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).
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.
This is just going to be a quick update, because I’m working on storyboard animatics today, but we have just passed the halfway mark — in fact, we’re at 52%. Of course, we only have about 30 hours to make the other 48% if we’re going to make. But consider this thought — if each of you found just one other person willing to put in as much as you did, we’d be done. So a few shares through your friend networks online or offline might be enough to do it.
We just tried our first teleconference with three of the principals for “Lunatics”, I plan to meet the others on Friday for another test call, and then we’ll be all set up to work o Saturday morning when we do our table read for “No Children in Space”. Our Kickstarter is currently at 40%, with just over 2 days left: http://kck.st/RTCwZs
We’re currently doing five things simultaneously: casting voice actors, reviewing applications for 3D artist internships, finishing our pre-production Kickstart work and rewards, training on the software, and planning for our next Kickstarte which will pay for the production of the pilot episode, “No Children i Space”. Everything is complicated and interlocked, and I am very busy camper. But this is pretty fun, I have to admit!
