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.”
Two of our major character parts in “Lunatics!” are played by the extremely versatile veteran character actor and voice-over artist, Paul Birchard. We are so lucky to have this guy on the project, and he really breathes life into these two characters: Joshua Farmer and R. Allen Emerson.
We have a great voice cast on “Lunatics!” which is one reason I really, really want to see this finished. One of the first characters introduced is “Hiromi Lerner”, voiced by Karrie Shirou. The part of Hiromi Lerner is tricky. She’s a subtle character — it’d be really easy for her to come off as a stereotypical homemaker role and thus dismissed, but the thing is, she’s somebody who’s decided to do this role on the Moon . Inside, Hiromi is like iron, and you could argue that she’s the one that really holds that colony together.
We really need some help getting the word out about our Kickstarter campaign, and one of our fans suggested neat idea: if you embed our Kickstarter widget on your webpage until Aug 20th, we’ll send you a free, high-quality printed set of OFFICIAL finger puppets and a signed thank you note. Details after the fold…
Over the course of 2012, we had a total of over 30 people work on Lunatics! But there was still a lot to do in 2013. We got a huge boost from mechanical modeler Chris Kuhn joining the team this Summer: Lead Mech Modeler: Chris Kuhn
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:
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.
Well, I’m not sure what’s happening with our Kickstarter. We’re stuck at 3% with 22 backers. I don’t know i that’s because I’ve overestimated how many people are supporting us or if it’s because you’re disappointed with the results. Could even be I’m just talking to myself and a bunch of web crawlers here, and only imagine that anyone is following this. It could be that even our closer followers aren’t seeing all of these posts, with all the changes that have been happening in the social media sphere. There are so many thing acting to lock you into a digital bubble.
