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…
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!
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.
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:
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.
Well, this is taking a little longer than I planned, due to software problems I don’t even want to get started on (I’m having to do a lot of workarounds and trouble-shooting as a result). But I’m getting fairly close now. Just have to smash some more menu bugs. Much of the DVD-authoring also serves double for the USB flash drive versions, since it will be basically the same design (for these, I’ll be using the prototype Lib-Ray spec, which basically means a small on-disk website with linked videos). These will be “hybrid” DVDs with additional “DVD-ROM” content accessible by computer. I may have to be a little creative with that, since the whole production source tree is now too big to fit comfortably on a DVD. I’ll be paring it down some, and some content will probably be on a second disk. Meanwhile, of course, the video of the animatic is available on our website: http://lunatics.tv/Episodes/Pilot/Animatic
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.
