re animating.
I will post a new update with the URL for the new campaign as soon as it is launched.
