We’ve just finished animating our “teaser trailer” (finally!), and we are putting the finishing touches o the presentation for our crowd-funding campaign to fund finishing the pilot episode. Please help us make this one a success!
I’m doing some production math today: created a list of every single shot in the pilot episode – there are 393 of them, omitting a few repetitions. For each, I listed all of the 3D model assets used. Then I wrote a little Python script to pivot this table and create a list of all 3D assets with the shots they appear in. There are 254 3D assets listed, ranging from the character “Georgiana” (118 shots) to the prop “Vegetables-Various” (1 shot).
I’m pleased to welcome our new character modeling expert, Bela Szabo (a.k.a. “contmike” in some circles). This puts us back on track for a crowd-funding campaign launching late in this month, if everything goes as I expect.
Sadly, Andrew Pray, who created the character model for “Georgiana Lerner” that we’ve been using in our animations up until now, is no longer with the project. He’s an art student, and is no longer able to commit to the amount of work that the character modeling for “Lunatics!” represents. This is a bit of a blow for me as a producer and for the project. It means we’re going to have to take some time for re-grouping. Certainly we’re going to have to fin someone new to do the character modeling for the project.
Rosalyn Hunter recently wrote an initial draft of the novella version of “No Children in Space” as part of NaNoWriMo. We’re planning to offer print and e-book copies as part o our upcoming crowd-funding campaign. Here’s a couple of brief excerpts from the story.
Although we’re officially on a short hiatus, I am still doing a little work on weekends, and we have also recently been joined by Chris Kuhn, a very talented mechanical modeling artist who is currently working on the Soyuz launch system which features prominently in our pilot episode. I’ve also had a chance to do some more tests with character models, shading, lighting, and rendering — pictures, links, and video after the fold…
Today, we posted the very last rewards, which were the three Lib-Ray-formatted versions of the pilot episode animatic, along with the dataset, which included all of the extras from the episode download page as well as a snapshot of the development source tree. Once we decided to release these in a format compatible with our developing Lib-Ray standard, we had to wait until we had enough of that standard defined to make sure they would match — but we’ve now reached that point with Lib-Ray, so it was possible to finalize these and get them shipped. And that marks the end of our Pre-Production Kickstarter! Hurray!
As mentioned in my last update, Lunatics is on a hiatus while I work on Lib-Ray goals. In the process, though, I’m finishing up the last Kickstarter rewards for Lunatics as well, which are the three copies of the animatic in prototype Lib-Ray format. They’re basically done, but there’s a couple of minor problems I’m sorting out with the menus and the packaging. After some analysis, I’ve also got some (hopefully much more realistic) predictions about Lib-Ray and Lunatics schedules for 2013.
This will probably be my next-to-last update. The DVD data sets are being mailed (all but one of them is in the post, the last one will go out on my next trip to the post office). There are two disks in a double-disk thin-pack (I know I didn’t actually promise a case originally, but I had these already, and I thought they’d look nicer than just sending you a paper sleeve). Disk 1 is a hybrid video/data DVD. That is to say, you can put it into a DVD-player and play it like you would any DVD movie, and there is also “DVD-ROM” content on the disk which you can get to by putting the disk into your computer (look in the “Extras” directory). The DVD features include:
