Despite missing our Kickstart goal, we just completed our cast reading for both the pilot “No Children in Space” and “Earth”. This went very smoothly — even better than we hoped. We’ll now be working on recording the lines and putting together an animatic to guide the animation production process. It’ll probably be pretty quiet for awhile as we work on this.
It was very disappointing to fall short of our Kickstarter goal — we made it to 72% before the deadline, which is in the dreaded “so close and yet so far” range. And of course, Kickstarter is “fixed funding”, which means we don’t see that money at all. Sad, but we’re not stopping the show over it. It means we’ll have to re-group a bit before doing any more fund-raising.
We are, however, still working. We had a very successful read-through of the scripts for both the pilot episode “No Children in Space” and the second episode “Earth”. We decided to do both at once partly because they were both ready to go and also because they’re very different scripts which show the different extremes that Lunatics episodes will span.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be recording the lines from both principal and supporting parts and assembling rough cuts of dialog. We’ll then give the actors a chance to re-record some lines if we feel it’s called for. Then we’ll be adding sound effects and music to make completely-mixed finished sound for the show.
At the same time, I will be finishing up my animatics for these two episodes — these will be made from hand-drawn storyboards by me (“sketchy-matics”), and I’ll also be picking up on the animation and modeling work in preparation for the final animation phase.
That’s a lot of “head-down” time, so the website is likely to be fairly quiet for awhile. I will try to get a few posts put up here to let you know how it’s going.
[NOTE 2025: These cast calls were recorded and are now on our PeerTube instance, embedded below]
Cast Reading / Rehearsal: “No Children in Space” (1-Hour Pilot)
Cast Reading / Rehearsal: “Earth” (Half-Hour Episode)
