We’ve just finished animating our “teaser trailer” (finally!), and we are putting the finishing touches o the presentation for our crowd-funding campaign to fund finishing the pilot episode. Please help us make this one a success!
I’m pleased to welcome our new character modeling expert, Bela Szabo (a.k.a. “contmike” in some circles). This puts us back on track for a crowd-funding campaign launching late in this month, if everything goes as I expect.
Sadly, Andrew Pray, who created the character model for “Georgiana Lerner” that we’ve been using in our animations up until now, is no longer with the project. He’s an art student, and is no longer able to commit to the amount of work that the character modeling for “Lunatics!” represents. This is a bit of a blow for me as a producer and for the project. It means we’re going to have to take some time for re-grouping. Certainly we’re going to have to fin someone new to do the character modeling for the project.
Although we’re officially on a short hiatus, I am still doing a little work on weekends, and we have also recently been joined by Chris Kuhn, a very talented mechanical modeling artist who is currently working on the Soyuz launch system which features prominently in our pilot episode. I’ve also had a chance to do some more tests with character models, shading, lighting, and rendering — pictures, links, and video after the fold…
As mentioned in my last update, Lunatics is on a hiatus while I work on Lib-Ray goals. In the process, though, I’m finishing up the last Kickstarter rewards for Lunatics as well, which are the three copies of the animatic in prototype Lib-Ray format. They’re basically done, but there’s a couple of minor problems I’m sorting out with the menus and the packaging. After some analysis, I’ve also got some (hopefully much more realistic) predictions about Lib-Ray and Lunatics schedules for 2013.
Well. I’m in bean-counting mode today. Have to itemize all of the expenses for 2012. I’ll finally find out how much I actually spent on Lunatics and Lib-Ray and miscellaneous overhea costs. Just looking at all the line-items, I have a feeling the number is going to be pretty staggering.
I’m still working on mastering the DVD for the animatics (a Kickstarter reward for the pre-production backers — in fact, the final one, along with the flash-media versions of the same content). I’m having some considerable headaches with the software but it’s getting done.
As you can see, we’ve revised our website and we have just posted the animatic version of our pilot episode, “No Children in Space”. This is the “International” or “Original” version with English subtitles. We are also rendering an “English-dub” version which is very similar, but has all of the dialog in English.
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.
