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.
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”.
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 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.
