Well. I’m in bean-counting mode today.
Have to itemize all of the expenses for 2012. I’ll finally find out how
much I actually spent on Lunatics and Lib-Ray and miscellaneous overhead
costs. Just looking at all the line-items, I have a feeling the number
is going to be pretty staggering.
Accounting Time
The time has run out and I’ve had to face the pile of accounting
paperwork today. Turns out there are some tax deadlines in January, and
Anansi Spaceworks must be ready or Uncle Sam will get very impatient.
Sometimes I wish I had an accounting department to pass these things on
to, but as we are but tiny, I must do it myself. Anyway, it really needs
to get done, regardless of taxes. Looking over it briefly, I can
already see that Lunatics cost a staggering lot this last year (much
more than our fund-raisers raised, I’m afraid).
Lib-Ray
A lot of people have been asking about the progress on our other major project,
Lib-Ray — which had a much-larger successful Kickstarter this last Summer,
which has been paying the bills for the last few months. The truth is that I have
really been neglecting it in favor of Lunatics, which keeps dragging out past my
expectations (I clearly need to improve my estimations for future work!). However,
the pre-production work on the Lunatics pilot is really and truly coming to an end,
with the DVD mastered and the DVD-ROM content collected. I need only a few
hours work to finish up the mastering and start burning (or “engraving” as Millenniata
likes to describe their process) disks. I’m now doing things like printing DVD
labels and finding cases for them.
Once that goes out the door (I’m thinking Saturday), then I’ll finally be clear to concentrate
whole-heartedly on Lib-Ray for awhile. It is of course absolutely critical that we deliver on
the already-paid-for work from Lib-Ray. After all, Lib-Ray got funded, and Lunatics did
not. So I’m afraid it will have to take precedence for at least the next few weeks. I’ll actually
be working on it until I reach certain milestones on that project, including getting the software
player working and finishing the prototype releases.
I also appear to have promised to create Lib-Ray versions for our high-end USB-card / SDHC
card backers on Lunatics.
So that’s a bit of a crossover. I will be finishing up those three next week as I start the
Lib-Ray work. Fortunately, for those, much of the design from the DVD can be
carried over, although there is still a lot of time-consuming conversion
steps that must currently be done manually.
Affect on Lunatics Schedule
We’re not going to be able to financially subsidize Lunatics any further.
Aside from what I can continue doing in my spare time or what is contributed
for free, progress beyond this point will require a successful fund-raiser of some kind.
The biggest disappointment, I suppose is that the sound production
for “Earth” will be pushed into February or even later, as will any work
on the fully-animated “Teaser Trailer”, which we started last Summer. With
so many delays, it’s not exactly a good record to have when promising to deliver
a series, but it has been an assumption from the beginning that we’ll have to
accelerate considerably to get into series production, so the slow start
while we’re learning doesn’t bother me that much.
On my own, I expect to complete the following before launching a new fundraiser for Lunatics:
- “Earth” soundtrack / audio drama (just about all the major parts for this are recorded, so this is mostly mixing)
- Fully-animated teaser trailer (this is going to require some time-consuming re-work, unfortunately)
- Fully-animated opening shot (the Moon/Earth shot at the beginning of the animatic is nearly there, but needs some tweaking)
- Blocking model of the ISF-1 colony set (lots of Blender time)
- Demonstration of digital puppetry with Pyppet (this is still the
riskiest part of the whole concept — we’ll have to decide if it’s going
to work or if we’ll need to substitute a different approach)
When I can get to all of this is going to depend on how fast I can make progress with Lib-Ray.
I don’t have to complete every part of it, but the prototype releases
and informal specification have to be complete, and the software player
needs to be handling basic playback, before I can return to Lunatics work.
Thereafter, my time will be split as I deliver on the remaining parts of Lib-Ray (it all has be done by July).
