September 2023 Summary

HIGHLIGHTS

September 2023 was a well-balanced month with significant production, writing, and development work, as well as training and research.

Kdenlive edit of Launch Sequence
Kdenlive edit of “Launch” sequence from pilot episode of “Lunatics!”

PRODUCTION

Manual testing of EXR Compositing nodes. Sequence assembly tests for all of S1E01 Pilot.
Located AVI animatic files for TR-Train sequence to use as a guide to reconstruction.

WRITING

Wrote and published Lunatics Project History #3: Launches and Misfires, about the Kickstarters in 2011-2012, the voice casting, and the Summer 2012 production sprint. Started Project History #4: Fixed Media.

Lander Top/Plan View

LTS Components in Launch Farings

Level 1 (Surface)

Vertical Section

Georgiana Lerner

Allen Emerson Concept Art Page
Allen Emerson

Sarah Allison

Style Study Based on Blender Durian Project Art
A chart showing possible character styles, based on concept art produced for “Sintel” (Blender Durian Project).

Spacesuited Hiromi (Andrew Pray)
Andrew Pray’s version of Hiromi, created in 2012. We kept the spacesuit, but the model of Hiromi herself was replaced later.
Q-DVD-Author with Main Menu from Blender Collection DVD DVD Styler with Menu for Lunatics Open Movie Edition

LTS Logistics Chart
Profile of the LTS “reference mission” for a typical Earth-Moon cargo transfer.

DEVELOPMENT

Created scripts to test and run ABX Add-On in Blender, as part of migration to VS Codium IDE.

Setup scripts to run unit tests in multiple fresh installations of Blender and tabulate results.

Researched methods to install dependencies, since ABX relies on PyYAML.

RESEARCH/TRAINING

Started watching Bartosz Milewski’s lecture series on Category Theory (I’ve gotten to unit 3.1).

Discovered “Rebound” orbit integrator in Python.

Watched several tutorials on Blender Grease Pencil, and tried some of them out. There are major changes between Blender 2.79 and 3.3, so I also got some practice with the newer Blender user interface.

Got a recommendation for a tutorial on writing bots for Mastodon: this method uses access to the API of an existing Mastodon platform, rather than acting as a Fedi server, as I had imagined.

OTHER/PERSONAL

This was the end of a record-breaking brutally hot and dry Summer here in Texas. Global warming is clearly upon us. We’re also in the fuzzy stage of the Pandemic, where it hasn’t really gone away, but virtually everyone is pretending it has. And we’ve had some equipment failures which have required my attention.

September 2023 Screencast Summary

This is a screencast of Lunatics and Film Freedom Project work from September 2023 at 60X (1 minute = 1 hour), set to music from our free-public-licensed music
collection (titles and credits at the end of the video and below).

HIGHLIGHTS:

  • 00:10 EXR Compositing Nodes
  • 01:18 Lunatics S1E01-LA-1-A/B Action-Across-Wipe Shot for Launch Seq.
  • 02:50 Lunatics S1E01-LA Sequence GL-Rendering / Assembly
  • 08:18 Lunatics S1E01-SF Sequence GL/Storyboard Rendering / Assembly
  • 11:40 Lunatics S1E01-TR Sequence Assembled from Previous GL/Renders
  • 12:41 Lunatics S1E01-SU Sequence GL/Storyboard Rendering / Assembly
  • 13:22 Lunatics S1E01-PC Sequence Checking Existing Assembly
  • 14:02 Lunatics S1E01 All Sequences Review Writing
  • 14:44 Film Making for Lunatics – Project History #3
  • 17:31 Film Making for Lunatics – Introduction
  • 17:59 Film Making for Lunatics – Project History #4 / Fixed Media Development
  • 19:55 VS Codium for Blender Add-Ons (Test & Run Scripts)
  • 20:52 Package Dependency for Add-Ons
  • 22:09 Multi-Version Blender Add-On Testing (Test Installation)

 

Music:
Tunnel Surf – “4” FMA Microsongs / CC0 v1.0 (Public Domain)

Zero Project – “Labyrinth”, “Ocean Trip”, “Moon Flight” from album “E-World” Jamendo #85671 / CC By-SA 3.0

“The Secret Book of Dreams”, “The Age of the Empire”, “The Defeat of the Demon King”, “The Lower Dungeons” (Excerpt) from album “Fairytale 2” Jamendo #79368 / CC-By-SA 3.0

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Terry Hancock is the director and producer of "Lunatics!" and the founder for "Lunatics Project" and the associated "Film Freedom" Project. Misskey (Professional/Director Account) Mastodon (Personal Account)