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).
Storyboard Animatic (Playlist of 4 Videos) on our Peertube Site [Updated 2025]:
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.
