Although we didn’t quite succeed with our attempt to fund the voice recording on “No Children in Space” and “Earth”, we were able to proceed slowly anyway, and completed a basic animatic for “No Children in Space”, with voices and soundtrack. We’ve also, since then, been joined by mech modeler Chris Kuhn and new character modeler Bela Szabo, who are already working on models to finish production of “No Children in Space”.
It was somewhat disappointing when our 2012 campaign fell so far from our goal, but I have to admit, there were a lot of signs that we weren’t really ready then. However, after an additional year of work, we’ve managed to accomplish a LOT: And so, I have a lot more confidence about our new 2013 Production Kickstarter. Please come and check it out!
We are now running a Kickstarter campaign to fund production of the pilot episode for “Lunatics!”, “No Children in Space”. After a year of work on this project, I’m really excited with how much we’ve accomplished — we have already got many of the most important models for the project created, and of course, with your help, we were able to do the pre-production work, create an animatic, and do voice recording. The goal of our new Kickstarter is to finish off the pilot by doing the remaining model work and then animating. Please check it out!
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.
This will probably be my next-to-last update. The DVD data sets are being mailed (all but one of them is in the post, the last one will go out on my next trip to the post office). There are two disks in a double-disk thin-pack (I know I didn’t actually promise a case originally, but I had these already, and I thought they’d look nicer than just sending you a paper sleeve). Disk 1 is a hybrid video/data DVD. That is to say, you can put it into a DVD-player and play it like you would any DVD movie, and there is also “DVD-ROM” content on the disk which you can get to by putting the disk into your computer (look in the “Extras” directory). The DVD features include:
Well, this is taking a little longer than I planned, due to software problems I don’t even want to get started on (I’m having to do a lot of workarounds and trouble-shooting as a result). But I’m getting fairly close now. Just have to smash some more menu bugs. Much of the DVD-authoring also serves double for the USB flash drive versions, since it will be basically the same design (for these, I’ll be using the prototype Lib-Ray spec, which basically means a small on-disk website with linked videos). These will be “hybrid” DVDs with additional “DVD-ROM” content accessible by computer. I may have to be a little creative with that, since the whole production source tree is now too big to fit comfortably on a DVD. I’ll be paring it down some, and some content will probably be on a second disk. Meanwhile, of course, the video of the animatic is available on our website: http://lunatics.tv/Episodes/Pilot/Animatic
There are a lot of exterior space shot in the 2nd half of the pilot episode, and I decided it would actually be easier to do rough animatics of these in Blender than to sketch them all — and it will certainly look better. So this week I’m doing a lot of quick renderings in Blender. So far it’s going pretty well, although am still a little behind where I hoped I’d be. There’s still a good chance I can get the animatic finished this weekend if “real life” doesn’t get in the way too much!
I’ve now mixed the audio for the pre-title teaser and Act I of “No Children in Space” for the animatic version. Although it sounded fine on my studio earphones, I found it didn’t sound so good on a TV. I realized I was mixing it too “hot” — meaning the dynamic range was too high. So I did a little research, and now I’m mixing a more reasonable version.
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.
Terry Hancock is currently busy mixing voice recordings for the dialog in “No Children in Space”. This is mostly a matter of fitting all of the lines together and making sure th levels match and the lines will fit reasonably well together. Last wee we shipped the artbooks and posters from our first Kickstarter — hopefully backers have either already received these by now or will in the next few days. Of course, we are still waiting a little longer on the data disks, as we hope to include the audio/animatic production tha we’re working on now.
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.
