As you can see, we’ve revised our website and we have just posted the
animatic version of our pilot episode, “No Children in Space”. This is
the “International” or “Original” version with English subtitles. We are
also rendering an “English-dub” version which is very similar, but has all
of the dialog in English.
“No Children in Space” Animatic
We are pleased to share this intermediate step towards getting our
pilot episode produced. This is a shot-complete storyboard animatic of
our pilot episode “No Children in Space” with the full “international”
voice cast production (it is in English, Russian, and Japanese with
English subtitles).
We will be also be uploading an “English-dub” version (in which all of the
Russian and Japanese parts are dubbed into English, mostly by the same
actors).
There is no final animation in this yet, although there
are a few pre-visualizations using Blender. The bulk of it is sketched
storyboards. The audio is fairly complete, except for some minor tweaks
and the addition of foley sound (which will be done after final
animation).
This is an important milestone for us — it completes
the production work promised on our pre-production Kickstarter and is
one of the major parts of our presentation for our new production
fund-raiser, which we hope to launch in January (we are also working a
final-animation-quality trailer and some technical demonstrations as
well as the audio production for our 2nd episode, “Earth”).
The audio is very near to its final form: with funding we will probably
re-record a couple of lines with technical problems, add foley sound,
refine the sound level adjustments, add better room ambiance effects,
and make other minor tweaks. There are some effects in this version, but
some of the more mundane sound to match the on-screen action will be
added after final animation.
The animation of course is very basic. It’s mostly just hand-drawn sketches with a few exceptions stuck
in for more complex shots. There are a few photos where appropriate
ones were available. In the final production, nearly everything would be
3D animated using a variety of rapid performance-based and
simulation-based animation techniques in combination with the more
traditional key-framed methods.
We will be launching a crowd-funding campaign in January to fund production
of this episode (and possibly future episodes if we get stretch funding).
Eventually we hope to produce quite a few episodes, but it all depends on the
funding — this project is intentionally too large for one or two people
to do as a hobby. That’s why I call it “an experiment in commercial
free-culture” — basically, this is a big enough project that we can
only do it if we can afford to pay people for their time, because it
will require a LOT of time from a lot of people to make 18 episodes a
year. That’s our goal. If we’re not able to fund that many, then we’ll
either go more slowly or animate fewer episodes, but we do intend to
press forward with this project, as it is extremely important to us. On
the other hand, we see no intrinsic reason why we can’t succeed with
this fan-based method, relative to more traditional advertising or
sponsored methods. It’s really just a question of finding enough people
who want it.
This video is released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, version 3.0/unported.
Certain music tracks have been explicitly licensed by us for this
purpose, although most have been previously released by the artists
under CC By, CC By-SA, or CC-0, as with sound effects and images.
Website
We are also unveiling our new website design. I think I’ve improved
it a bit. The idea is to make a little bit better use of CSS and
emphasize the content a little better, since we’re starting to have more
to show.
