Just in time for Christmas:

Lunatics Pilot “No Children in Space” – Storyboard Animatic

I just finished editing the storyboard animatic, and I’ve uploaded it
to YouTube in 4 parts. As expected, there are many pieces of this I
still want to improve, but what I’ve uploaded should be comprehensible
and reasonably “watchable”, although it is still mostly just sketched
storyboards. There are a few computer-animated shots (although the
models are not complete — you can see that the Shuttle has no texturing
and is missing some detailing, including the portholes which you see in
the sketched storyboards).

The audio is pretty close to done, although we might do additional tweaking later
on (I’m still playing multiple minor parts myself — I might replace some of those later).
Everyone put in really excellent voice performances — I’ve been really
thrilled with the results. We do have a few technical problems which
might require re-recording with better equipment, but that would require
more funding, so it’ll have to wait.

Also, there’s basically no “foley” sound — this would be added to match the finished animation later on.
The animation of course is just _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).
Please look to our website for updates on that (http://lunatics.tv).

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 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0). 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.

I uploaded this in four parts for convenience, since You Tube has a nice
“playlist” feature which makes it easy to play them in sequence (follow the link).

I am only advertising this video to a few people initially — backers,
actors, and other contributors to the project. This is because I’m
planning to do some work on the website before publicly “launching” it
(not all of the promised credits are in place, for example), and there
may be some updates or changes this week after I get some feedback. I
hope we’ll be able to publicly announce it by New Years.