Today, we posted the very last rewards, which were the three Lib-Ray-formatted versions of the pilot episode animatic, along with the dataset, which included all of the extras from the episode download page as well as a snapshot of the development source tree. Once we decided to release these in a format compatible with our developing Lib-Ray standard, we had to wait until we had enough of that standard defined to make sure they would match — but we’ve now reached that point with Lib-Ray, so it was possible to finalize these and get them shipped. And that marks the end of our Pre-Production Kickstarter! Hurray!
This will probably be my next-to-last update. The DVD data sets are being mailed (all but one of them is in the post, the last one will go out on my next trip to the post office). There are two disks in a double-disk thin-pack (I know I didn’t actually promise a case originally, but I had these already, and I thought they’d look nicer than just sending you a paper sleeve). Disk 1 is a hybrid video/data DVD. That is to say, you can put it into a DVD-player and play it like you would any DVD movie, and there is also “DVD-ROM” content on the disk which you can get to by putting the disk into your computer (look in the “Extras” directory). The DVD features include:
I’m still working on mastering the DVD for the animatics (a Kickstarter reward for the pre-production backers — in fact, the final one, along with the flash-media versions of the same content). I’m having some considerable headaches with the software but it’s getting done.
Well, this is taking a little longer than I planned, due to software problems I don’t even want to get started on (I’m having to do a lot of workarounds and trouble-shooting as a result). But I’m getting fairly close now. Just have to smash some more menu bugs. Much of the DVD-authoring also serves double for the USB flash drive versions, since it will be basically the same design (for these, I’ll be using the prototype Lib-Ray spec, which basically means a small on-disk website with linked videos). These will be “hybrid” DVDs with additional “DVD-ROM” content accessible by computer. I may have to be a little creative with that, since the whole production source tree is now too big to fit comfortably on a DVD. I’ll be paring it down some, and some content will probably be on a second disk. Meanwhile, of course, the video of the animatic is available on our website: http://lunatics.tv/Episodes/Pilot/Animatic
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”.
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.
Well, we’re ticking down the last few hours, and I don’t where else to popularize the project at this point. We’re at 65%, and with only three hours left on this Friday night, it’s starting to look unlikely that we’ll get more than one or two more pledges. Something amazing could still happen in the next couple of hours — it’s not that huge a stretch if many of you increased your pledges or got somebody else in on it. But whether or not that happens, I want to take a moment to thank every one of you for believing in our project enough to pledge. We really appreciate it!
