There are several factors we have to balance in coming up with a style of animation and rendering for “Lunatics!” You might think that 3D animators should always try for maximum realism (“photorealism”) when making animation, but this is not necessarily a good idea. First of all, the human eye is extremely good at spotting errors in photorealistic renderings and especially in animation. This is the basis of the problem known as the “uncanny valley effect”: if you have extremely photo-accurate models and renderings of characters, then even the slightest error in movement creates a disturbing “creepy” effect. Such animations are often described as “zombie-like” or “doll-like”. This is because we are very sensitive to tiny differences in the way real people move.
Although we didn’t quite succeed with our attempt to fund the voice recording on “No Children in Space” and “Earth”, we were able to proceed slowly anyway, and completed a basic animatic for “No Children in Space”, with voices and soundtrack. We’ve also, since then, been joined by mech modeler Chris Kuhn and new character modeler Bela Szabo, who are already working on models to finish production of “No Children in Space”.
We have just switched over to a smalle Kickstarter campaign to fund just the production of the voice cast (with sound effects, foley sound, and music) and a 2D animatic created by Timothée Giet based on storyboards by Terry Hancock. Find it here: http://kck.st/RTCwZs
We are pleased to announce our core team of seven very talented artists for modeling, rigging, and animation: Andrew Pray, Cosmin Planchon, Guillaume Côté, Sathish Kumar, Vyacheslav Yastrebcev, Timothée Giet, and Gorka Mendieta. They will be working on the “teaser trailer” for “No Children in Space” and some animation tests, all of which will be released during our Kickstarter campaign (which launches THIS FRIDAY – JULY 20TH – “MOON DAY”).
I wrote a column for Free Software Magazine about the free software infrastructure I set up on our server to support Lunatics. You might find it interesting: Creating a Project Website for “Lunatics” with Apache, Zope, Plone, MediaWiki, Trac, Subversion, and the Cloud Too
