Funding, distribution and musings on my sanity (or lack thereof)

Business has been going pretty well.  This is great, and it also means I haven't had a chance to work much on AR.  I've been proofing and editing the scripts in between banging my head against code and deciphering client requests, and spent a whack of Sunday working on Red, but I'm pretty sure at this stage that I won't be ready to animate the first ep by the end of the year.  I am refusing to have panic attacks about it.

stop-panic-attacks (Photo credit: mia.gant)

I think it's slightly depressing that my current progress doesn't look a whole lot different from my last wip (last picture right at the bottom of the post) seeing as I spent so much time reducing polys inside the mouth (an activity that vacillates between therapeutic and tedious, depending on my mood, how long I've been working on it and whatever else is going on in my life at that point), and am currently working out the shape of the mouth and kind of expanding outward from there.

I've been told I'm all kinds of crazy quite a few times for doing this thing mostly on my own, especially when I lament how crap I am and how long I take to do anything.  I've so far spent about 8 years on this project.  What I have to show for it:

• stuff no one will ever see directly:
  • a timeline spanning from 2009AD-4200AD/1997AR in various states of detail peppered with other character/story "event chains" (basically a bunch of scenes in vaguely the order I think they happen in with not a lot tying them together yet) also in various states of detail
  • an event chain for the next "season"
• stuff a few people will see:
  • 14 scripts worth of one (finally!) mostly completed "season"
• stuff everyone gets to see:
  • the beginnings of one actual character model (as above)
  • a blocking out of one single solitary block in Fremantle (not even completely blocked out)

    

  • a rig that seems to do the job

Realistically, I have never at any stage worked anything close to full time on this project.  My oldest child is 7 and before I started breeding I was at at uni.  My husband reckons the amount of work I have done so far (including stuff no one will ever see or know about except when I tell them like I'm doing now, about the countless times the scripts have been rewritten because the characterisation was completely wrong or I fell into gaping plot chasms I had somehow not noticed earlier, or the number of times I've rebuilt my three, particularly Base, as my modelling skills gradually improved and I found it easier to just start again than try to fix the things that were wrong) is probably reasonable.  I am still fully convinced that I'm crap because I can't churn out a fully textured and rigged ready-to-animate model inside of a day.

It's been pointed out that production houses are...well...production houses, and have teams of Many so anything they do gets done in 2 years.  Currently my only counter of note is Timothy Albee who made Kaze, Ghost Warrior by himself in 6 months with two computers.  Sadly I lack his Lightwave skills, but it defintely can be done.  There's probably people out there who have done similar things and I just don't know about them because I haven't been looking.

I also have a budget of sfa for this thing.  Thankfully existing in this day and age means there are alternatives to selling your soul pitching at something with money and hoping they like your idea enough to run with it (and if you're really lucky, without them "improving" it).  Now we have crowdfunding (Kickstarter being the best known that I'm aware of, and the very cool offshoot Kicking It Forward, which I discovered reading the Kickstarter page for Tube, an open source animated film) and distributing and monetising with Vodo.  I am also eventually going to make a website and probably keep posting snippets of things on Artician and deviantART and trailers on Youtube and maybe Vimeo too.

I can't use Kickstarter as it's currently America only, but knowing such a thing existed got me onto Pozible, which is an Australian equivalent.  I'm going to be utilising it once I work out what the going rate is for voice actors and people who are good at doing sound and music stuff, because while I have on good faith that there are people out there who may like to help out just for fun, just for experience or just to say they did, and I've had a couple of people on G+ ask about voice acting, I really would like to be able to pay them in some form or other.

Now that I feel happy about having done some kind of progress report and having options for doing things I want to do, I should probably catch up on sleep so I can work faster so I can do more work on AR rather than whinging about not having time to work on AR :)