In the end, we made it to 72% – $3085, but that of course falls short of the money we needed clear the goal and so none of you will be charged for this. This is frustrating — especially when you come close, but there is actually a pretty good reason for it: it avoids us getting into the situation of owing a bunch of rewards and not having the means to create them (and thus reduces the risk of you paying for something and not getting it).
In this particular situation, it’s too bad, because there are some ways we could probably have descoped the project to fit in a $3000 budget, but that’s hindsight.
As it is, whatever we do next will have to be out-of-pocket for us, and our pockets are getting kind of empty from the work we’ve already funded that way.
However, most, if not all, of the actors have said they would do this project without up-front money if they needed to. And it looks like I’ll have to ask them to do that. The nicer animatic that Timothee could have produced would’ve been very helpful, but is not absolutely critical to the production pipeline. He might decide to work on it anyway in October (I’ll talk to him about what he’s willing to do), but if not, we can work with my sketches. They’re not that bad.
What we’re all hoping of course, is that this is a temporary situation — that, sooner or later, the idea will start to catch the imagination of more people, and this project will find a fan-base large enough to keep it going sustainably. “Kickstart” is exactly the right metaphor for that, whether or not the Kickstarter service is doing the trick. The other approach, of course, is simply to rely entirely on collaborators to volunteer their time. Some may not be able to do that, but I hope we’ll have enough of a group to proceed to the next step.
So, it’s a cliche, but of course I’ve been considering what to do if this didn’t make its funding goal, and yes…
the show must go on!
🙂
The Plan Now
We will go ahead with the virtual “table read” this morning and the voice recordings. I will also ask for the supporting cast recordings over the next week, and then I will be cutting together the soundtrack and mixing in all of the extra sound (music, effects, and foley).
I will be finishing up my storyboards and the “sketchy-matic” made from them — that is something I’ve already promised on the previous Kickstarter, and is something I can do myself, so there’s no problem there.
With all of this, we will still have a version of “No Children in Space”, and hopefully also of “Earth”.
It’s useful to get both of those, because there has been better critical response to “Earth” (of the two people who’ve reviewed our scripts, anyway). The two scripts are very different, and they represent two extremes to which “Lunatics” scripts will be able to go — it gives a better idea of the series’ range to do both.
We will also complete the 3D-animated “teaser trailer” that we worked on in July and August, to show what our finished animation can look like, I will probably do so more work on the 3D modeling myself, and we’ll do some animation tests.
We’ll post these complete animatics, tests, and the finished-animation trailer online, and we’ll begin a low-impact fund-raiser to try to get the money for the animation project (this will probably be more like the Blender Foundation’s “pre-sale” campaigns that they used to fund “Elephants Dream”, “Big Buck Bunny”, and “Sintel”). Of course, we’ll notify all of you who supported our Kickstarters when these things go up.
So, I don’t think you’ve heard the last of “Lunatics”. 🙂
