We’re breaking a lot of new territory on the project, at least for us, and this isn’t the first and probably not the last time I’ll misjudge the schedule. I had estimated model-sheet production based on Daniel’s time on the concept sheets, but he’s doing a much higher quality of work on the model sheets, and it takes some time (and unlike some of us, Daniel has a full-time day job to keep up with, too). I suspect I could’ve gotten my part done on time, but I have to admit, an extra month makes me feel a little less stressed, too.
I know we’ve been very quiet for awhile now — progress was a bit slow at first while we sorted out some workflow problems, but we are making pretty good progress now. I am currently drawing and revising the colony floorplan. It’s amazing how many inconsistencies had crept in before this revision, and a lot of my current work is just resolving conflicts. I’m also adding a lot more detail that had previously existed only inside my head, so this has been a very good exercise for getting things down on paper where we can refer to it. A lot of what we’re producing for this Kickstarter Pre-Production project is the “story bible” that we’ll use to keep stories, directing, and design consistent throughout the series.
This last week, I mostly spent getting up to speed with Blender’s scripting interface for Python. I have to admit to being a little anxious about this, but it’s really pretty simple stuff once you get started (that’s always the hard part!). Daniel’s working on the model sheets. And I’m starting to write the structural parts of the book we’re creating as part of the production process.
Well that was an interesting experience. Yesterday, we joined thousands of sites in what was apparently the largest Web blackout protest in history to oppose two very dangerous bills in the US Congress: the “PROTECT-IP Act” (PIPA) in the Senate and “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) in the House of Representatives. This seems to have had a useful effect, as a dozen or so people in Congress have reversed their position, and Obama’s administration released a statement in opposition to the bills. So now we’re back to the business of making new media content work!
Just quick note today: We’ll be joining the blackout protest against the SOPA / PIPA legislation tomorrow (Jan 18th), along with Reddit, Wikipedia, and many other sites.
Even Google will be doing something about it, as I understand it. This legislation could be extremely devastating to us, as it targets many of the people who we rely on as distributors, and of course, on viewers. Furthermore, it is unnecessary to create legislation like this as the threat of so-called “piracy” is vastly overblown.
Well, the holidays went well, and now it’s back to work. This week, I’ve spent on defining the spec for the model and design sheets to get Daniel started, and also working on some additional reference research on Soyuz to support modeling the Soyuz re-entry (and ascent) module which we’re going to need for an early animation test.
Posters I got the concept art posters back from the printers today, and they look really nice. As I mentioned earlier, I printed enough for all backers, because they really didn’t cost much after the first 10 or so which were already spoken for. So, if you’ve received a survey notice, be sure to fill in your address so I can send you the poster. For those of you who selected “no reward”, I sent out a regular email — I’d still like to send you a poster. Just email me (i.e. at “digitante at gmail dot com”) an address to which you’d like me to send it.
Thanks to the support of some very generous backers, we are now able to commission Daniel Fu for the character design artwork. Work will start in January!
