Summary 2011
- Creator-Endorsed “Containers” Business Model
- Fan-Financing & Crowdsourcing Idea
- DVD Pre-Sale Concept
- Need for Free HD format, becomes “Lib-Ray” Concept (Presented at Texas Linux Fest 2011).
- Recruited Daniel Fu for Concept Art Commission
- Pre-Production Kickstarter Campaign — SUCCEEDS!
In 2011, I started to think about what we might be producing for sale to support the Lunatics Project. Pre-sales of DVD releases had been a major part of funding for the Blender Open Movies and for “Sita Sings the Blues”. So that was an obvious choice — except that DVDs were already starting to become old-fashioned, and the standard definition video they provided was no longer a high-end product worthy of the prices we’d need to charge. They wouldn’t capture the full resolution of the production (which I had decided would be 1080p “Full High Definition” (FHD)).
The obvious answer was Blu-Ray, but if DVD was encumbered with DRM and other non-free aspects, Blu-Ray was an even more tyrannical power grab. I conceived of creating a format based on open standards, using essentially an on-disk web site as a menu system, and the new VP8 codec for video, with Matroska MKV container, supporting chapters, subtitle, multiple A/V tracks, etc. Karl Fogel of Question Copyright suggested the name “Lib-Ray” for this, and it stuck.
I considered character artists I knew online, and
Kickstarter became the hot new solution for crowdfunding, and by the end of the year I set up a campaign there for Pre-Production.
See Also:
Project History – Part 3: Launches & Misfires
Lunatics Project Timeline 2009-2016
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