Wow. This week, I’ve started animating We’ve had some nearly-final shots for awhile — the “Earth in Space” shots, but those were kind of trivial. I’m now working on a complex “real” shot for the first time. It’s a particularly tough one close to the beginning of the Pilot (and the “Prolog” and the “Preview” based on the Pilot). I’ll go into some detail on the construction of this shot i our Patreon “Patron Newsletter” this month.
Today, we’ve launched an on-going crowd-funding campaign on the Patreon platform, which is oriented towards series projects like ours. We’ll be posting updated goals as we go. Our first goal is to raise the estimated $1000/episode that Lunatic will cost us in out-of-pocket cash to keep going (that’s not including anyone’s time, of course). During this first phase, we’re appealing to those of you who have helped us in the past (or tried to!). A new preview will be released on the Patreon page soon, with the updated NPR/anime style and a lot more of the 3D assets that we’ve been developing over the last year.
Our production team has recently been joined by a new 3D graphics artist, Keneisha Perry, who will be working primarily on characters and character costumes!
We’ve now started working on the asset for the “on Earth” shots in the pilot episode. These models are often not as glamorous, but they take a lot of work, and are very necessary for the plot. We’re also working towards preparing production rigs for animated our characters. We also need HELP on character modeling, if yo have Blender character modeling skills, can follow a modeling style concept, and would like to get involved.
We’ve just posted the audio drama for the episode “Earth” in OGG and MP3 formats for downloading or streaming from the download page. We hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed making it!
I’m currently doing the sound-design for the Audio Drama: picking music tracks from the track library, tryin to figure out what ambience and sound effects to use, and moving the voices into scenes.
Update on our Kickstarter Campaign: “Meet Mechanical Modeler Chris Kuhn” – we’re at about 4% of our goal still which may not seem like much, but it’s still $1778. Remember that you won’t lose anything for trying – if we don’t make it, you’ll never be charged. And you won’t be charged anything until Aug 20th in any case. We can still make it if we can let more people know about the project. Link after the fold…
We really need some help getting the word out about our Kickstarter campaign, and one of our fans suggested neat idea: if you embed our Kickstarter widget on your webpage until Aug 20th, we’ll send you a free, high-quality printed set of OFFICIAL finger puppets and a signed thank you note. Details after the fold…
We’ve sent out some press releases for the Kickstarter. I’ve also posted an update about the non-photorealisti visual style and how we hope to render our characters in the final production (or at least what some of our options are).
Well, I’m not sure what’s happening with our Kickstarter. We’re stuck at 3% with 22 backers. I don’t know i that’s because I’ve overestimated how many people are supporting us or if it’s because you’re disappointed with the results. Could even be I’m just talking to myself and a bunch of web crawlers here, and only imagine that anyone is following this. It could be that even our closer followers aren’t seeing all of these posts, with all the changes that have been happening in the social media sphere. There are so many thing acting to lock you into a digital bubble.
Kickstarter, with its “all or nothing” funding scheme, reduces risks for both creators and backers. For a project like “Lunatics!”, this makes it a lot safer bet. This protects early backers financially — if we don’t make it, you’ve lost nothing. And the money doesn’t come out until the end when we know the campaign has succeeded (or doesn’t because it hasn’t). We really need “inside” support from those of you already following “Lunatics!” if we’re going to encourage the “outside” support from new people we communicate with.
