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.
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.
This last week, I mostly spent getting up to speed with Blender’s scripting interface for Python. I have to admit to being a little anxious about this, but it’s really pretty simple stuff once you get started (that’s always the hard part!). Daniel’s working on the model sheets. And I’m starting to write the structural parts of the book we’re creating as part of the production process.
