2009: Inspiration and Project Start

Several previous projects provided inspiration for starting the “Lunatics!”, including our own attempt at a free-culture adventure game, “The Light Princess” (2000-2002), which had been a partial success artistically although a failed programming project; the “Space Homestead Corner” (2001-2005) — a non-fiction blog about a different way of thinking about space settlement; the Blender Open Movie projects, and the “Morevna Project”.

The final piece came into place, though, when we heard about the modest business success of “Sita Sings the Blues”, which was using the “Creator Endorsed” business model to sell copies (and ancillaries) after production — something we didn’t previously think would be feasible for a free-culture film.

We decided that it would be worth trying to create a film project based on the shoe-string budget that the Creator Endorsed business model could provide, and see if we could make that work.

2010: Series Development and Writing

We sketched out the characters we wanted — originally caricatures of different attitudes and factions in the existing space community, although subsequently fleshed out considerably and given plausible back stories.

We came up with several story ideas, an episode format that split the difference between Japanese-style anime and USA-style hour-long science fiction series, and a round-robin style of storytelling that gave us eight more-or-less equally balanced main characters rather than a single central protagonist.

Our introductory story ran quite long, so we broke it up into two stories — “No Children in Space” and “Earth”. In addition to providing context and exposition, NCiS would also be a visual spectacle, allowing us to show off the animation part of our project, with almost no dialog needed.

2011: Production Design

In 2011, we primarily worked on production design — trying to figure out how we’d organize the production team, get assets made, and produce the show. We also pitched the project to Daniel Fu, who we’d worked with on “The Light Princess”, for new character designs.

We made a number of conceptual errors in the process, which would result in some rather disruptive changes later on. For example, we designed our first episode, “No Children in Space” to be a highly-visual production, partly because we assumed it would be hard to cast good actors without a really good demonstration of our animation production. In fact, this was exactly backwards — actors were relatively easy to cast, though modelers and animators proved harder.

Our “sell the containers” business plan had a major flaw, which was that we planned to sell DVDs, but also to release in high-definition (which DVDs don’t support). We wanted a “better container”, and Blu-Ray had so many nasty proprietary aspects that we came up with the Lib-Ray free-standards-based format as a project sub-goal, which Terry Hancock outlined in some articles for Free Software Magazine, and in a presentation at Texas Linux Fest 2011.

2012: Go Big AND Go Home

After succeeding on our first Kickstarter in an exciting last-minute rush, pre-production went pretty smoothly. Character modelsheets, colony floorplans, and the storyboard animatic were developed.

Awkwardly, our Lib-Ray Kickstarter succeeded, but our Production Kickstarter did not. The money was very useful, but it introduced a burden of finishing the Lib-Ray project in parallel with Lunatics! production, without funds for our own priority project.

In late Spring, we successfully cast the major voice talent for the production (to our amazement), but found recruiting modelers and animators harder. We ultimately paid $200 trial commissions to seven artists, leading into the Production Kickstarter, which unfortunately failed. Most of the artists left soon after that, but we nevertheless recording the dialog in the latter part of the year.

2013: Teaser Trailer, Audiodrama

By 2013, we were able to get past collaboration failures and our own limited understandng. This year we released a simple trailer which showed the launch from “No Children in Space”, but almost entirely from the point-of-view of Georgiana Lerner. This required few assets, which we had developed as part of the trial commission.

Mech modeler Chris Kuhn and character modeler Bela Szabo joined the project this year, and we completed a lot more production work. We tried again with another Kickstarter campaign, and when that failed, we tried to set up more of a “crowd-sourced” approach with the Wreck-A-Movie site that had been created to support “Star Wreck” and “Iron Sky”.

We also adapted the dialog recording for “Earth” into an audio drama. In December, we tried to launch a campaign on IndieGoGo, primarily to pay for a run of audio drama CDs to promote the project, but a fire on December 3rd radically changed our plans, and we had to cancel.

2014: More Characters and Rigging

In 2014, we successfully recruited Keneisha Perry, a promising student 3D artist from the California State University at Chico, to help with character modeling and rigging. She first worked on additional costumes for our main characters, then went on to work on secondary characters (“Walk-Ons” and “Extras”).

Keneisha also created our basic character rig, using Nathan Vegdahl’s “Rigify” script, and then we created a facial animation control rig, based loosely on the design used for “Sintel”.

At this point, we had a lot more model assets available, and we were able to produce a much better Preview Trailer, which we used to launch our new Patreon fundraising campaign. We still had a lot of sets and characters to finish up before we could produce any of the pilot, though!

2015: Internships, Sets, and Animation

Elsa Balderrama joined the project briefly in the early part of the year, originally hoping to work on animation, but in fact what she mainly did was to help us migrate from Plone to WordPress, before finding that her new job didn’t allow enough time to continue work on “Lunatics!”

So Keneisha Perry took over as primary character animator as well, and began work on animated character action scenes.

We also became an industry partner with CSU’s Media Internship Program. This allowed us to find more help and gave their students a unique option of doing a 100% telecommuting-based internship. This was initially for Keneisha Perry’s sake, but also allowed us to take on Travis Souza and Johnnie Wilson who worked on sets over the Summer. Travis continued into the Fall.

Much polishing on sets and lighting is left and a lot of animation needs to be done before we can release, but we hope we are close to release now.

2016: Releases and Infrastructure

Our predictions for release schedules have been pretty unreliable. We’ve never done this before, and things which seem like they’re going to be simple, sometimes aren’t. Sometimes we find new areas that need lots of improvement before we can do them reliably. And sometimes we just stumble in the learning process.

One thing that is very clear is that our collaboration tools are not adequate, and this year will mark the beginning of an Infrastructure Project to provide additional and improved tools for collaboration on animated films made with free-software tools. We have not figured out exactly what we’re going to do with this; how we’ll recruit; or how we’ll fund it; but it’s clearly necessary if we want to transition to an active series production.