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 sent out some press releases for the Kickstarter. I’ve also posted an update about the non-photorealisti visual style and how we hope to render our characters in the final production (or at least what some of our options are).
My latest update gives some insights into the process we followed to get to the pilot episode script as we started producing it. Also a bit of relation to the original short stor and the rest of the series.
I’m doing some production math today: created a list of every single shot in the pilot episode – there are 393 of them, omitting a few repetitions. For each, I listed all of the 3D model assets used. Then I wrote a little Python script to pivot this table and create a list of all 3D assets with the shots they appear in. There are 254 3D assets listed, ranging from the character “Georgiana” (118 shots) to the prop “Vegetables-Various” (1 shot).
As you can see, we’ve revised our website and we have just posted the animatic version of our pilot episode, “No Children in Space”. This is the “International” or “Original” version with English subtitles. We are also rendering an “English-dub” version which is very similar, but has all of the dialog in English.
Although we may replace some of the voices later on, I have now completed assembling the voices for the pilot episode, and I have now started working on the full sound mix wit effects and sound. I have also spent a considerable amount of time refactoring the Blender source files for the project — there is a lot of scaling, matching, and linking work that needs to be done. I also recently found a problem with my system that may explain some of my frustrations with Kdenlive.
Despite missing our Kickstart goal, we just completed our cast reading for both the pilot “No Children in Space” and “Earth”. This went very smoothly — even better than we hoped. We’ll now be working on recording the lines and putting together an animatic to guide the animation production process. It’ll probably b pretty quiet for awhile as we work on this.
