Free-culture Project “Lunatics!” is back on Kickstarter

After an additional year of production work, our free-film project “Lunatics!” is back up on Kickstarter. We have a lot more done – some “finished” animation, voice acting and soundtrack mixing, a lot more completed 3D models, including some of the toughest mech modeling, and several characters. We are still 100% free-culture, using CC By-SA license for everything we release, and we’re still open-source, making our models and other elements available to the commons. We use only music with By-SA compatible licenses, and we are working entirely with free-software, especially Blender, Kdenlive, and Audacity.

The Kickstarter video starts with our recently completed “teaser” demo video, which is meant to show at least one possible rendering and final animation style for the project (though we’re still experimenting). This version is toon-shaded, but lacks outlining — I’m actually pretty happy with the way that looks. The limited PoV/hyperreal concept for this trailer was originally conceived to minimize the number of 3D assets we’d use (originally it was all PoV and didn’t show even show the character). However, as the video goes on to show, we actually have quite a few other models, including the Soyuz exterior completed now.

As I outlined in my update on licensing and business models, “Lunatics!” is entirely under the same free CC By-SA 3.0 as Wikipedia and other bastions of free culture. Unlike several other “free” film projects, we’ve actually decided to be strict about the music licensing as well — every piece of music we use is under a By-SA compatible license so that we can release it to you under By-SA.

An important part of our business model — creator-endorsed post-release sales — is a concept born right here on QuestionCopyright.org.

We’re also part of a growing group of projects relying on and promoting free-software tools like Blender, Kdenlive, Audacity, Inkscape, and Gimp to realize our concept.