I was invited to this event to discuss three projects currently crowd-funding, our own “Lunatics!” project, another film project called “Algorithm” , and the huge (and controversial) Ubuntu Edge project (which is aiming to raise $32 million to build a limited run of smartphones running the “Ubuntu Touch” operating system — that’s over 750 times as much as we need for “Lunatics!”). This was a fun chat — the part about “Lunatics!” is mostly towards the end:
Kickstarter, with its “all or nothing” funding scheme, reduces risks for both creators and backers. For a project like “Lunatics!”, this makes it a lot safer bet. This protects early backers financially — if we don’t make it, you’ve lost nothing. And the money doesn’t come out until the end when we know the campaign has succeeded (or doesn’t because it hasn’t). We really need “inside” support from those of you already following “Lunatics!” if we’re going to encourage the “outside” support from new people we communicate with.
Thanks to everyone who supported our Kickstarter on our Moon Day opening, and thanks to everyone who helped spread the word about it! You never really know what’s going to happen, and I do hate the sound of those darned crickets. So I’m really grateful that we had some noise on our opening day. That’s a little complicated to say: First, and most importantly, it is better than any of our previous Kickstarter campaign attempts, including our successful pre-production campaign! So that’s a really good sign.
We are now running a Kickstarter campaign to fund production of the pilot episode for “Lunatics!”, “No Children in Space”. After a year of work on this project, I’m really excited with how much we’ve accomplished — we have already got many of the most important models for the project created, and of course, with your help, we were able to do the pre-production work, create an animatic, and do voice recording. The goal of our new Kickstarter is to finish off the pilot by doing the remaining model work and then animating. Please check it out!
As I posted earlier, it’s clear that we are not going to be able to raise sufficient funds to take us all the way through production of the pilot episode on this Kickstarter. I will be canceling this Kickstart in just a few minutes. I’d like to thank those of you who supported this project with your pledges! If you would like to continue supporting our production, please consider backing our much more modest campaign to fund the next phase: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2144275086/lunatics-pilot-episode-voice-drama-and-animatic
Thank you very much to all of you who were willing to support this very ambitious project at this early stage! It has, however, been apparent for awhile now that we’re not going to succeed in funding the entire production process for the pilot episode in one go. So much for the “frontal assault”! However, this doesn’t necessarily mean a failure for the project — we’re now switching to a more incremental process. We’re getting ready to announce a replacement Kickstarter campaign which at minimum will fund us just through: This campaign is currently going through the Kickstarter review process and will hopefully be launched in just a few days.
Twenty people have contributed to our project, and as we are approaching the end of this campaign, I want to take a moment to say ” Thank you! ” to you all for pitching in! I was pretty nervous about putting this Kickstart up — although I’ve had some success with projects and art, money has never been a real comfort area for me. And when we started working on Lunatics, we were pretty much working in a complete vacuum. It’s very hard to have any idea if anyone cares what you’re doing. We knew we really enjoyed what we were coming up with, but we didn’t know if it would be clear to other people.
