Terry Hancock is currently busy mixing voice recordings for the dialog in “No Children in Space”. This is mostly a matter of fitting all of the lines together and making sure the levels match and the lines will fit reasonably well together. Last week we shipped the artbooks and posters from our first Kickstarter — hopefully backers have either already received these by now or will in the next few days. Of course, we are still waiting a little longer on the data disks, as we hope to include the audio/animatic production that we’re working on now.
Audio Production
Overall, the performances that have been turned in are excellent. It looks like we’ve got good dialog recordings from the principals (possibly with a few exceptions that will need pick-up recordings later). There are some issues with a few of the supporting lines — though mostly it’s a matter of recording quality. That may require some creativity with the mixing, or we may have to get better recordings (possibly through round-robin shipping our recording equipment or renting some studio time, which unfortunately costs that cash money stuff we’re pretty short on). I’ll have to give that a lot more thought.
But I’m very optimistic that we’ll have a good audio track, and then be in a position to work on animation again.
Mango Project / “Tears of Steel”
Meanwhile, the Blender Foundation‘s Mango Project has released “Tears of Steel“. This is an excellent demonstration of virtual CG effects combined with live-action footage. I happened to watch the film right after watching Marvel’s “The Avengers” and I realized that the CG effects are of comparable quality — which is really saying something, considering the difference in budget!
I also happened to notice some great rocket flame effects right at the beginning — it’s really very realistic, and exactly what we should be using in the Soyuz launch scenes in “No Children in Space”. Hopefully we can study what they did and just adapt it to our project (since of course, the Mango Project source code will be available to us).
Pre-Sales / Fundraising
I have not yet launched a new pre-sale fundraiser for “No Children in Space”, but I have worked on it some. I’d just like to get the animatic and possibly the teaser trailer finished before we get serious about a new fundraiser. We had a very useful experience with the fundraisers in the Summer, but really going to need to have a successful one if we want to get the pilot actually made, so we’ll be taking more time to make sure we’re completely ready for it before launching a new one.
One of the criticisms that has been raised is that the production quality of the Kickstart videos was pretty low, which reflects badly on a project that is supposed to be about film-making. This is a good point, and those were all pretty last-minute jobs. We’re probably going to try to create a much more polished look for the next one — we’ll treat them more like actual productions. Possibly we’ll do something 3D-animated rather than the live “direct appeal” approach that we’ve done before.
Discussion
By the way, I know we don’t have any comment feature on these news releases. That’s basically because spam makes it too hard to administrate comments. You can look up our Lunatics Diaspora stream, though, and I do try to mirror news releases there for comment. We also have a Lunatics Facebook Page, and a Lunatics Page on Google+ which I don’t update quite as often, but all of the major milestones are noted there too.
