TL;DR: We are making progress, slowly but surely marching towards a finished film.
Our apologies for the radio silence since the campaign. While our IndieGoGo campaign was quite successful, 60% funding isn't quite letting us work on the film as smoothly and quickly as we had hoped. Matt and I have been doing other (paid) work in order to add to the budget ourselves, there has been time put into grant applications, and we've been meeting with a number of freelance artists and vendors to get the film made within our means and non-linear pipeline.
We are happy to say that it is working out quite well, despite not being able to meet the projected schedule!
At this point we have rough versions of all of the environments, and rough layouts of the entire film. We're working on near-final layouts (e.g. camera tracking and placement within the environments relative to the characters) so that we can make final calls on the environments and move forward in the pipeline.
Most recently we have engaged a small 3D studio to finalize our environment and character assets. They are helping with modeling and texturing at this point. Our relationship requires some flexibility in order to engage them at the rate that we can afford, but may even allow for help to animate and composite!
We've secured near unlimited access to a medium size render-farm. The last revision of our trailer consumed nearly a decade of render-time, so you can imagine that the final film will take some serious number-crunching. We're very grateful that the owner has agreed to barter for services, keeping a little more money open for artists.
Having to work as efficiently as possible dictates a pretty atypical non-linear pipeline, with the various stages of modeling, texturing, surfacing, rigging, layout, animation, render, FX, and compositing blending through each other in parallel. The final aspects of that pipeline are coming together as we start to final proof-of-concept shots across the film.
Those of you who are part of the "Colony" series of perks, you have not been forgotten. We have been making small improvements to the film that have kept us from committing to what we need from you. You're likely to end up featured slightly more than we originally anticipated, and we hope to finalize that soon so that we can ask you for what we need.
As always, follow @sitgfilm and @mikeboers on Twitter for smaller updates as we go along.
Have a happy Friday!
~ Mike