Wow. This week, I’ve started animating We’ve had some nearly-final shots for awhile — the “Earth in Space” shots, but those were kind of trivial. I’m now working on a complex “real” shot for the first time. It’s a particularly tough one close to the beginning of the Pilot (and the “Prolog” and the “Preview” based on the Pilot). I’ll go into some detail on the construction of this shot i our Patreon “Patron Newsletter” this month.
I’ve gotten requests to publish a list of free-licensed resources used for Lunatics, and I have accumulated a very long list of them in my browser bookmarks collection. I don’t really have time to edit this down into a more digestible format, but i wasn’t too hard to export the bookmarks and import them into my news blog here. So here you go: links to all kinds of free art resources!
Happy New Year! A lot has happened in the last few weeks, and we’re about to make some major changes on the “Lunatics!” project website. Progress continues on 3D assets for the series and for “No Children in Space”; and we’re making new promotional and fundraising plans. It’s time to shake things up, and we’re planning to do just that!
We’ve completed our first production, which is an audiodrama: The colonists are joined by meta-conceptual artist R. Allen Emerson as part of his project to experience a lunar eclipse as viewed from the Moon, while Josh struggles with a new problem getting the colonies first crops started. This episode worked particularly well as an audiodrama, and we’re very excited to have been able to finish an entire episode! You can stream or download the FULL EPISODE (34 minutes) from our site here: http://lunatics.tv/z/s1e02a We are also offering the episode on Audio CD along with some extras, in an IndieGoGo Campaign: http://igg.me/at/lunatics/x/1057944
Thanks again for pledging! Here’s the previously promised download link: http://lunatics.tv/Downloads/2013_KS_DL_IRIDIUM Includes eight different desktop background designs in a variety of sizes and aspect ratios, printable versions of the finger puppets we used in some of our previous videos, and an updated collection of banner graphics, should you want to link to our project. I had fun making these. I also did some more learning about Freestyle, though I have more work to do there.
Our show doesn’t really have a single star. Instead we have an ensemble of several colonists, each of whom gets their own stories. But we also want to get them together as for ensemble moments, like this scene of the two main families having their first meal together on the Moon.
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.
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.
Since we decided to have Paul Birchard do the Allen Emerson character (first introduced in “Earth”), I thought maybe I should share his audition for it. We enjoyed it a lot. This of course, is the same “Art Now!” interview that Rosalyn and I voiced earlier. I have to say that Paul a whole lot better than I am at the part! Of course, Paul is playing both the interviewer and Emerson here.
For our first Kickstarter campaign back in December, we promised a “Pre-Production Artbook and Writer’s Guide”, which I have just now uploaded to the printer after a long, long time drawing, writing, and editing for it. This is a 170-page “story bible” with all of the essentials in the pilot episode and some additional material for the second episode as well. This includes set plans, character model sheets, sketches, character background information, future historical notes, two full scripts, a bonus short story “The Landing” which was Rosalyn’s first fictionalization of the “Lunatics” story (it’s interesting to see how much the concept has changed), and even the small character-focused reading scripts we used for auditioning actors.
