As we’ve already mentioned in an earlier update, Lunatics! will start out with two soundtracks — one in “original language” and one in “English-only”. These tracks will be nearly identical most of the time, but they will handle the few cases of characters speaking other languages differently.
Our show doesn’t really have a single star. Instead we have an ensemble of several colonists, each of whom gets their own stories. But we also want to get them together as for ensemble moments, like this scene of the two main families having their first meal together on the Moon.
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.”
The path we took towards the concept for the pilot episode was pretty convoluted. It arose out of a number of constraints we were trying to deal with when we were planning to launch the “Lunatics!” series. Both “No Children in Space” and “Earth” are drawn roughly from Rosalyn’s original short story, “The Arrival”.
Thanks to everyone who supported our Kickstarter on our Moon Day opening, and thanks to everyone who helped spread the word about it! You never really know what’s going to happen, and I do hate the sound of those darned crickets. So I’m really grateful that we had some noise on our opening day. That’s a little complicated to say: First, and most importantly, it is better than any of our previous Kickstarter campaign attempts, including our successful pre-production campaign! So that’s a really good sign.
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!
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!
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:
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.
