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The first real shot that I'm animating is the "Train Exterior" shot at the beginning of the Kazakhstan train sequence in the pilot. This is a shot I've been planning for over four years -- so talk about "delayed gratification", this is it. I first published an animatic version of this shot in a tutorial I wrote for Free Software Magazine in 2010. It hasn't really changed that much in concept, although of course, it's looking a lot more real now!
CREDITS: train model is by Chris Kuhn. Plants, rails, etc by Terry Hancock. Materials and rendering by Terry Hancock.
An early (still quite clunky) version of the shot, with some notes can be seen on Vimeo:
I've gotten requests to make a list of free-licensed online collections available, since I have been collecting them for a long time for Lunatics. I don't have time to do this in a carefully-curated way, but my browser does have a bookmark export tool! So this is a lightly-edited output copied from a bookmark export, and there's not a whole lot of description or prioritization. However, I generally do move the most important resources to the top of the list in each category as I'm browsing, so there is some order here!
Top music source for Lunatics, by far.
Best source for F/X sound, categorized by license - many are CC 0, CC By, or CC By-SA.
Patreon is a newer crowd-funding solution which is particularly suited for on-going serial projects. Instead of having a fixed deadline and funding goal, we have "milestones" we'd like to reach, which will improve the quality of the episodes we can produce, and how quickly we can produce them. More money means we can bring more talent into the production, and that means producing more episodes in a shorter period of time. Enough money, and we can operate less like a "no budget" underground operation and more like a commercial studio. And that's entirely feasible if fans put the kind of money into our production that they would on buying movie tickets or renting videos of a proprietary series.
How much you pay is up to you -- it depends on how much you value our work. Many people who are only casually interested will probably pay nothing. This is nothing new -- most people who watch television shows probably don't buy from the advertisers, either. And a lot of people will just watch whatever is on. But if you value what we're doing and want to make sure we can do more of it, then you can buy into it, and we're prepared to offer some exclusive rewards for doing so, though we hope the biggest reward is watching the show which will be free for all, and knowing that you helped make it happen.
Patreon also represents less production risk than Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, because you don't pay anything up front. You're only charged when we release an episode -- it's "pay on delivery". And for series, it's more convenient, because it's a subscription -- if you do nothing, you'll pay the same amount for the next episode, and so on. However, if you decide you really like the series, you can increase your pledge, or if you're disappointed, you can reduce it or cancel it at any time.
We're using Patreon to ask for direct support for producing Lunatics. Among the rewards we're offering:
The first goal is to just make sure we can pay our existing bills (which I've been mostly paying out of pocket, of course). These are mostly things that really come out on a monthly basis (like web hosting), although there's also going to be one-time expenses like printing posters or copies of our audiodrama for promotional uses. We also really ought to be spending a little bit every month on advertising the project -- one thing I've learned is that with an original concept, you really do need to advertise or no one will hear about it (it's a little easier with fan-fiction which has an existing concentrated market).
The other reason for this goal is to avoid the "empty restaurant" or "empty progress bar" syndrome. We don't really want to promote the project until there is some showing of support from our "insiders" (which includes you, if you're reading this now!). If we get to our $1K "Countdown!" goal, we'll already be at 20% of the $5K "Launch!" goal, which I would like to reach before we release our "Prolog" episode, if possible.
So we're going to work extra hard to create a nice, polished preview that shows off all the new and shiny stuff we've been working on over the last year, especially our improved rendering and materials style. I hope to get that up this month (August 2014).
Patreon doesn't have a self-updating progress bar, widget, by the way (at least not yet), so we've made our own banners for the successive milestones in the campaign.
Lunatics is a very character-driven story, and unlike a lot of short Blender movie projects, the character count is pretty high. This is particularly true for the beginning of the pilot episode, since it starts out on Earth. So one thing we need to be able to do is to take a few basic character meshes and create a lot of variations, first for our "Walk-On" characters (that appear only for a scene or two) and then for "Extras" (background of shots, crowds, etc).
We also need to have our main characters go through some costume changes -- into spacesuits, obviously, but also, both Hiromi and Georgiana will be wearing flight suits during the trip to the Moon, while on Earth, they should be wearing more traditional clothes. That all calls for different costumes to be created.
Fortunately, these are all strengths for Keneisha Perry, who is currently majoring in a 3D graphics program in California. She's already contributed some great work for Georgiana and Hiromi Lerner, including the pinafore costume for Georgiana in the picture, and she's expecting to do more work on differentiating characters for the pilot based on Bela Szabo's character base meshes and main characters.
We're also discussing how we want to do our character rigging workflow. Most likely we'll just be starting from Rigify and perhaps using the Sintel character rig as a guide to rigging design and controls, but it's still undecided. It's possible that Keneisha will also be helping a lot with this.
The pilot for Lunatics is an unusual episode in several ways. One is that it starts on Earth, in the wide-open deserts of western Kazakhstan, and in the somewhat bizarre little spaceport town of Baikonur, which has an odd combination of small desert town, fossils of Soviet-era progressivism and propaganda, and a working town, supported largely by the space industry and related tourism. Our vision for 2040 is mostly optimistic -- slight improvements here and there, but mostly still the sleepy town that it is today.
In order to realize this, we are modeling just a few iconic parts of the town, notably the "Stele to Science and Space" (which also acts as a scene transition), the "Cosmonaut / Baikonur Town Monument" (I'm not sure what the proper name for this is, but there's a large bas-relief relating to spaceflight, and a stele with words which I'm told translate roughly to "Glory to the conquerors of space"). There's also the train station (though we're going to futurize it a bit), a marketplace with a souvenir shop, and the park behind the Cosmonaut Hotel with the "cosmonaut trees" -- part of the rituals associated with going into space Russian style.
We also have to model parts of the spaceport itself, including the interior set for the "Aquarium" room and the exterior of "Building 254" where the final launch prep is done.
For both the town and the spaceport, the exterior locations will be "double-set-models" with a main "foreground" set where all the character action takes place, and a larger, but much simpler "background" or "context" set which fills in the background vegetation and buildings and so forth.
Sathish Kumar, our principle set modeler, and his Spark Multimedia studio is starting on the foreground sets. Meanwhile, I'm starting work on the background sets. The image associated with this article is a render of a proof-of-principle test I did based on the setting for the "Stele to Science and Space". The monument itself is missing, but this fills in features from the park and surrounding buildings. My plan is to render these elements with cel-shading, but no outlines, since they are meant to be perceived as part of the background plate, with a focus on color rather than definition of details.
Bela Szabo has been continuing to work on the major characters. He has finished models for Georgiana, Hiromi, Tim, Josh, Anya, and Sergei. Which leaves Rob, Allen, and Sarah of the main characters (the colonists). None of these characters are rigged for production animation yet (Bela created a simple rig for Georgiana for the "Soyuz Launch Demo", but it was not really a full rig).
I'm working with Gorka Mendieta on the process for creating our rigs with consistent controls to make animation more uniform over all of them. We're looking to the Blender Cookie "Flexi-Rig" by Nathan Vegdahl and Beorn Leonard for our lead on this. It's not clear to me yet whether this means actually using that rig or just being "compatible" with it. But we are trying to take advantage of shared community resources as much as we can.
Tying into an existing teaching rig like the Flexi-Rig would have some nice advantages. For one thing, our characters would operate just like the ones in the training course, and so any amateur animator who had taken it would already know how to manipulate our characters. For another, there may be scripts developed that target the rig -- like Konstantin Dmetriev's lip-syncing script for the Flexi-Rig, which is based on the Papagayo lip-sincing aid, which we could then use.
We are a still a LONG way short of having ALL of the characters for the pilot ready. There is a secondary tier of important character models to create, some of which will be used throughout the series, and we need a lot of "walk ons" (brief speaking parts or close-ups) and "extras" (background/crowd characters, no lines) for the pilot especially.
So we are also looking for additional character modelers now!
This would be a terrific opportunity to demonstrate your skill at character modeling in Blender, and at following the stylistic lead of other artists -- both Bela Szabo's existing models and Daniel Fu's character modelsheets. These are important skills in a studio/team environment, so it should look good on your resume and/or demo reel. I regret that, as we are all working as volunteers at this point, I can't offer any up-front pay, although of course, all contributors will be included in our "pay the artists" profit-sharing breakdown, according to how much is contributed.
I'll be posting a more detailed call for character models soon, but if you are interested, please contact us! You can email Terry Hancock at either "digitante at gmail dot com" OR "auditions at anansispaceworks dot com".
ALSO a reminder: we're probably going to be transitioning to a WordPress-based site soon. So the RSS links and stuff will probably change. You might want to check back occasionally. I will post a message on this feed before changing over, though.
]]>Wow. There's been a lot going on with the "Lunatics!" project. Some of it was very good, and some of it was very bad. Overall, though, it's clear that we're going to be changing a lot of things.
One of the most exciting developments of 2013 is that we finished our first complete story production -- which is the audiodrama version of the episode "Earth". This episode introduces the character "R. Allen Emerson", a "meta-conceptual" artist who comes to the colony to observe, experience, and record a lunar eclipse as seen from the Moon (which means the Sun will go behind the Earth). At the same time, the colonists are struggling with their first real existential threat, because there's a mysterious problem with some of the crops.
This drama is now available for download or streaming on our site. We will be offering this as the main attraction on an up-coming audio CD.
We're really proud of this story and recording!
On December 3rd, though, not long after we initially published "Earth" and launched an IndieGoGo campaign associated with it (to pre-sell the audio CDs and raise money for paying actors and if possible, 3D modelers), we had a large grass and building fire which did a great deal of damage to our main office facility -- which is to say, my home office in the back of the building we call the "library". Even more damage was done to our "shop" building, including completely destroying our main electrical box on the property. Then we almost immediately had an ice storm which made repairing the electrical system a real problem (and of course, we had no heat).
Needless to say, we were pretty busy working on that problem, and as a result, we completely neglected promoting the IndieGoGo campaign which just sat at zero until late in December, when we retired it (technically it's still up, but I've removed all the rewards and marked it as "canceled"). We considered doing a new start on it in December (when it was down to 30 days), but decided that, with the time running out, it would be smarter to just cancel it and try again, perhaps with a different strategy.
The fire damaged, but did not destroy our main production computer. However, it appears that no data has been lost. I immediately backed up most of our project data by writing it out to Millenniata "DVD-M" archival disks. So we're pretty safe on that front.
It was quite a wake-up call as to how much data had not yet been migrated to our Subversion server, though, and I have been working hard to bring the repository up to date. This is also necessary for us to begin serious work on set models.
This series will remain a free-culture project. But I've dismissed a lot of more conventional channels for film financing and support on the belief that they just won't be compatible with our free-culture goals. That belief is largely untested, though, because I haven't studied the conventional methods well enough. One of my first goals as producer this year (which I've already started on) is to become much more familiar with the world of independent film and animation and how other film projects get financed. Some may not work for us, some may work just fine, and some may work with a little adaptation.
We don't need to reinvent every wheel!
I need to do a lot more research here, but it's quite likely that we'll be entering some of our work (starting with the audiodrama) into festivals or competitions of one kind or another. Getting recognition at that level would be a huge step forward in promoting the project.
I'm also considering some ancillary products we might produce from our assets and/or team that might make additional associations and improve awareness of our project.
I don't want to get too specific before I'm fully committed, but I have several ideas that I'm pursuing:
Many of these things could be done with almost no extra effort beyond what we're already doing for the animated production. And of course this ties in with having something to sell through the storefront I proposed above.
I've talked a lot about Lunatics from a perspective of free-culture advocacy, free-software demonstration, new business models, and even a little bit from the aspect of story (though I've tried not to drop "spoilers"). But we're also trying to do some exciting things visually, and I'm going to be focusing more on the "non-photorealistic" rendering for Lunatics, and trying to get some more "final look" work out there.
I've not wanted to do too much of this kind of work yet, because we had few 3D assets to do it with, but that's changing. This Spring, I'm going to work towards producing a series of "key stills" which will show final posed characters on final sets with the final "inked and shaded" look that I'm aiming for. I've found that for many people, this is the most interesting aspect of our project, and yet they don't yet have a clear idea of what we're talking about.
In some ways, the Soyuz launch demo backfired, because people didn't like the way Georgiana looked. This was intended as a first pass for what the "final look" might have been. It was made without worrying too much that it could be clearly seen as CG, and maintaining an "economical style" -- meaning a style I was sure we could keep up through a whole episode, was what I was aiming for.
However, looking back on it, I too have to agree that it could be improved a lot, and I'd like a more Freestyle/NPR look better. So, I've decided to go further in that direction. This is far more demanding on the hardware (we're going to need that cluster to animate in this style), and requires quite a bit more work in the rendering process, but I think the results are worthwhile (like the ISS model I've illustrated this post with).
So, what I'm resolving is to put more effort into the graphical "look" of Lunatics, and I think this will make the project a lot more compelling -- both for people seeing our project for the first time and also for the artists who are working on it.
Frankly, the project's web presence has fallen very short of my intent.
"The Old"
We're going to reduce our reliance on the Plone CMS. Plone is a powerful tool in the hands of professional maintainers, but is not so good "out of the box", and I simply don't have the time to make it do what I need. I'm not sure whether we'll get rid of it completely or not.
This "production blog" or "project news" is based in Plone, and I have never been able to allow reader comments on it. It is possible to enable automated sign-up and commenting features, but the out-of-the-box Plone provides absolutely no support for managing spam bots. I tried turning on just the automated sign-up feature for about a week, and got something like 1200 fake users signed up on the site. Furthermore, the administrative interface only lets me delete them one at a time. Needless to say, that's not happening. So we have this one-sided communication (although I do pay attention to responses on Facebook, Google+, Diaspora, and Twitter).
We were using a MediaWiki installation for pre-production assets. However, it doesn't quite fit the task and we've actually found ourselves relying more on private emails, which means stuff gets misplaced, and also that it's not very "open source".
OpenUpload was a useful package for receiving large files, but the interface is a little clunky, and it's intended to be a general file-sharing tool, not a submissions system.
Subversion and Trac work okay as far as they go, but they don't fill all the project's needs for storing digital assets, and trying to use them to store all the assets is failing for us. Again, we've slipped into passing lots of data around privately, which results in disorganization (and had the fire been more severe, we might have lost some of it).
We've tried to use some outside services. We got a good start with Kickstarter, but I don't know if it's going to be the best choice for us from now on. We tried IndieGoGo unsuccessfully, but I think that had more to do with our approach than with the site. The team behind Wreck-a-Movie seems to have abandoned it, which may be part of why it didn't work out very well for us. And of course, we used the non-free Skype for teleconferencing, simply because most of the team had it installed already.
"The New"
So what are we going to migrate to?
A self-hosted Wordpress blog as a solution for the production blog and possibly some of the CMS needs. I'm not certain whether we'll migrate the main site fully to Wordpress, or just the blog -- it depends on how much flexibility it allows me.
We're not getting rid of Subversion, Trac, or MediaWiki, as I still think they have applications. But we are adding a new package called Resource Space, which is a full, open-source "Digital Asset Management System". If this doesn't work as well as I think it will, we have other some other open source DAMS to try out. There's a nice video intro to Resource Space, if you want to understand better what it's useful for. In brief, a DAMS makes it a lot easier to track, organize, and locate digital assets (things like photos, sound recordings, video clips, 3D models, etc). This particular one has good web integration which means it's perfect for our project.
Resource Space also provides through-the-web large file uploads, so it should replace Open Upload.
For voice and real-time visual collaboration, we have been considering "Big Blue Button", which would provide the ability to do presentations, meetings, and whiteboard work online. Aside from the cast readings, where it is essential, this could really speed up our collaboration in other areas, like 3D modeling and animation, as compared with long email exchanges. Rather than burdening our server with this, we'll probably use a hosting service.
We are also very likely going to open an online storefront, although this is a little risky. We have to at least have enough projected sales to cover the monthly fees on the storefront. One of the best is run by Amazon, mostly because of the ability to integrate into the Amazon Marketplace and be found by searches on the Amazon site. Of course, they charge for all of that, so it does have some significant overhead costs. We need to make sure we have products to sell before attempting it.
We may look into somewhat more specialized funding and collaboration sites targeted at independant film, like Seed and Spark, which I recently discovered.
I think it's going to be an exciting year for us!
]]>In this half-hour audio drama, the lunar colonists at the ISF-1 colony are joined by international superstar "meta-conceptual" artist, R. Allen Emerson and his three "intelligent artwork" robots, just as the colonists are struggling with getting their first crops started.
This is our first completed episode production. It's a 34-minute audio drama. We recorded the voices originally for animation, but this episode is very dialog-driven, and with only a few minor tweaks, it works as an audio drama. Since we've been really fortunate on the audio side, this really shows the current strengths of our project. We are still planning to raise funds to animate both this episode and the pilot, to create "Volume 1" of our animated "Lunatics!" series.
Additional formats will be coming, as well an official "creator endorsed" audio CD version which we will be selling soon (probably through an IndieGoGo campaign to fund a CD press run). We're hoping that having a full episode available, even if it's just audio, will communicate a lot better what we want to do with "Lunatics!"
Thanks for listening!
For those who are curious, let me outline how our sound production workflow works.
Of course, we start with a script. We had conference call in September 2012 with the principal actors, and we did a read through of both "No Children in Space" and "Earth" ("Earth" is what I'm working on now). This allowed us to clear up some basics about the lines, and then the actors could record takes of the lines to send to me (by various means, as it happens -- we do have a special upload tool for this, but some of them were just email attachments).
I then opened up whatever they gave me and did some minimal processing in Audacity, moving all of the lines into clusters of takes for each line for each character. I then exported this as a lossless FLAC audio file -- one for each character role in the episode. This is what I have included in the source tree as the actors' input lines -- this way, they're all consistent.
I then make an Audacity file for the episode's dialog. One-by-one, I import each character's voice takes into the file. First, I have to "gap" the audio -- I use "Split Delete" to delete the silences between the takes (I wish there were a way to automate this step, but Audacity doesn't seem to recognize the silences -- it could be they're not perfectly silent or something, though in some cases, that seems surprising). This gets a bunch of individual snippets of dialog, which can then be moved around. I give these tracks a name like "~ALLEN", which means it's the "source" track, which will wind up with all of the outtakes.
I then go through the process of selecting takes. I think this is probably the hardest part of the project, because it involves listening to the same takes over and over again, and making lots of little decisions. Sometimes it's quite hard to tell them apart. And sometimes, the best take will depend on the takes selected for the other characters. Choosing which character to introduce first is tricky too -- I usually try to work by selecting the character with the most lines first, and then building around the primary conversations that character is involved in. In Earth, for example, there are important dialogs between "Allen" and "Anya", between "Allen and Georgiana", and also between "Rob", "Josh", and "Anya" -- "Hiromi" and "Tim" have fewer lines in this episode, so they were added last.
As I select takes, I move the one I select in a new track just named after the character, like "ALLEN". These are the live tracks for the episode. I space these out into scenes, and as I add new characters, adjust the spacing to create the dialogs. I mute the "~" source tracks (I picked "~", BTW, because if you do an alphabetical sort on the tracks by name, they will all fall to the end. I also add a "*LABELS" track with labels identifying each scene by name to keep a rough track of where everything is).
Eventually, I have the dialog for the entire episode as a series of scene dialogs, with gaps in between. For testing, I export these to MP3, import the resulting file in Audacity again, delete the gaps between the scenes and re-export as an MP3. This produces a rough version of just the unadorned, mostly-unfiltered dialog, so I can hear how it's working. After going through all of this, it's not unexpected to find that some lines just don't quite work.
So for those, I go back to the actors and ask for a few "pick-ups" (we're doing a few of those now -- normally it'd be good to do this on a shorter timescale. It is a little worrying that we've had a year between principal recording and pick-ups on this production (shorter for Ariel, fortunately -- she did the main recording for Georgiana just a couple of months ago. Of course, her voice is gradually changing).
After this, I then need to break the episode up into scenes. I do this by opening the original dialog file, deleting all the extra stuff and then saving under a new name for each scene. This is the only way I know to preserve all of the Audacity project structure for each scene.
I also spend some time selecting music, figuring out what sound effects and ambient sounds I need, as well as what kind of filtering, panning, and other effects I want to do on the voices. I also plan out how I want the sound levels to work out -- conversation level, ambient sound level, background music level, and peak sound levels.
Now that I've got things chopped down to more manageable chunks, I can start to add the music, sound effects, ambient sound, and foley sound. I can also get finer control over the level of each individual line, so I can get them to be more balanced with each other.
This is the phase I'm working on now with "Earth".
So far, I've been doing all of this with Audacity, and it seems to be a good choice. An argument could be made that I really ought to be using a more complex audio editor like Ardour, and maybe someday I will try to learn that. But so far, Audacity seems to be doing the trick.
Of course, "Earth" was really intended to be an animated video, rather than just audio, so there are some adjustments that have to be made. We are adding just a tiny bit of narration, and a few of the "pickups" are actually re-written or added lines to make up for the lack of visual cues. In an animation, we can show that someone is present without them having to say anything, but in an audio play, we need them to say something just so we can identify them.
"Earth" requires surprisingly little change to work as an audio drama, which is the main reason we chose it for this project.
It does take some getting used to. Sound design for an audio production is very different. It's often necessary to emphasize speech and use less music than you would for video, which may seem a little counter-intuitive. But it seems to be true -- without something to look at, music can get a little dull, so the musical elements are usually shorter. And of course, credits have to be spoken, so there's only going to be a little bit of the title music in this version.
Of course, I'm still going to want to make the animated version of "Earth" -- there's a lot of visual stuff I want to be able to add. But I think it's going to be a lot easier to find people interested in supporting that if we've got a finished story out there for people to enjoy. Of course, we may find that an audio drama is really what people would prefer. Not sure what I'll do if we get that reaction. Probably go ahead with the animation anyway, since that's what we wanted to do.
We're planning to get the Audio Drama finished and online by October. We've been given the opportunity to give out freebies to the "Friends of the Fen" premium memberships for FenCon X, which is an annual science-fiction convention in Dallas. They'll get cards with a link to the download site (also a QR code for those who prefer not to type). Perhaps we can get a little exposure for "Lunatics!" that way.
If you know of a local convention that might also like to get cards like these, let me know (at digitante at gmail dot com), and I'll see if I can't arrange to send them something as well. I was really hoping to send some pressed CDs, but we didn't have the turnaround time (or the money) to do that.
One nice thing about sending them cards instead of CDs is that we actually have right up until the conference (starts on Oct 4) to get our audio final and complete and uploaded. I would actually have already had to send the audio to the CD press by now to have physical CDs in hand for the con.
]]>Here's a quick guide to our "Meet the Team" updates about the people making Lunatics!
Writer: Rosalyn Hunter
Director/Producer: Terry Hancock
Character Designer: Daniel Fu
Modeling Team:
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
Chris Kuhn has been a Blender enthusiast since 2009, and a sci-fi nerd since the age of six. He specializes in high-poly mechanical models and constraint-based rigging. He is the author of two books and the owner of "Kuhn Industries" on Facebook.
Chris also has an electronics background (with a specialty in RF systems). He enjoys traveling, working on cars, and building semi-functional gadgets with spare parts. Chris was drawn to the Lunatics! project by both the story and characters – the idea of exceptional people going to space seemed a tad more realistic than what you typically find at the movies.
Chris currently lives in Germany with his wife Jessie.
Although many of the models for Lunatics! are going to be time-consuming to create, the ones Chris has been working on are among the very hardest, most complex models, where his expertise with mechanical modeling and rigging is basically indispensable.
If you visit Chris's page on BlendSwap ( Kuhnindustries ), you can see that he's done a lot of science-fictional and real aerospace models. He's also known for his book on rigging mechanical models with Blender's constraints system -- which is exactly what he has been doing for us on Lunatics!
Chris knows the Blender constraints system better than anyone I know of! And his rigs really make the animating easy for us!
]]>We'll be happy to send you a free set of them, along with a signed "Thank you!" note, to anyone who helps us get the word out by putting our Kickstarter widget up on your blog, news site, or personal web page to help us get the word out. And we are SO not above bribery! :-)
To claim your finger puppets:
And that's it. We'll check that the link is up, and at the end of the campaign (successful or not), we'll get the puppets printed and mail them out to you.
Even if we don't get referrals from your embed (apparently we have no way to check anyway), we'll still send you the puppets and a thank you note for trying.
Whether your website has a huge circulation or a tiny one, this is still a great way to support "Lunatics!" by letting your readers know about us, and we'll be very grateful.
The embed code for the Kickstarter widget:
<iframe frameborder="0" height="380" src="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2144275086/finish-lunatics-pilot-episode/widget/card.html" mce_src="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2144275086/finish-lunatics-pilot-episode/widget/card.html" width="220"></iframe>
The idea behind the 2-minute "teaser" that we did before was to make the most of limited 3D assets and also to demonstrate a short piece of animation to prove that we have the necessary skills. I think it was very successful at those goals.
However, it was rather slow and perhaps a bit high-concept for an actual trailer. And that is not, of course, an accurate impression of our intent for the series. Also, by now, we have a lot more 3D asset to show off, even if they aren't all quite finished (some of the assets in the new trailer are still lacking final textures, but I think the result is still pretty good).
This also allows us to get straight to the subject in our Kickstarter video, and it uses the intro from the track "Space Zine" by Elaine Walker which we are using for our main track for the series (you may recognize this from some of our earlier videos).
Hopefully, this is much more on target, and perhaps will help with the Kickstarter campaign. Please share it!
]]>My latest Kickstarter update is about the non-photorealistic rendering options for characters, and why it's probably a good idea for "Lunatics!":
"So we're seeking other ways to reduce the "uncanny valley" issue. One of these is to use "non-photorealistic" (NPR) rendering. This tends to make the characters look as if they have been drawn or painted rather than photographed. As with other cartoon techniques, this tends to make your perception a little more forgiving about movement."
And it includes this Freestyle test render (this is probably NOT our final parameters -- there's something a little odd going on with the eyes, though I really like the way it brings out the detail in the spacesuit):
Regrettably I never got adequate spam-filtering tech working on this site, which is why I still don't have any kind of comments feature or forum here on our site. Of course, it is possible to offer feedback through our pages on Facebook, Google+, or Diaspora. Or you can just email me personally at "digitante at gmail dot com".
I'd actually love to hear from some of you who are reading this -- just to know that you're really out there. Also, serious suggestions are welcome.
I've been wanting to take the time to actually understand the software here and make the necessary upgrades, but I've been prioritizing the directing and producing tasks -- I didn't really want to spend a whole lot of my time this year on IT tasks. Alternatively, it would be great to hear from someone who knows Zope/Plone very well who might be able to help me figure out exactly what packages I need to install to get these features.
And unfortunately, this means I'm kind of shouting into the void here, or that's what it feels like. I'm not able to see what your reactions are.
We had a decent first day on the 20th, with 16 people backing us fairly quickly. However it's starting to look like maybe that's entirety of our fan base at this point. I had been thinking it was closer to 100. I love you folks who are behind us on this, and I really feel great about the enthusiastic things some of you have said to me, but it's looking like there's just not enough of us.
I know that a lot of someones (or perhaps some-things) are subscribed to this RSS feed. The RSS link is the highest traffic URL on this site, averaging well over 1000 hits a day. But maybe those are just bots of some kind, with no one actually reading them? I know that Google Reader was shut down recently, so maybe those feeds aren't really going anywhere now?
There are also some other communication blocks building up. Facebook made major changes to their "Page" policy. It's no longer the case that just "liking" a page means you get their updates -- apparently this is an anti-feature so they can now sell you advertising. I have NOT been playing along with that. And they've always used some crazy selection algorithm for deciding what are "top strories" and they always reset your viewing preferences to "top stories" instead of "most recent" (the latter should let you see everything, but the former only shows you the posts of the most active posters in your friend circle -- this is actually exactly the opposite of the way I feel this thing should work).
Google of course, has turned the corner somewhere along the power-mad corporate crazy train, and is well on their way to becoming the new Microsoft. So Google+ has much the same problems. However, it does have the "Communities" feature, and I've made sure to post our trailer video on what seem to be relevant community pages: "Sci-Fi", "Science Ficton", "Short Animated Films", "Open Content Works", "Creative Commons", "Free Culture", "Blender", and so on.
Diaspora is better about those things, but it's a much smaller community and not necessarily the best place to find backers for a Kickstarter. It's also a little more hassle to post links there, but I have been making sure all of our updates are mirrored there.
In fact, barring pauses for sleeping and eating, I've pretty much been writing updates and posting non-stop since the beginning of the Kickstarter. I'm going to have to lay off a bit or go insane at this point.
I also did some conventional advertising via Project Wonderful ads on web comics. I don't think that was too awfully productive (though I think we did get one backer that way). I think it's useful to have gotten our name our there, even if it was brief (I spent just $20 on this). I don't really regret it though -- putting money into the web comic world seems like a fair social positive to me.
I've heard it's a mistake to advertise to a broader audience too early, and I've held off a bit on sending out press releases to more major blogging channels. I had hoped we'd get to 5% - 10% before doing that, because you need a little more show of confidence to attract those backers. With just 3% and that little tiny green bar, it's not a strong encouragement for new people to support us.
As I posted before, I really don't know how we could possibly continue this project if we don't get some support on this. I'm not saying that to scold anybody, I'm just thinking about some hard financial facts that I'm going to have to face if this falls through. I don't really think I can afford to keep working these kind of hours on this. I'll have to prioritize work that makes some money, and then I'll have to choose between dragging "Lunatics!" production out into the indefinite horizon where open projects go to die, or just cutting it off quickly and mercifully.
And I don't think I'm the only one in that situation. Last year we could do some work without any pay -- the actors, after all, were only volunteering for a Saturday meeting and some home-recording time. Modeling and animating, though, are pretty intensive and time-consuming jobs, even if the requirements are fairly mild. I don't really feel right about asking people to put in crazy hours like that with no pay.
If we had a credible alternative fund-raising plan, we could try that, but so far, I have not thought of one.
Last year, when our Kickstarter went so poorly, I wasn't shocked. I could point to a dozen serious things wrong with that Kickstarter, starting with the absence of the teaser trailer and the rather shoddy editing and sound quality on the pitch video. It was pretty easy to rationalize that as the result of just not being ready yet. This year, however, everything is pretty much as I planned -- if people are turning away, I think they must have much more substantive problems with our project. Maybe it turns out that "Lunatics!" is not what they expected, and they just don't really like it after all? Or maybe it's because the trailer is a little unconventional?
The hyperreal directing style of the trailer is of course not the style the pilot will be in, but it seems liked a cool effect to try out, and it went with the PoV shot, which kept the modeling requirements minimal. It is of course a challenge to produce a trailer of any kind before you've made the film it's a trailer for. But maybe it's sending a wrong message about the tone of "Lunatics!" as a result?
Or it might be that the number of people watching it -- just a couple hundred -- is simply too small.
Or maybe people are waiting for payday, not realizing that it really doesn't matter, because nothing will post to your bank account until August 20th (end of the campaign) -- and then only if we make it, of course.
I cannot of course contribute to the campaign myself -- even if I had the desire to and the bank balance to back it up, the credit card processors have rules against that. I'm not sure what kind of fraud that would be, but they don't like it, so they don't allow it. The closest I could probably get is to promise kickbacks to my Mom -- but sshh, don't tell anyone I said that! In any case, that would just waste money.
We're not beat yet, though. Regardless of our status, I'm going to start sending out press releases tomorrow. We're also going to go ahead and start mixing the "audiodrama" version of "Earth". There has been some comment that "Earth" is really a stronger script, and I certainly think it is funnier. Maybe having that out there will be a big pull. I think I'm going to try to find out.
Unlike last year, I will NOT be canceling this Kickstarter. I'm going to ride it right to the end, even if we just sit at 3% until then. However, I would greatly appreciate anything you can do to spread the word about the project among your own friends and colleagues. Maybe we can get that 10% and start turning things around? There's always the possibility that something will hit just the right button, or that some hugely-popular site will pick us up -- and then "a miracle happens" and we get our funding.
Or, if you folks think there's something missing or wrong with our presentation, maybe you could send me an email at "digitante at gmail dot com" and let me know what you think. I don't think I'm going to get swamped with email for asking for that, so go ahead and hit me up with your ideas. Or scorn. Whatever!


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It comes down to hype and the internet. Years ago before the internet you would hang around in your social groups and you might go out for a night out with your mates and catch a movie, if you liked it you would tell other friends and you would end up with word of mouth. But now thanks to the internet the amount of hype that gets generated for movies becomes intense.
Now there are two types of hype, prometheus suffered from the first which was people assuming this would be the greatest movie ever made in history and people having a full year to obsess about it. I guess it would be like going out with a hot chick and wanting to get it on with her but having to wait a full year and when you finally do rock the casbah she isn't what you were expecting. Although the way people bitch about the movie it would be like if she dropped her pants after a year and was really a dude and she had a bigger nob then you as well just to really rub it in.
People were also kept in the dark so there were a lot of people playing the guessing game which is also never a good thing. For instance people were assuming that alien harvest would be the story for the movie or that there were actually xenomorphs in the film, i remember there were supposedly leaked scripts that turned out to be fake. There were people saying they knew people who worked on the film and they saw alien costumes on the set. This all feeds the imagination and the expectations. So the cogs in the brain start to turn and you start to build up a picture which eventually turns out to be different from the one you end up seeing. Then when the movie didn't live up to there perceptions or lofty expectations they get annoyed.
Now Alien was a horror movie but james camerons film Aliens was more of an action/war film and some people were annoyed at the time but there wasn't a platform to vent your hate like there is now with the internet. I realised right at the begining that prometheus was going to be different just from the opening music and to me this was more of an exploration film. So Alien is horror, aliens is action and prometheus was adventure/exploration 50's style sci-fi, the problem comes when people say we wanted more of a horror film which we got with alien 3 which everybody hated or more of an action film which we got from alien resurrection and which everybody hated, so ridley gave us something new, but you had so many people wanting it to be different things that you were always going to have a lot of people that were going to be disappointed.
I personally just wanted to see something different so i was happy although the movie does have it's short comings but nothing major in my opinion. I personally think and again this is only my opinion but the people who complain about the movie constantly and i mean constantly are probably sad and have no lives so were pinning everything on this one movie, god forbid if they ever got a girlfriend and then they were cheated on. They would probably take to facebook to vent there abuse at the guy that was banging there girl while they were caught up writing abusive things to david lindeloff on twitter or to people on youtube that say they enjoyed the movie although i can never actually see this becoming an eventuality. All in all it's just a movie these people need to let it go, they may feel cheated but i don't think they really know what cheated is. But in the day and age we live in every dickhead gets a voice thanks to the internet, that is why you get people calling people who like twillight names and people who are fans of nolan names and being an arm chair critic on everything, you only have to look at imdb to see this and it comes from both sides.
Now the second kind of hype comes after people have seen the movie so there isn't that much invested interest from the person the film is being hyped to like batman begins for instance. I was told this movie was really good and i went to see it and thought it was okay and then the same thing happened with the dark knight, i didn't enjoy either and decided against seeing the third movie, but i didn't bitch and wine about it because i hadn't spent a year of my life anticipating it although even if i had i would still just think wow that was a shit movie and then carry on living my life.
So to sum up a film like prometheus was always going to upset some people because it was so anticipated and you cannot please everyone, if you repeat yourself then it is same old same old and if you give people something new then some people will take to it and some people won't. But it is the internet which has led to the amount of spite that people unleash now, i think in a way the internet can be quite harmfull to certain people and i think it has had a negative impact on normal civil social conventions.
Main reasons for the intense dissapointment, I think, are:
1) Love for Alien
2) Editing
3) The question laden script
Remember the Star Wars prequels? I'm not saying Prometheus is at all in the same dire league as them, but a similar thing has happened with fans.
MadEye said:There's also the Lindelof haters...
Carrot said:LOST fans are complete nut jobs
they used to bug me over how great and well written the series was, praising it nonstop, saying it's the best show of all time
then after the FINAL episode they turn and say it's the worst thing of all time
I don't care about lost
I've never cared about lost
These people belong in Arkham Asylum
fifield said:People don't like it because "how dos she run with a c sexshun xD"
pfusr said:
fifield said:People don't like it because "how dos she run with a c sexshun xD"
there was a big earthquake in NZ in teh 80s. There was an article in the paper about a man who had a silo fall on him inside a large agricultural building, breaking his pelvis. He hotfooted it out of there, managing to sprint with all speed even with the broken pelvis.catecholamines. better than sliced bread when the shit hits the fan :)
pro_metheus_fan said:Although the way people bitch about the movie it would be like if she dropped her pants after a year and was really a dude and she had a bigger nob then you as well just to really rub it in.
With the sequel and possibly a third film we will see how big the fan base is by the amount of money it makes and tickets that are sold, if the sequel bombs then i would say the fan base is probably smaller then fox had anticipated and then maybe the film would have a chance at cult status one day.
But i think that the audience is a lot bigger then anybody thinks, after all there are a lot of normal people out there that enjoy movies to and are not like the kind of loonies you get on imdb or these blog sites. The people i'm talking about are normally known or define themselves as "fanboys" and "haters" from what i know, i think virgins would probably be a better word for them but i know that these people who are still fighting in a long prolonged war about whether the movie was actually any good or not are not representative of the common working man or ordinary people, although for some fucked up reason they seem to think they are. But it is my opinion that the sequel will make money, plus you will have toys and merchandise etc which will no doubt make it more of a part of pop culture if they sale well. Personally i can see fan conventions possibly twenty years from now if that's the case.
But to me prometheus will never be a cult classic because i think the fan base is actually larger then anybody knows. Everybody i have spoken to or am friendly with who has seen it who are just normal everyday people and not movie geeks liked it and wouldn't mind seeing a sequel. Some were a little underwhelmed but on the whole enjoyed it of course you never hear from any of these people on the internet because they don't post things on imdb or youtube.
So to me the question is will it become a classic? Blade runner started off as a cult classic because it's fan base was small but over time once critics had re-evalutaed it it became a sci-fi classic and is largely considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made, hence it's preservation in the national film registry in america. As for prometheus i don't know, the movie isn't perfect but if the film series has enough of an impact on pop culture then i think it might. It depends on the hysteria that gets built up for the sequel.
Star wars for instance in my opinion is not a particularly well directed film although it is a good movie but it's impact on society at the time is what i think has prepelled it to the level of praise it gets today meaning i think the toys and merchandising had a big part to play especially on young children and this was a movie the whole family could enjoy and it really did change the ball game in hollywood when it came to making money from movies. So maybe prometheus will be the same. Maybe the buzz and anticipation and virals etc will have been enough to change how films are marketed and maybe the open questions left in the movie will change how franchises are formatted this is the first movie i can think of that is the first in a proposed trilogy that asks this many questions and yet has gone on to earn over four hundred million dollars. It would be the first philosophical action/sci-fi trilogy ever made perhaps. I would just like to say my opinion on star wars is just that my opinion so if there are any star wars fans out there that are really upset with this comment then i apologise.

subset: commoncrawl


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Graham MacAree writes about Chelsea for SB Nation, and is very good at it. He has a very compelling long-form piece up on SBN on the upcoming proposals to set up a Financial Fair Play-style rule in the Premier League to prevent sides from spending more than they take in.
MacAree underlines the going counterargument, and warns off those who believe FFP would benefit smaller clubs that the big clubs are pushing for the rule to shore up their built-in advantage. He writes:
The obvious answer is that cost-control benefits the 'big' clubs as much if not more than the smaller ones. Take the break-even rule, for example. If clubs could only spend exactly as much as they brought in, Table 1 describes how much money would have been available for each Premier League side in 2011, the most recent date for which the Guardian provides detailed figures.
Under a break-even system, the top four clubs (the old big four) are able to spend almost as much as the rest of the league combined. Add Manchester City and Spurs to that list and you have the top 30 percent of clubs spending 60 percent of the league total.
MacAree is absolutely correct that loss-prevention rules in the Premier League would benefit bigger clubs the most, in the short-to-mid-term. However, there are several factors that, ideally, could help mitigate this apparently financial stranglehold.
First, MacAree doesn't address the one major problem that FFP was designed to help mitigate: wage inflation. Teams able to spend far and above what they earn in revenue help drive up transfer fees and wages for players across the board. Even with the added purchasing power of the historically-established big clubs, there will be limits on what they can spend based on turnover.
Moreover, currently mid-to-low table clubs aren't competing with the Chelseas and Man Citys for players, but clubs of similar size and financial heft. Wages ideally would drop to reflect the new-found restrictions.
None of this, you'll note, will upend the existing world order. MacAree is absolutely correct that spending limits ossify the current power structure in football. But it does provide financial stability, and prevents clubs from either risking financial ruin or courting owners with bottomless pockets in the blind hope of leap frogging the elite.
In this respect however, it is little different from professional leagues like Major League Baseball. And the financial stability afforded to mid-table clubs can give them room to invest in performance analysis and scouting in order to beat the market for younger prospects, prospects they'll have less reason to immediately sell-on to bigger clubs in order to cover losses.
No doubt, spending limits are good for big clubs. But they provide an immense opportunity for smartly run clubs to shore up commercial revenues via the old fashioned method: winning football matches.


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Privileged MacShane Evidence Now Available to the Police
New Police Complaint Made
A source close to the Standards and Privileges Committee pointed out to Guido that the police could not use the evidence gathered by the Committee during their investigation because it was subject to parliamentary privilege. Now that it has been published however it is no longer privileged and can be used by the forces of the law.
Guido has spoken to m'learned counsel and they have confirmed this is the case. He has therefore just put in a new complaint to the Met:
This ain't over…


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Which Countries Have The Highest Rates Of Obesity?
Due to differences with sampling methods and time periods, it is rather difficult to directly compare obesity rates in different countries so any numbers mentioned in this article are best-guess estimates.
According to the WHO Global Database on BMI, the small Micronesian island of Nauru has the highest obesity rate (BMI>30) with a massive 78.5% of adults falling into this category. Incidentally, Nauru also has the highest rate of diabetes in the world. Pacific Island nations are over-represented in obesity statistics with the 6 most obese countries coming from this region.
Read More >>


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