Today I came across a news report abou the status of “Freestyle” in Blender, which reminds me of the animatio style issues I’ve been contemplating for Lunatics since the beginning: just how realistic will we want the graphic style of the series to be?
We’ve crossed a pre-production milestone — the modelsheets for the eight colonists (our main characters) are completed. Daniel is now moving on to the artwork for secondary characters. This puts us on schedule for our (recently slipped) delivery goal of early May.
In my last post, I had to announce a one-month slip. Fortunately, it looks like we are on track to make that goal. I can breathe a small sigh of relief now that the drawings for our eight main characters are done (the last three are below — the previous update includes the other five).
Well this is one of those “good news/bad news” posts. The good news is that Daniel is producing some truly awesome model sheets, and I want to share some previews of them. The bad news is that they aren’t going to be done on time. So, I’m slipping the pre-production schedule by one month to accomodate (i.e. Kickstart rewards should go out in May, now).
We’re breaking a lot of new territory on the project, at least for us, and this isn’t the first and probably not the last time I’ll misjudge the schedule. I had estimated model-sheet production based on Daniel’s time on the concept sheets, but he’s doing a much higher quality of work on the model sheets, and it takes some time (and unlike some of us, Daniel has a full-time day job to keep up with, too). I suspect I could’ve gotten my part done on time, but I have to admit, an extra month makes me feel a little less stressed, too.
I know we’ve been very quiet for awhile now — progress was a bit slow at first while we sorted out some workflow problems, but we are making pretty good progress now. I am currently drawing and revising the colony floorplan. It’s amazing how many inconsistencies had crept in before this revision, and a lot of my current work is just resolving conflicts. I’m also adding a lot more detail that had previously existed only inside my head, so this has been a very good exercise for getting things down on paper where we can refer to it. A lot of what we’re producing for this Kickstarter Pre-Production project is the “story bible” that we’ll use to keep stories, directing, and design consistent throughout the series.
This last week, I mostly spent getting up to speed with Blender’s scripting interface for Python. I have to admit to being a little anxious about this, but it’s really pretty simple stuff once you get started (that’s always the hard part!). Daniel’s working on the model sheets. And I’m starting to write the structural parts of the book we’re creating as part of the production process.
Well that was an interesting experience. Yesterday, we joined thousands of sites in what was apparently the largest Web blackout protest in history to oppose two very dangerous bills in the US Congress: the “PROTECT-IP Act” (PIPA) in the Senate and “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) in the House of Representatives. This seems to have had a useful effect, as a dozen or so people in Congress have reversed their position, and Obama’s administration released a statement in opposition to the bills. So now we’re back to the business of making new media content work!
