Although we didn’t quite succeed with our attempt to fund the voice recording on “No Children in Space” and “Earth”, we were able to proceed slowly anyway, and completed a basic animatic for “No Children in Space”, with voices and soundtrack. We’ve also, since then, been joined by mech modeler Chris Kuhn and new character modeler Bela Szabo, who are already working on models to finish production of “No Children in Space”.
It was somewhat disappointing when our 2012 campaign fell so far from our goal, but I have to admit, there were a lot of signs that we weren’t really ready then. However, after an additional year of work, we’ve managed to accomplish a LOT: And so, I have a lot more confidence about our new 2013 Production Kickstarter. Please come and check it out!
We are now running a Kickstarter campaign to fund production of the pilot episode for “Lunatics!”, “No Children in Space”. After a year of work on this project, I’m really excited with how much we’ve accomplished — we have already got many of the most important models for the project created, and of course, with your help, we were able to do the pre-production work, create an animatic, and do voice recording. The goal of our new Kickstarter is to finish off the pilot by doing the remaining model work and then animating. Please check it out!
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!
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:
We now have all of the physical rewards in hand (that’s the character line-up posters and the artbooks), and we are working on signing and packaging those tonight ! I hope to get them into the mail tomorrow morning. Both have turned out beautifully! I’m very happy with ” Book One ” who was able to print the artbooks with color plates as well as the usual black-and-white content as well as ” Smartpress ” who has been doing our poster printing. Both have produced very high quality printing for us. Screenwriter Rosalyn Hunter signing a “Pre-Production Artbook & Writer’s Guide”.
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.
