When they left, there were people all around, people with cameras snapping pictures of Georgiana learner, the "space girl". She could hear people saying those words -- "the space girl" -- everywhere that she went. She found it odd as she had never been to space herself. She had only been to training classes. The closest that she had got to anything like space was when they let her put on her space suit and walk around the base of a swimming pool.

That had been fun. They dropped rings from the surface and she would walk forward and try to catch them. It was slow, moving that heavy suit in the water, and she had pushed her legs as fast as she could, but even with weights at the bottom, she sometimes fell forward and landed on her chest.

The first time that she had done it, mother had rushed forward, concerned that somehow she would break the seals of her suit, but she had only laughed, the sound echoing dully in her helmet as she climbed back to her feet to try again jumping through the water this time.

Georgy was used to blue skies. She had seen them all of the seven years that she had been alive, and she didn't know what it would feel like to live in a place where the sky was always black. Daddy told her that things are never just better or worse, they are different, and although she would lose the blue sky, she would gain a sky full of more stars than anyone on Earth had ever seen. She looked forward to seeing that, and to seeing Daddy again. She hadn't seen him for most of a year, unless you counted calls on the Grid. Her last call had been just two days ago. Mother had smiled wide and said, "Honey, we'll be there soon," in that voice that she seemed to keep only for him. Georgy hadn't said much of anything.

And another:

The trip was a blur. She spent so much time thinking about all of the details that she didn't appreciate the trip. Sometimes she wished that she could simply be like Georgy and enjoy the experience, but then again even at Georgy's age she hadn't been the sort to simply sit and enjoy things. "Driven" -- that was how they had described her as a child. She was driven to excel, to finish things.

At Georgy's age, she was living in the United States and traveling around the world every Summer.

Dad would introduce her to things such as rappelling. She would be hesitant at first, then she would repeat the experience as many times as it took to be good at it. Daddy always got a kick out of that, paying for tickets so that she could try again and again until she completed her goal. She remembered when she had first learned wall climbing in a sporting goods store, and she had stayed there for hours until she finally had been able to ring the bell on the ceiling. Father had laughed out loud at that, proud that his daughter was not only a self-starter, but a finisher too.

Mom was less forgiving. "Put that down right now and come to dinner", she would say. Despite the fact that she professed to hating the rigid schedules that her mother had imposed on her, Mom was a woman who liked order and doing things at the right times. Hiromi was always being chastised for letting time run away with her as she obsessed over her current project.

When they moved to Japan, grandmother had solved the problem by getting her a very demanding piano teacher. Music class before had been a chance to tinker with lots of different instruments. She had begun piano lessons because she liked the way that it sounded, and the teacher had commented favorably at how she was able to pick out a song on the keys the first time that she had touched one.

Her new teacher had taken her to a concert on their third lesson together. She had pointed to the stage and said, "Your goal is to be there on a stage winning a competition before you are eighteen." She had done it at eleven, winning the All Japan Youth Piano Competition and basking in the glow of completion only to realize that every ending is simply the start of something new.

Becoming Japan's best child pianist had only shown her that there was a larger world where Japan was only one country among many. There was also the fact that she was only the best "child" pianist. Two more years and she could enter the "youth" competitions. There were ones for adults as well.

She changed piano teachers and dropped out of school, her grandmother going through the tortuous regulations to allow her to miss school as she traveled the world to compete internationally in competition.

Unsurprisingly, her mother did not like it. She felt that Hiromi needed a more normal life. A life with games and friends, watching movies, and internet chat. It was the odd fact that her father and grandmother were in agreement that allowed her to continue with this strange, expensive obsession. How many teenagers regularly see a chiropractor and a hand surgeon for repetitive injuries from sitting at a bench all day.

Besides the challenge of it all, Hiromi didn't do friends well. She had never really been good at people. It was an odd thing, because she was relatively pretty, and people called her sweet. It's just that her obsessive nature made people call her a show off. Most people didn't like it when they introduced a game to someone and ended up getting soundly beaten by a little girl who had just started playing that day. They got angry. They avoided you. They called you a braggart even if you never said anything about it. They learned to hate you.

Hiromi solved the problem by not playing with them, she would observe quietly while others played. It kept her out of trouble, but it also kept her on the edge of friendships instead of in them. There was a boy that she had liked when she was ten. She was still going to school then. Shiro was his name. The two of them had been showcased as stars of the school in an assembly because she had started winning piano awards, and he was a chess whiz. There was a luncheon or a dinner, and some kind of after school club that they had attended. Shiro had offered to teach her to play chess, but she had declined. God knows she didn't need another obsession. He had felt offended that she had snubbed his game despite the fact that she went out of her way to watch him compete -- one time almost missing practice when his game ran long. She had run up to the stage and congratulated him before rushing off to class to get scolded for tardiness. He had simply remembered that she hadn't stayed to watch him get the trophy. He had stopped talking to her after that, and she had stopped imagining that she would ever have a boyfriend.

She had taken the anger and disappointment that she'd felt, and she had channeled it into intensity on that Rachmaninoff piece that had been giving her trouble. In his own way, Shiro had helped her win that competition because the judges had been simply blown away by the depth of emotion expressed by a girl of only eleven. So often, children succeeded in the technical precision of a piece but not the feeling.

The pounding beats of her childhood disappointment and thwarted dreams had translated into tears in the eyes of the judges and thunderous applause. She continued to get such inspiration in all of her celebrated youth. Not going back to school. Not going to field day. Not making the middle school graduation ceremony. Not being in town for her former best friend's birthday party. Her emotional range never faltered except for a comment when she was seventeen that she lacked joy and playfulness in her Mozart. She had cried when she got home that night. Her teacher said to ignore the comment. It was one negative thought in a sea of praise, but it hit home because it was true. Piano wasn't as fun as it had been. She had begun to wonder if this would be her entire life.

Animation and Rendering Tests

Officially, we're taking some time off for me to finish work on Lib-Ray, but I do still have some weekend time to spend on Lunatics, and I have been getting a few things done. Here I'm going to share some of the rendering and animation tests I've been doing, just so you can see what's going on. Please bear in mind that these are still very incomplete, but we are getting close to ready to do some final animation which we will use in our crowd-funding campaign, which will probably start next month.

Welcome to Chris Kuhn!

I am delighted to have the help of Chris Kuhn, who is a really talented mechanical and science-fiction modeler. His portfolio on BlendSwap is well worth your time to have a look at. He's put a particular focus on rigging mechanical models with constraints (rather than using armatures), and he's now working on the models for the Soyuz launch system, which plays a prominent role in our pilot episode. He has already completed the Soyuz Launch Vehicle!

Shading for Characters

Early-on in this project, I decided to go with a "non-photorealistic" look, but until now, we have not attempted to get this look in any of our renders. Last weekend, I did some experiments with adjusting the materials and shaders in our existing character models (Georgiana and Hiromi) to get a good rendered appearance. I experimented with FreeStyle and with Blender's internal edge-rendering, but after comparing several tests, I think the unlined versions look better, although the "toon shading" produces an excellent soft feel for the characters, which I really like.

Soyuz Interior Set

I am also re-integrating the set for the Soyuz Descent Module interior set which will appear in the pilot episode. We attempted to get this set ready last Summer, but there were significant problems with combining the elements for it: scaling, file-linking, and rigging problems. The result was a set that was incomplete and not very much like the real Soyuz capsule. I've nearly managed to get this correct, although there are still a few problems to work out.

(Compare the above real photo to the test-render below)

As you can see, we still have some work to do to get it right (you may notice that the flight engineer's couch is sticking into the wall!), but then, that's why we do test rendering! It is very tight inside the real Soyuz module, so this is a very crowded set. I think that, considering that none of us has ever actually been inside a Soyuz or a trainer, and we're doing all of this from reference photos and a few plan views (which, frustratingly, do not always show the angles we want or omit important details), that we're not doing too badly.

Video Animation Tests: Evading the "Uncanny Valley"

An important concern for me from the beginning of this project has been "will the character animation read well enough?" Specifically, we have the combined requirements of using accurate proportions on our characters to fit the very realistic settings and a very low budget for animation. When very realistic models are animated very simply there is a creepy aesthetic effect, commonly called the "uncanny valley", that we'd really like to avoid.

This effect is used intentionally in horror films to creep you out with dolls or zombies which look realistic, but don't move realistically. And some computer-animated films run into this problem by accident -- it can become very distracting. We obviously don't want that. But how can we avoid it?

The effect tends to go away if either the character designs are less realistic (more cartoon-like), in which case our brains accept a higher level of interpretation and don't expect the characters to move very accurately, OR if the movement is accurate and lifelike enough to sell the character design.

We took a very risky path with the character designs on this project, because they're really quite close to real proportions, and as a result, I've been quite concerned about how this is going to read when animate. This last weekend, I finally got a chance to animate a brief sequence of facial expressions and head movements with Andrew Pray's rigged "Georgiana" model in order to find out. I found that, actually, it's reading pretty well -- surprisingly well, really. This gives me a great deal more confidence in the feasibility of this production!

So, I'll leave you with a brief animation test real that shows this, and also my first attempt at animating Chris's Soyuz rocket model (this is a very rough first cut of the "pod staging" shot I have planned for the pilot, although just about everything about it needs more work):

Video on YouTube
Video on Vimeo

Altogether, these last few days have gone a long way towards convincing me that this project is really going to work. In about a month, I'll engage in convincing the rest of the world of that -- or at least enough of the world to fund our production.  Thank you for your continued interest and support!

We've completed all of the pre-production work that was funded from our first Kickstarter, back in December 2011. Since we finished in late December and delivered rewards in January, that makes us about nine months later than we originally predicted. On the other hand, what we delivered was a lot more complete than originally planned (we had expected to have only a temporary soundtrack with Rosalyn and Terry doing all of the voices, but instead we've been able to deliver the full-cast audio). We raised $2410 for Lunatics in that Kickstarter, and in 2012 we actually spent $5700 on Lunatics expenses, all told -- so our personal contribution to this was about $3300, which covered equipment expenses, some advertising and promotional expenses, and the seven $200 commissions for 3D-modeling work.

There were considerable problems going into the production fund-raiser in the Summer -- essentially we just weren't ready, and there was no way to make that up, though we tried valiantly. Looking back on it, I would say the big mistake was advertising the campaign launch date in advance, and thus being forced to launch before we were ready. A delay of just a week or two might have made a big improvement then, although it's unclear if it would've been enough, because we still have a lot to prove about our capabilities, and we didn't have enough available. So I think it was perceived as too high risk.

That's why I have not yet announced a launch date for the campaign we plan to run this Spring. Instead, I'm basing my plans on completing a checklist of requirements. And of course, I won't even be working on those until I finish the requirements for Lib-Ray. So, basically, this is what's driving the schedule:

Lib-Ray Milestone Requirements (and Status):

• Working software player (50-70%?)
• Informal Description of Lib-Ray Standard ("Introduction to Lib-Ray", with enough detail to make one -- 95% done)
• Master "Sita Sings the Blues" (70%?)
• Master "Blender Open Movies Collection" (10%?)
• Describe mastering process in detail (80% done -- this is just updating and extending the series I wrote for Free Software Magazine in 2012)

Overall, I'd say I need at least  two weeks for this still, possibly as much as four weeks (and if it takes more, it just does).

Then there's the following needed before I think we can launch a new campaign for Lunatics (in more-or-less the order they need to be done):

• Demonstration of Digital Puppetry Technique (0% done -- this is probably the most critical risk and needs to be resolved)
• Teaser Trailer (40% done? We have the models, but they need some rework and re-integration, then animation)

• Blocking Model of Colony (20% done -- I have a plan for this set and a couple of module models started. Not hard, but time-consuming)
• Finished CG model space shots of LTS, Earth, and Moon (60% done -- you've seen these in the animatic, but they need detailing)

• Audio voice recording and mixing for second episode "Earth" (50% done - still have to mix. Of course, we already have this for the pilot, as well as the animatic).
• Detailed cost-breakdown and projections of production schedule and expenses (more bean-counting and more accurate/conservative schedules! I have some ideas in my head, but I need to write them down and do the math)
• Re-connect with the team, and recruit new members as needed (some will have gone onto other projects).
• Produce a campaign video using all of this material and higher production values (no more last-minute campaign videos!)

That, I figure is at least a couple of months of work, which I'll have to do on my own. Also, there is real-life happening at the same time. Realistically, this might take until May or June at the present rate. As I tackle these things, I may start posting to see if I can get some help from the community -- particularly on some of the finer points of using Blender.

So that's where we stand.

The time has run out and I've had to face the pile of accounting paperwork today. Turns out there are some tax deadlines in January, and Anansi Spaceworks must be ready or Uncle Sam will get very impatient. Sometimes I wish I had an accounting department to pass these things on to, but as we are but tiny, I must do it myself. Anyway, it really needs to get done, regardless of taxes. Looking over it briefly, I can already see that Lunatics cost a staggering lot this last year (much more than our fund-raisers raised, I'm afraid).

Lib-Ray

A lot of people have been asking about the progress on our other major project,  Lib-Ray -- which had a much-larger successful Kickstarter this last Summer, which has been paying the bills for the last few months. The truth is that I have really been neglecting it in favor of Lunatics, which keeps dragging out past my expectations (I clearly need to improve my estimations for future work!).

However, the pre-production work on the Lunatics pilot is really and truly coming to an end, with the DVD mastered and the DVD-ROM content collected. I need only a few hours work to finish up the mastering and start burning (or "engraving" as Millenniata likes to describe their process) disks. I'm now doing things like printing DVD labels and finding cases for them.

Once that goes out the door (I'm thinking Saturday), then I'll finally be clear to concentrate whole-heartedly on Lib-Ray for awhile.

It is of course absolutely critical that we deliver on the already-paid-for work from Lib-Ray. After all, Lib-Ray got funded, and Lunatics did not. So I'm afraid it will have to take precedence for at least the next few weeks. I'll actually be working on it until I reach certain milestones on that project, including getting the software player working and finishing the prototype releases.

I also appear to have promised to create Lib-Ray versions for our high-end USB-card / SDHC card backers on Lunatics. So that's a bit of a crossover. I will be finishing up those three next week as I start the Lib-Ray work. Fortunately, for those, much of the design from the DVD can be carried over, although there is still a lot of time-consuming conversion steps that must currently be done manually.

Affect on Lunatics Schedule

We're not going to be able to financially subsidize Lunatics any further. Aside from what I can continue doing in my spare time or what is contributed for free, progress beyond this point will require a successful fund-raiser of some kind.

The biggest disappointment, I suppose is that the sound production for "Earth" will be pushed into February or even later, as will any work on the fully-animated "Teaser Trailer", which we started last Summer. With so many delays, it's not exactly a good record to have when promising to deliver a series, but it has been an assumption from the beginning that we'll have to accelerate considerably to get into series production, so the slow start while we're learning doesn't bother me that much.

On my own, I expect to complete the following before launching a new fundraiser for Lunatics:

• "Earth" soundtrack / audio drama (just about all the major parts for this are recorded, so this is mostly mixing)
• Fully-animated teaser trailer (this is going to require some time-consuming re-work, unfortunately)
• Fully-animated opening shot (the Moon/Earth shot at the beginning of the animatic is nearly there, but needs some tweaking)
• Blocking model of the ISF-1 colony set (lots of Blender time)
• Demonstration of digital puppetry with Pyppet (this is still the riskiest part of the whole concept -- we'll have to decide if it's going to work or if we'll need to substitute a different approach)

When I can get to all of this is going to depend on how fast I can make progress with Lib-Ray. I don't have to complete every part of it, but the prototype releases and informal specification have to be complete, and the software player needs to be handling basic playback, before I can return to Lunatics work. Thereafter, my time will be split as I deliver on the remaining parts of Lib-Ray (it all has be done by July).

We are pleased to share this intermediate step towards getting our pilot episode produced. This is a shot-complete storyboard animatic of our pilot episode "No Children in Space" with the full "international" voice cast production (it is in English, Russian, and Japanese with English subtitles).

LINK TO EPISODE

We will be also be uploading an "English-dub" version (in which all of the Russian and Japanese parts are dubbed into English, mostly by the same actors).

There is no final animation in this yet, although there are a few pre-visualizations using Blender. The bulk of it is sketched storyboards. The audio is fairly complete, except for some minor tweaks and the addition of foley sound (which will be done after final animation).

This is an important milestone for us -- it completes the production work promised on our pre-production Kickstarter and is one of the major parts of our presentation for our new production fund-raiser, which we hope to launch in January (we are also working a final-animation-quality trailer and some technical demonstrations as well as the audio production for our 2nd episode, "Earth").

The audio is very near to its final form: with funding we will probably re-record a couple of lines with technical problems, add foley sound, refine the sound level adjustments, add better room ambiance effects, and make other minor tweaks. There are some effects in this version, but some of the more mundane sound to match the on-screen action will be added after final animation.

The animation of course is very basic. It's mostly just hand-drawn sketches with a few exceptions stuck in for more complex shots. There are a few photos where appropriate ones were available. In the final production, nearly everything would be 3D animated using a variety of rapid performance-based and simulation-based animation techniques in combination with the more traditional key-framed methods.

We will be launching a crowd-funding campaign in January to fund production of this episode (and possibly future episodes if we get stretch funding).

Eventually we hope to produce quite a few episodes, but it all depends on the funding -- this project is intentionally too large for one or two people to do as a hobby. That's why I call it "an experiment in commercial free-culture" -- basically, this is a big enough project that we can only do it if we can afford to pay people for their time, because it will require a LOT of time from a lot of people to make 18 episodes a year. That's our goal. If we're not able to fund that many, then we'll either go more slowly or animate fewer episodes, but we do intend to press forward with this project, as it is extremely important to us. On the other hand, we see no intrinsic reason why we can't succeed with this fan-based method, relative to more traditional advertising or sponsored methods. It's really just a question of finding enough people who want it.

This video is released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, version 3.0/unported. Certain music tracks have been explicitly licensed by us for this purpose, although most have been previously released by the artists under CC By, CC By-SA, or CC-0, as with sound effects and images.

Website

We are also unveiling our new website design. I think I've improved it a bit. The idea is to make a little bit better use of CSS and emphasize the content a little better, since we're starting to have more to show.

Two sequences are still empty -- "Meetings at Iridium" and "Dinner Table".

"Meetings" is very complex to block, with about a dozen characters on-screen at once -- it's tricky to keep track of where everyone is at each point. I'm contemplating whether I really want to do this with sketches or if I want to use my character placemarker models and move the characters around like game pieces. That might look kind of silly, but I'm just trying to make sure about where each of the characters is at each point. This scene is also going to be "deep field" with action happening the background as well as foreground of the shots. It'll probably be the last sequence I finish.

The Dinner scene is actually very simple -- mostly one and two character shots, but as it is intend to mix in with the end credits, the framing will be unusual. I might also want to go straight to using concept art for the characters here.

I'm guessing I need another day or two to finish up the animatic itself at this rate (it may take another day to deal with some of the publishing issues like updating the credits and uploading the video).

The Moon I created took some considerable clean-up work to get rid of artifacts, but I think it came out pretty nicely. The color data is from the Clementine mission, which is provided by the Planetary Data System and the USGS -- I used both the "greyscale" and "multiband true-color approximation" images. The bump map is an elevation image created from Kaguya's laser-altimeter measurements.

These won't really do for the final versions of the close-up shots (not enough polygons), but they'll be fine for the distant shots and for use in the animatic.

I've also created a nice low-fidelity version of the moon shuttle (the "service module" is from the version I posted earlier, while the lander is an early model from Vyacheslav Yastrebcev, who has been working on the lander). With these, I can create most of the exterior shots for the animatic, although of course, the shuttle isn't fully detailed and textured yet.

I've now got these working to my satisfaction and will be spending tomorrow actually making the shots I want. Then I'll fill in the remaining sketches I need to draw by hand, and I should have a complete animatic sometime on Saturday or Sunday.

After that, there's just the problem of mastering the DVD for the backers. I have used "Q DVD Author" for this in the past, although it looks like it might be a little hard to install now (it's in Debian Multimedia, but not the main distribution -- and sometimes there are compatibility problems with the Multimedia packages). There's also "DeVeDe", which seems to be standard in Debian now -- I'll probably give that a try to see if it's adequate to the task.

Right now, the animatic consists primarily of hand-drawn storyboard sketches.  I draw in a very fast, impressionistic style which is intended for a simple practical purpose: to explain how a shot is composed. Sometimes it gets pretty blobby. For what it's worth, yes I can draw "better" than that, but not very quickly, and my goal here is not to create the best drawings, but simply good enough drawings fast enough.

There are a lot of inconsistencies, because I started storyboarding well before we finished the concept art phase. So there's at least two (and maybe three or four) different designs for the moon shuttle in the storyboards. And I played around with several different methods for making storyboards, including a couple of different sketching styles and photo-collage.

The current animatic also has a little bit of low-animated shots that I have created as samples over the last year or two.

There's also about 25 minutes of black screen in the second half. These are shots I had intended to compose in Blender all along. They include some interior shots of the colony and a lot of exterior shots of the shuttle, the landing site, and so on.

There are a few weird spots on the soundtrack still: I've found a few things that need to be fixed in audacity -- some sound effects and even a couple of lines need to be time-shifted a little bit to make more sense.

As a matter of interest, the pilot episode is currently 53 minutes long, including titles.

Goals for Finishing the Animatic

The first goal, of course, is to fill in all of that black space. My plan includes the following:

• Create the Earth and Moon shots for backgrounds and some key shots. These few shots will be "final animation" shots, since they are particularly easy to compose and animate.
• Updating the Blender shuttle model that I currently have to make it more animate-able (pretty easy: I just need to group the stages and parent empties to them). I'll use this to create the missing exterior shots in the second half and to replace the confusing sketches in the first half. These won't be final, because the shuttle hasn't been detailed or textured yet.
• Sketch the remaining shots inside of the colony. (I decided not to attempt to do these with the blocking model of the colony, so that I don't have to have that done yet).
• Replace some of the sketchier storyboards with composites made from concept art.
• Fix the remaining sound issues to match the improved animatic
• Master the hybrid DVD with the animatic and pre-production art data for our backers (and also for the people who participated in creating it).

I've decided to eliminate the fly-through of the blocking model of the colony as a goal for this animatic. Instead, I'll be working on that over the holiday break -- the extra shots will be added to the animatic in early January when we're setting up our next fund-raiser. This blocking model won't be particularly hard, but it will be very time-consuming. And I don't want to make people wait forever to see the animatic! So in this first release, the animatic will use storyboard sketches for these shots.

Then What?

Next week I plan to mix the soundtrack for episode 2, "Earth". I'm going to do this one as sound-only, because I think it's very dialog-driven and will probably be easy enough to follow. I'm also planning to do this one "on the clock". My goal with that is to see how fast I can work, now that I've worked out the technical problems and have a good workflow. Ideally, I should be able to complete an episode sound mix in one week if I work steadily at it. I estimate that this is what would be required in full-production mode for the Lunatics series. So I'll be keeping track of this time and using it to make projections for our schedule.

This is all part of making our project more credible. We really need that if we are going to get the funding to proceed. From here on to the end of the year, I'm going to be pressing to get all of the materials we need to start a new Kickstarter fundraiser in January.

Part of the reason we failed in the Kickstarters we ran this last Summer is that we simply were not ready, and we did not present a compelling demonstration that we can deliver on Lunatics. So, I'm not committing to a specific launch date for the Kickstarter this time. We'll start when we are sure we're ready.

The first problem was that I had not adjusted the level on the title music, so it was pretty much filling the full digital scale (i.e. the peaks are at 0 dBFS or "decibels from the full digital scale"), just like it would on an Audio CD. But this is not the norm for television. Normally, TV audio is mixed somewhat lower.

For television, you want a narrower dynamic range (which is the difference between the loudest and the quietest sounds on the soundtrack, expressed in decibels) than you do for theatrical movies. That's because people usually don't listen to television in an extremely quiet room. A typical living room is much louder than a typical theater auditorium. So very quiet sounds will be lost. On the high end, very loud sounds may be disruptive and in any case, they can cause distortion on the smaller amplifiers used with home televisions.

Viewing on the computer has similar (and possibly worse) limitations.

I had been simply mixing "by ear" using my studio monitor earphones and computer sound card. They're pretty good equipment and they isolate the environment pretty well. I found a nifty website tool for estimating frequency response of your soundcard + earphones + ears combination. It shows me that my hearing is still pretty good and that the soundcard and earphones work over a wide frequency range, though there may be some problems on the very high-frequency end. The down side of this, though, is that stuff that sounds good over my earphones may not sound so good on a TV set.

I found that in fact, I had been mixing with a dynamic range of about 70 dB which is probably okay for theatrical use, but is way too hot for home-listening on a TV. I also had very inconsistent levels from scene to scene. But what levels should I use?

I did some research online, but although there are plenty of discussions of loudness levels on online forums, I found the information more confusing than useful. So instead I decided to learn by example -- I loaded part of the soundtrack from a TV series I like ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer" as it happens), and took a look at what levels they used. I didn't use a formal measurement process, but just estimated by looking at the "Waveform (dB)" scale in Audacity. Here's what I saw:

The absolute peaks were at -8 dBFS.

This seemed like a pretty good starting point, although I didn't see much point in wasting the top 8 dB of scale space (thus throwing away some resolution). So I decided to adjust this scale up to use more of the digital scale. I'm currently working on adjusting my levels to match this plan:

So far, I've only applied this adjustment to a couple of scenes.

Mixing Progress for "No Children in Space" Animatic

As for the sound mixing in general, I have finished the before-title teaser and all of "Act I" which is about 30 minutes in. This was about halfway through the episode as originally conceived, although with all of the edits, I'm not so sure anymore. The episode has probably grown a bit in length from the original 55 minute plan.

I hope to get through Act II sometime this week, and finish up the entire animatic. I will then be going through and improving some of the dodgier artwork to make what's going on a little clearer to people other than myself. I also have to make sure that I've met all of the attribution requirements and haven't accidentally used non-free images in my mock-up shots (some of them are photo-collages rather than sketches).

We had a valuable learning experience working the "Teaser Trailer" this last Summer, but in fact, we found a lot of things that need closer attention.  In particular, the linking of files was not entirely consistent, and there are a number of scale errors between the different files (not just inconsistent scale, but also just elements that haven't been matched to the plan). There's also a lot of unnamed objects.

In addition, the Subversion repository is cluttered with unnecessarily duplicated Blender files, owing to my misguided attempt to preserve attribution information in filenames. In the future, we'll be relying more heavily on Subversion itself for information about who has contributed, and the really definitive information will be kept in text blocks in each Blender file.

This all obliges me to do a lot of tedious clerical work to straighten out the files. This has been very educational, as I've learned a lot more about the practical aspects of collaboration in Blender, the interaction of the files with a portable Subversion repository, and the means of editing and fixing links and data blocks (mainly textures).

I also took the time to document this in an article for Free Software Magazine on re-factoring a multimedia project (I'll post a link later when it gets published).

Now that I've figured out what my goal is with the refactoring, I should be done in a few days. I plan to reassemble the shot files for the Teaser when I'm done, and then we'll (finally!) be able to animate.

Also, I decided to start doing daily modeling exercises in Blender to get myself more up-to-speed with this stuff. I did my first daily project and uploaded it to BlendSwap yesterday. So we'll see how that goes. Not every exercise will produce a sharable model, but a lot of them will. At least some of these will be prop and set development for Lunatics. So that should be fun.

Sound and Animatic Editing Progress

I got the last remaining pieces of dialog for the pilot episode, and these have been cut together into a voice track in Audacity. So we now have complete "Original Language" and  "English-Only" voices. I have combined this with my earlier full-sound edit for the opening of the pilot (from the beginning voice-over to the arrival in Baikonur).

There are a still several voices I'm doing myself in this track. I may want to cut-in replacements later, but I've decided to cut this off until I've finished the full sound edit for the episode.

These have to be made in combination with the animatics, especially for the pilot where a lot of the story is told visually. We need to match effects to the images and events.

So, I've also started editing the "story reel" animatic in Blender's VSE -- after a very frustrating attempt to do it in Kdenlive.

However, I also recently discovered that I have not had OpenGL running on my production computer! This really surprised me, because in the past, that would have been completely unusable. There is a substantial improvement after fixing it, though, as you would expect. This definitely improves the performance of Blender and it may have a substantial impact on Kdenlive (which I believe does use GL rendering).

So that was embarrassing, but a least it's working now!

Overall, the performances that have been turned in are excellent. It looks like we've got good dialog recordings from the principals (possibly with a few exceptions that will need pick-up recordings later). There are some issues with a few of the supporting lines -- though mostly it's a matter of recording quality. That may require some creativity with the mixing, or we may have to get better recordings (possibly through round-robin shipping our recording equipment or renting some studio time, which unfortunately costs that cash money stuff we're pretty short on). I'll have to give that a lot more thought.

But I'm very optimistic that we'll have a good audio track, and then be in a position to work on animation again.

Mango Project / "Tears of Steel"

Meanwhile, the Blender Foundation's Mango Project has released "Tears of Steel". This is an excellent demonstration of virtual CG effects combined with live-action footage. I happened to watch the film right after watching Marvel's "The Avengers" and I realized that the CG effects are of comparable quality -- which is really saying something, considering the difference in budget!

I also happened to notice some great rocket flame effects right at the beginning -- it's really very realistic, and exactly what we should be using in the Soyuz launch scenes in "No Children in Space". Hopefully we can study what they did and just adapt it to our project (since of course, the Mango Project source code will be available to us).

Pre-Sales / Fundraising

I have not yet launched a new pre-sale fundraiser for "No Children in Space", but I have worked on it some. I'd just like to get the animatic and possibly the teaser trailer finished before we get serious about a new fundraiser. We had a very useful experience with the fundraisers in the Summer, but really going to need to have a successful one if we want to get the pilot actually made, so we'll be taking more time to make sure we're completely ready for it before launching a new one.

One of the criticisms that has been raised is that the production quality of the Kickstart videos was pretty low, which reflects badly on a project that is supposed to be about film-making. This is a good point, and those were all pretty last-minute jobs. We're probably going to try to create a much more polished look for the next one -- we'll treat them more like actual productions. Possibly we'll do something 3D-animated rather than the live "direct appeal" approach that we've done before.

Discussion

By the way, I know we don't have any comment feature on these news releases. That's basically because spam makes it too hard to administrate comments. You can look up our Lunatics Diaspora stream, though, and I do try to mirror news releases there for comment. We also have a Lunatics Facebook Page, and a Lunatics Page on Google+ which I don't update quite as often, but all of the major milestones are noted there too.

We are, however, still working. We had a very successful read-through of the scripts for both the pilot episode "No Children in Space" and the second episode "Earth". We decided to do both at once partly because they were both ready to go and also because they're very different scripts which show the different extremes that Lunatics episodes will span.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be recording the lines from both principal and supporting parts and assembling rough cuts of dialog. We'll then give the actors a chance to re-record some lines if we feel it's called for. Then we'll be adding sound effects and music to make completely-mixed finished sound for the show.

At the same time, I will be finishing up my animatics for these two episodes -- these will be made from hand-drawn storyboards by me ("sketchy-matics"), and I'll also be picking up on the animation and modeling work in preparation for the final animation phase.

That's a lot of "head-down" time, so the website is likely to be fairly quiet for awhile. I will try to get a few posts put up here to let you know how it's going.

Needless to say, there's a lot of technology that has to work for this to happen, so we scheduled some technical tests this week just to make sure we don't have serious problems that will interfere with the reads.

We did find a few. But we've managed to work through it.

We are using Skype this week after deciding not to use Google Hangouts (because it requires a Google+ membership for everyone, which is a little invasive).

We're going to try to migrate to a free-software platform later -- I've had a strong recommendation to try Big Blue Button, but we have some time pressure for this first set, so we're using Skype even though it's not free -- just about everybody already had it installed. So far it's, well... adequate. So we'll be able to get through the reads this way.

In fact, we even managed to run a few lines from "No Children in Space", and it was terrific to hear. I'm really starting to get excited about this!

The Kickstarter to pay for all this will end on Friday (near midnight US Central time), so we only have a few hours, and unfortunately we're only at 40% so far -- so we really need your help! Even a small amount helps. I'd actually be even happier to have lots of $10 to $30 pledges than fewer pledges for $100 or more, because in the end, it's reaching a critical mass of fans for the project that is going to make it sustainable.  Rewards range from putting your name in the credits (as a "Backer" for $10, a "Premium Backer" for $50, or even one of the "Sponsor" tiers at $200 and beyond). Or you can go for the stuff -- posters, the artbook, the soundtrack on CD, the animatic on DVD, and even the obligatory T-shirt. Or you can get it all in one big package for $150.

Of course, "Lunatics" is free-licensed, so even if you choose one of the smaller rewards, you'll still benefit. It's really about raising enough to support the production -- but then it will be online for everyone to enjoy.

There will never be a better time!

Lunatics Voice/Audio and Animatic Production Kickstarter

I hope to also finish the storyboard animatics which were promised while we're waiting on the printers. That way we'll be able to ship books, disks, and posters at the same time to those who ordered all three.

If you didn't order an artbook through our first Kickstarter, but would still like one, we've also added a signed copy as a reward on our current Kickstarter campaign for Audio Production and Animatic. We're at 32% with just 4 days left (just under $3000 left to raise), so now would be the time if you want to get one of these!