We’ve just finished animating our “teaser trailer” (finally!), and we are putting the finishing touches o the presentation for our crowd-funding campaign to fund finishing the pilot episode. Please help us make this one a success!
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).
I’m pleased to welcome our new character modeling expert, Bela Szabo (a.k.a. “contmike” in some circles). This puts us back on track for a crowd-funding campaign launching late in this month, if everything goes as I expect.
Sadly, Andrew Pray, who created the character model for “Georgiana Lerner” that we’ve been using in our animations up until now, is no longer with the project. He’s an art student, and is no longer able to commit to the amount of work that the character modeling for “Lunatics!” represents. This is a bit of a blow for me as a producer and for the project. It means we’re going to have to take some time for re-grouping. Certainly we’re going to have to fin someone new to do the character modeling for the project.
Rosalyn Hunter recently wrote an initial draft of the novella version of “No Children in Space” as part of NaNoWriMo. We’re planning to offer print and e-book copies as part o our upcoming crowd-funding campaign. Here’s a couple of brief excerpts from the story.
Although we’re officially on a short hiatus, I am still doing a little work on weekends, and we have also recently been joined by Chris Kuhn, a very talented mechanical modeling artist who is currently working on the Soyuz launch system which features prominently in our pilot episode. I’ve also had a chance to do some more tests with character models, shading, lighting, and rendering — pictures, links, and video after the fold…
As mentioned in my last update, Lunatics is on a hiatus while I work on Lib-Ray goals. In the process, though, I’m finishing up the last Kickstarter rewards for Lunatics as well, which are the three copies of the animatic in prototype Lib-Ray format. They’re basically done, but there’s a couple of minor problems I’m sorting out with the menus and the packaging. After some analysis, I’ve also got some (hopefully much more realistic) predictions about Lib-Ray and Lunatics schedules for 2013.
Well. I’m in bean-counting mode today. Have to itemize all of the expenses for 2012. I’ll finally find out how much I actually spent on Lunatics and Lib-Ray and miscellaneous overhea costs. Just looking at all the line-items, I have a feeling the number is going to be pretty staggering.
I’m still working on mastering the DVD for the animatics (a Kickstarter reward for the pre-production backers — in fact, the final one, along with the flash-media versions of the same content). I’m having some considerable headaches with the software but it’s getting done.
