We completed the principal cast read-throughs for both “No Children in Space” and “Earth” as scheduled. Everything went remarkably smoothly and we finished in about half the time I estimated it would take.
As a special ” omake ” thank you gift to all of you who have supported the Kickstarter, I feel I should let you know about the download site we created for the first Kickstarter we ran. This is not a complete secret anymore, and we’re going to be opening it up soon anyway, but here it is: LUNATICS KICKSTARTER DOWNLOAD SITE This page has most of the digital-rewards-in-progress that we’ve been developing for this project. Some additional material (including the soundtrack) will be going up on this site soon. But already, you will find digital posters, desktop backgrounds, the finger puppets from the previous Kickstarter video, the artbook in PDF format, and so on.
In the end, we made it to 72% – $3085, but that of course falls short of the money we needed clear the goal and so none of you will be charged for this. This is frustrating — especially when you come close, but there is actually a pretty good reason for it: it avoids us getting into the situation of owing a bunch of rewards and not having the means to create them (and thus reduces the risk of you paying for something and not getting it). In this particular situation, it’s too bad, because there are some ways we could probably have descoped the project to fit in a $3000 budget, but that’s hindsight.
There’s now less than one hour before the time runs out on our Kickstarter. As it is, we’re 68%, about $1350 short of our goal, so none of the pledges will be charged. It’s frustrating, but then the whole point of the Kickstarter is that we don’t get stuck trying to deliver rewards when we can’t actually afford to make them. We’ll try to do the best we can. The read-through already set up, and I believe we’re going to record voices regardless of the Kickstarter outcome.
Well, we’re ticking down the last few hours, and I don’t where else to popularize the project at this point. We’re at 65%, and with only three hours left on this Friday night, it’s starting to look unlikely that we’ll get more than one or two more pledges. Something amazing could still happen in the next couple of hours — it’s not that huge a stretch if many of you increased your pledges or got somebody else in on it. But whether or not that happens, I want to take a moment to thank every one of you for believing in our project enough to pledge. We really appreciate it!
Since we decided to have Paul Birchard do the Allen Emerson character (first introduced in “Earth”), I thought maybe I should share his audition for it. We enjoyed it a lot. This of course, is the same “Art Now!” interview that Rosalyn and I voiced earlier. I have to say that Paul a whole lot better than I am at the part! Of course, Paul is playing both the interviewer and Emerson here.
The core part of this stage of the project is the audio production. I’m not certain that I’ve put the voice cast video up on this project, so as we are approaching the last few hours, let me do that: These are: Vernoika Kurshinskaya, playing Anya Titova Farmer Paul Birchard, playing Joshua Farmer Lex Quarterman, playing Timothy Farmer Ariel Hancock, playing Georgiana Lerner Karrie Shirou, playing Hiromi Lerner William Roberts, playing Rob Lerner Additionally, Sergei Oleinik will be playing Sergei Titov in the pilot, “No Children in Space”, and Paul Birchard will also be playing Allen Emerson in “Earth”.
Here’s a little information about my storyboard and animatic process, since that’s what I’ve been working on today. This is not the animatic we’re advertising as a goal of this Kickstarter — these are the sketches that I make myself. To keep clear which is which, I call this my “sketchy-matic”, since my storyboards are pretty sketchy. I start with 4″x6″ plain index cards, which I draw on with colored pens. The drawings are very sketchy because 1) I’m not a great comic artist and 2) because it only really has to communicate what the shot, so it’s not necessary to have a whole lot of detail. One of the better likenesses in my storyboards — but still quite sketchy 🙂
This is just going to be a quick update, because I’m working on storyboard animatics today, but we have just passed the halfway mark — in fact, we’re at 52%. Of course, we only have about 30 hours to make the other 48% if we’re going to make. But consider this thought — if each of you found just one other person willing to put in as much as you did, we’d be done. So a few shares through your friend networks online or offline might be enough to do it.
I see we’ve got some new backers this morning. Welcome, and thank you! Here’s some music from the soundtrack. I apologize if the sound levels are a little bit inconsistent, you might have to adjust your volume. The videos are just slide shows of collected pre-production graphics from our work on the project (or the little spinning disk animation I created recently).
