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”. 🙂