Production Update (Nathan):
This week has been very busy for the production teams! Our first batch of The Shattered Sleep Archives came out this last Saturday, and has been very well received. Round two is already in production! Expect more of these short written pieces to help us flesh out more of our universe and fill in some of the cracks around our central narrative pieces. Speaking of which, hopefully you saw our announcement video for Celestial Horizons, Shattered Sleep, our first interactive narrative experience, presented in podcast format. We’re super excited for that. We wrote the first episode of it, (and ran it through several drafts,) held auditions, and cast the main parts. Casting was super difficult because of the caliber of the auditions we received, but we think we’ve got a stellar final cast figured out. I’m excited for everybody to hear what they’re capable of! We’re going to have everything else finished by this Saturday, (recording, mixing, mastering, distribution, etc.) I’m also working with Brianne on getting some super cool motion graphics built for the YouTube releases of Shattered Sleep, so keep your eyes out for those. Research has been very exciting this past week—we’ve dug into cryogenics, entangled particles, and NASA emergency operations. As far as development goes, we’ve got a lot of projects in the works that I can’t talk about yet, but I’ve spent a lot of time laying out the groundwork for those. My week has been meetings, meetings, meetings—and all in all, they’ve been really great. We have such a fabulous team!
Animation Update (Brianne):
Animation has been busy. In preparation for launching our podcast on Youtube as well as podcast platforms, I’ve been hard at work with building motion graphics, title cards, and some sound design to help fill out the soundscape with our talented voice actors. In particular I’ve discovered and started to use an amazing blender add-on simply called “Animation Nodes”, and it’s an extremely powerful tool. It honestly feels a lot like an extremely powerful version of programming in MITs Scratch drag and drop programming language, but an order of magnitude more complicated. This week I learned about anti-freeze proteins, which are exciting as a contributing technology to the safety of cryogenic stasis in our story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifreeze_protein One of the ways that our story is truly sci-fi is that we in the current year don’t actually know how to safely freeze humans in a way they can be unfrozen. There are all sorts of interesting technologies like artificial organs, life support, nanoparticles, and chemicals like antifreeze proteins that will likely go into the actual technology once it exists. Regardless of that eventual technology’s functional components, there are still fascinating moral and ethical implications ready to be explored, and we’re excited to be a part of that.
Community Update (Christine):
Hey everyone! Thank you so much to those who are already following us on Facebook, Instagram, and have joined us on Discord! It’s been really cool to see how many people are already interested in what we are doing, even though we don’t have a ton of information out yet. We’re so thankful for all of your support and we’re excited to see where this all goes! This week has been all about figuring out the best way to get information out to our audience and narrowing down what information all of you want to know. If you ever have anything you’re particularly interested in hearing about, feel free to post it in Discord and tag me! I’ll do my best to make it happen. We also met this week in order to film some behind-the-scenes content and the announcement for Shattered Sleep. We all are looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Discord and seeing the impact you will be making on the story. Again, thank you so much for the support already! We’re looking forward to going on this journey with all of you!
Technology Update (James):
I have been working on getting our Discord server ready for our community to interact with and influence the story line of our podcast! We are creating a new channel where our audience can post “in character” as crew members aboard the Ark Lyravea. There are a lot of other really cool things in development right now, but unfortunately I’m not allowed to talk about any of them yet! Stay tuned!
