We knew what we wanted to do with the personalities of the characters for Lunatics! , and we had back-stories, descriptions, and a few personal details. But we didn’t have characters, and I intentionally left some creative room there, because I felt that a real character designer could do a much better job. I had done something similar to this for a game project years back, and my first choice was to contact one of the designers who had worked on that project – Daniel Fu . Of course, years had passed, and he’d gone on to different sorts of work. He’d also done his own online comic series with ” The Retriever “. So I felt pretty lucky when he agreed to do the designs for us.
During the Apollo era, Walter Cronkite, the famous TV newsman, told a story about interviewing Neil Armstrong. He had asked him what he and Buzz Aldrin would do with their last hours of life on the Moon, should the Lunar Module Ascent Engine fail and strand them there. He was hoping, he said, for some poetic response about doing a last experiment for the benefit of Mankind or contacting their loved ones back on Earth. What Armstrong actually said, though, is something any one of our major characters in Lunatics! would understand implicitly: “Well. I imagine we’d be working on that engine.”
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.
Sadly, Andrew Pray, who created the character model for “Georgiana Lerner” that we’ve been using in our animations up until now, is no longer with the project. He’s an art student, and is no longer able to commit to the amount of work that the character modeling for “Lunatics!” represents. This is a bit of a blow for me as a producer and for the project. It means we’re going to have to take some time for re-grouping. Certainly we’re going to have to fin someone new to do the character modeling for the project.
We’ve crossed a pre-production milestone — the modelsheets for the eight colonists (our main characters) are completed. Daniel is now moving on to the artwork for secondary characters. This puts us on schedule for our (recently slipped) delivery goal of early May.
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.
Hello everybody! Today, I started work on following through with the posters (the “Concept Art” posters). I’ve queried our two logo sponsors and received a logo from one of them. I also checked the cost of the poster printing. I’ve also had a chance to run over the final numbers and make sure that the overheads have all been accounted for. It turns out that when all the costs and overheads are calculated, we have about $1836, which is very nice: that will cover not only the $1600 for Daniel, but $100 incentive for Rosalyn on the script writing work, and still leave a bit for contingencies.
Allen Emerson is the last of the portraits for the Concept Art Poster. “R. Allen Emerson is a Conceptual Artist most known for his work in active and intelligent materials media. He made his name in the New York circuit winning the Andy Warhol Prize in Experimental and Performance Arts for his ground-breaking installation “Consciousness and Mechanism” presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts. His visionary exploration of non-static images of dramatic simplicity, and his pioneering work in interactive art has made Emerson a leader in the modern trans-humanist zeitgeist movement.
After doing several of the others, I thought I’d come back and try putting shadows and highlights on Sarah’s portrait. I also decided to color her hair more naturally. “Dr. Sarah Allison is one of the foremost authorities on moon morphology and geophysics. She has clocked over 100 hours exploring the moon’s surface. She holds the George P. Kokh Chair in lunar planetology at New Mexico State University. Currently she is to be found at the European University Collectives Marius Hills Lava tube expedition in the Ocean of Storms on the Lunar surface.” Drawing by Daniel Fu. Digital ink and paint by Terry Hancock.
Here is the Concept Art Portrait for Igor Timothy Farmer / Tim. “Timothy Farmer son of Anya Titova Farmer and Joshua Farmer is the communications assistant on the ISF colony. He runs his own highly ranked web channel about the LIBRE project. He has plans to get a degree in computer science.” Drawing by Daniel Fu. Digital ink & paint by Terry Hancock.
Another color portrait for the Concept Art Poster — this is Joshua Farmer / Josh. “Joshua Farmer (Ph.D.) received his Doctorate in Space Agriculture for his work on rapid-growth high yield crops. He was recruited to work at the Lunar Installation and Biological Research Interprise (LIBRE) to prepare crops for the colonization effort. He remained on as one of the colonization candidates and was chosen for the first team.” Original pencil drawing by Daniel Fu. Digital ink & color by Terry Hancock.
Drawing of “Anya Titova Farmer” / “Anya” by Daniel Fu (from the concept art sheet), digitally inked and colored by Terry Hancock. “Anya Titova Farmer (M.B.A.) is business manager of the ISF lunar colony. She comes from a long line of Russian entrepreneurs, astronauts, and rocket engineers. Her father Anatoly Titov and her Uncle Konstantin Titov manage the Titov Space Industries, founded by her grandfather Igor Titov. She received a degree in international business from the Russian Academy of Economics (RAE) and a Master in Business Administration from the University of Arizona. She is also founder and part owner of Sputniki Zvezda Serebryaniy (Silver Star Satellites).”
