I made 35 new storyboard sketches yesterday. I’m scanning them in right now. I’ve also created 10 CG animatic shots for spacecraft exterior shots. This puts me a bit behind where I had hoped to be at the beginning of the week, but I’m still making pretty good progress.
There are a lot of exterior space shot in the 2nd half of the pilot episode, and I decided it would actually be easier to do rough animatics of these in Blender than to sketch them all — and it will certainly look better. So this week I’m doing a lot of quick renderings in Blender. So far it’s going pretty well, although am still a little behind where I hoped I’d be. There’s still a good chance I can get the animatic finished this weekend if “real life” doesn’t get in the way too much!
A famous filmmaker once said that “a movie is never finished, only abandoned.” Lately I’ve been trying to decide just when the animatic is ready enough to be “abandoned” by freezing a copy on DVD for our pre-production backers. Of course, it’s not really abandoned — I’ll being going right back to it over the holiday break to make additional improvements. But it will mark a significant milestone as this will be our last reward product for the people who backed us in pre-production.
I’ve now mixed the audio for the pre-title teaser and Act I of “No Children in Space” for the animatic version. Although it sounded fine on my studio earphones, I found it didn’t sound so good on a TV. I realized I was mixing it too “hot” — meaning the dynamic range was too high. So I did a little research, and now I’m mixing a more reasonable version.
Although we may replace some of the voices later on, I have now completed assembling the voices for the pilot episode, and I have now started working on the full sound mix wit effects and sound. I have also spent a considerable amount of time refactoring the Blender source files for the project — there is a lot of scaling, matching, and linking work that needs to be done. I also recently found a problem with my system that may explain some of my frustrations with Kdenlive.
Terry Hancock is currently busy mixing voice recordings for the dialog in “No Children in Space”. This is mostly a matter of fitting all of the lines together and making sure th levels match and the lines will fit reasonably well together. Last wee we shipped the artbooks and posters from our first Kickstarter — hopefully backers have either already received these by now or will in the next few days. Of course, we are still waiting a little longer on the data disks, as we hope to include the audio/animatic production tha we’re working on now.
Despite missing our Kickstart goal, we just completed our cast reading for both the pilot “No Children in Space” and “Earth”. This went very smoothly — even better than we hoped. We’ll now be working on recording the lines and putting together an animatic to guide the animation production process. It’ll probably b pretty quiet for awhile as we work on this.
We just tried our first teleconference with three of the principals for “Lunatics”, I plan to meet the others on Friday for another test call, and then we’ll be all set up to work o Saturday morning when we do our table read for “No Children in Space”. Our Kickstarter is currently at 40%, with just over 2 days left: http://kck.st/RTCwZs
