Continuing with themes in the stories for Lunatics… Here’s number three: Theme #3 Fatalism versus Can-Do on the Frontier One of the unfortunate memes in movie science fiction — especially European SF for some reason — is the recurrence of the “nobel sacrifice of life” or of the triumph of hopelessness and fatalism. Some character inevitably concludes that it’s all pointless and takes their helmet off to die in the “cold hard vacuum of space”. I guess this is supposed to be symbolic of something or other, but I find it incredibly annoying. Real space pioneers just won’t act like that. Being on a frontier really focuses you on basic survival needs.
Dr. John Robert Lerner, founder of the International Space Foundation, will be joining the first true human settlement on a planet beyond the confines of this Earth. He and a group of pioneering colonists will be settling permanently at the International Space Foundation Colony on the northern Border of Mare Imbrium at the Laplace Promentary. This is a crowning achievement for the Mechanical Engineer who has given the last twenty-five years of his life supporting this cause which soon will come to fruition.
Themes in Lunatics Although Rosalyn Hunter is credited as the “writer” on Lunatics and I am credited as the “director”, the reality is a bit more muddled than that. We are highly collaborative in our creative process, as you might expect from a married team. I thought it might be interesting to introduce some of the themes we’re working into the series. Here’s the first: Theme #1 “Bridging from Here to There”
This is an open-source project, so anyone who wants to access the data we produce will be able to get it in time (certainly before next Summer). Anyone backing this Kickstart (at any level) will receive notification and a site to download this data as a package (probably a single large ZIP file, or possibly several smaller ones) available for download on April 12, 2012 (“Yuri’s Night”). We’ll publish this link publicly sometime after that. Of course, all of the backers will be credited in the dataset as well.
Today I finished the first of the digital ink & paint portraits based on Daniel Fu’s character concept art. This is not the final art we are creating for this Kickstart, but it is the artwork that will appear in high resolution on the “Concept Art Poster” we are offering at the $15 level, to be delivered right after the Kickstart finishes, in December. A lower resolution version (similar to this image) will appear on the “Characters” page . to replace the existing silhouette images.
This is getting a little ahead of ourselves, but we thought it would be a fun extra to share with you all. This is a bit of dialog that Rosalyn wrote for the 2nd episode of Lunatics, to be called “Earth”. This is our own performance of the dialog, although we’ll probably have real voice actors re-record the scene for the final episode. This gave us a chance to test out our recording equipment and technique. We have a little bit of a room acoustics problem, but otherwise it worked out quite well. I have an idea for an acoustic panel made from cardboard that may improve the ambiance considerably.
As you can see from the widget on our front page, we have just launched our Kickstarter campaign to fund pre-production artwork development for the series. This includes the character design and model sheets, the set plans, and plans of the vehicles that appear in the pilot episode, “No Children in Space”. It will also support Rosalyn Hunter in making final revisions to the script.
We’re getting everything ready to star our first Kickstarter campaign. This will cover pre-production artwork some 3D modeling necessary for the pre-production phase, and an animatic of the pilot episode with a temporary soundtrack.
This week I learned a lot of new thing about modeling in Blender — basic stuff like how to properly use edge loops and how to set up path-based animations. And I created a nice fly-around video of my LTS Shuttle model.
