Hi there internet land!

Just wanted to let you know we haven’t disappeared. We are still working on Stasys but we have changed some things with the scripts and some of our roster (adding more people). I personally I’m slammed right now working on two other projects (one for a TV network), so my schedule is what is slowing things down, however we are moving to produce a scene from Stasys as a test of the entire work flow. We will keep you posted on our progress.

Cheers!

Kat

It’s been an incredibly busy past couple of weeks on Stasys. First off, I would like to welcome both Robert Falconer and Kevin Grazier to the Stasys Production team. Robert will be coming on board as Producer and Executive Story Editor, while Kevin joins us as Producer and Science Advisor. Kevin, for those of you who may not know, has served as a science adviser for many popular sci-fi shows, including the forthcoming Defiance, TNT’s Falling Skies, Battlestar Galactica, Eureka and more…

More details about their involvement will be released in the weeks ahead. On the art production side of things, we are moving forward towards producing our teaser, which is still slated for completion in October. I can’t get into heavy details just yet, other than it is proceeding on schedule.

For now, the art team is hard at work bringing together the assets required for the teaser and the first episodes. So sit tight as we continue to rock it! There will be a lot more coming…

I just wanted to let everyone know that while there haven’t been a lot of recent updates over the last month on this site directly, it’s because we have all been incredibly busy working on the show.

What I can tell you is that, as of two nights ago – the first episode was written. Rock solid now and ready for prep! Episode 2 will be finished this weekend along with a lot of Episode 3.  The near term goal for me writing the episodes is to have at least 5-7 of them complete. From there we move to the prep, production and post production stages – three of them would be in the pipeline at a time until a full season is complete (between 12 and 20 episodes).

This isn’t really all that crazy. It’s just a matter of time to get them written based on the original feature film script. So much of the work is already done from a story point-of-view.

Now onto to other things!

Our campaign really needs to kick into gear in order keep things on track. So if you haven’t contributed, this is where we ask you to please do so. Every dollar counts.  While I understand that some people may be a bit gun shy about contributing to a project like Stasys, given that campaigns for projects such as Space Command have gone sideways, let me assure you that ours has legs, and no one will be hitting the ejection button over creative differences that could put the show at risk.

So don’t be shy. It’s time to kick in some cash and help us see this through.

Several new additions to the production team are coming online now as well, and our VFX team comprises almost 25 people in at least six countries, if not more. Our teaser is starting to get sorted, too (we did some tests on the weekend using the latest builds of Ipisoft’s DMC 2.0 solution), and our primary goal to release the teaser in October is on track.

That’s all for now, the rest is very hush hush at the moment. But if you want the inside scoop, I highly recommend you visit the Stasys campaign page at Indiegogo.com because more uploaded artwork from Eric Chu and additional renders of our sets and tests of characters are now online.

You may also want to check out this excellent article talking about Stasys on the freshly redone LightWave3D.com website!

While its been a hellish week on earth, on ARK 17 its getting pretty. Check out some of these renders from Alx who has been modeling away over the last couple of days.

We need your support! Contribute to the campaign today!

More to come.

For those of you who have been wanting to see some renders and an idea of how good Stasys can look – well here you go. In Stereoscopic no less.
While this is not a set from Stasys, the guy who built it (Tobian/Andrew Comb) will be working on the show doing much of the set construction based on designs of the artists themselves with input from me, and Eric Chu. I decided to render this out as a test of our stereoscopic work flow in general and if you have the ability to watch this then you know the Stereoscopic is near perfect! (compared to a lot of stuff out there including many major feature films!)
This is because of a special formula that we drive our own Liberty3d.com UberCam StereoCamera plug in with in LightWave.
This technology is key to how we are able to make the best looking stereoscopic out there on this budget and then some!
We will have more stills and renders for you soon!
Special thanks to Andew Comb for the use of his Alpha Base set!

Stereoscopic Test for Stasys

A week ago Monday I sat down and met with Eric Chu in Vancouver, taking him out of his busy day to discuss Stasys and the look of the show. If you don’t know who Eric is, to put it simply he is responsible for a lot of awesome stuff and I always wanted to meet the man who designed a ship and character that I had a lot of personal dealing with while on BSG during seasons II and III in the VFX department. Eric designed the Galactica and the Cylon Centurian and much much more for the show essentially giving it its “look”.

I’m very happy to have Eric on board and looking forward to working with him bringing the universe of “Stasys” to life along with the ideas he comes up with and making those a reality on screen once again.

For more about Eric here is his bio below.

“Eric Chu is best known as a conceptual designer and illustrator who has worked on SyFy Channel’s Battlestar Galactica and has earned the label “The Cylon God” for redesigning many of the iconic elements for the show, including the Battlestar Galactica, the Cylon Centurions, Cylon Raiders and Cylon Basestars.

He has worked on movies, TV, video games, and commercials in various capacities, mainly from his Vancouver studio (Paranoid Delusions Inc.) or in Asia. His work encompasses designs, storyboards, animation, sculpture and writing, and he enjoys any avenue of creative expression by which he can inform, enlighten, and amass great multitudes of loyal followers who will do his every bidding.”

No lie about the last part. I have to buy him dinner from here on in when we meet.

Ok so here we are well into the pre-production stages of Stasys, and now is the time to put out the call for additional artists.

Several people have contacted me over the last week or so asking how they can help out.

Here is a list of what we need.

1. Top end hard-surface modelers who produce clean, lean but extremely precise and excellent looking models. If you have experience creating cars, space ships and sets in LightWave and can texture to boot, we want to hear from you.
2. We need several texture artists who can assist with the texturing process of our characters and sets/props. We want our characters and sets to look as photo-realistic as possible so we need great artists who can take on some of these areas.  Photo-mapping of characters for example is a must, but we have some special tools to help along with that process (AgiSoft for example) but need people to clean certain things up and fill in various blanks as well.
3. We need a couple of people also who can assist in the facial morph modeling process. Each character will need to have a standard set of facial morphs for phonemes like “Ahh, Eeh, Moo” plus more so that we can fine tune our facial animation precisely using TAFA and our facial capture solution. IF you own TAFA this is a major plus as we can get you to assist in the facial animation process.
4. We need people who are familiar and good with tools like IKBoost in LightWave and have worked with mocap files before. Motion Builder experience is a big plus.

Contact us through our contact section.

Last night I met with an amazingly talented and happy friendly concept  artist and who is very excited about “Stasys”. For 3 hours we discussed the concepts behind the project, the script itself and more and it was a very productive meeting. I sincerely hope he agrees to come on board in an official capacity as I feel his work in the past, some of which was instrumental in establishing the iconic looks and feel of a show I worked on (hint hint) will help to propel Stasys into the furthest reaches of space.

In addition to meeting up with ____ __ I have been slammed trying to collect up reference and other materials to hand to him and the rest of the team who are continuing to build out tests, experiment with texturing looks for our characters and more.  So progress continues and we need your contribution to the pre-production campaign today to keep going (even though we will keep going no matter what). So please check out the campaign and make a contribution today!

Over the next week my schedule is packed with meetings on Skype with the production team, plus meetings with other people who are looking to be involved some in the real world, some in the virtual world. Regardless its all stuff that has to be done.

We will have some announcements next week that I think everyone will be surprised to hear about.

Set construction for various locations featured in the pilot for Stasys has begun. Over the course of the next few weeks we will be posting some preliminary renders of what the interiors of ‘ARK 17′ will look like.

We currently have a small team of top notch modelers working away on this portion of the tasks required to bring Stasys to life and we hope to expand that team soon so keep checking back as we will be looking for people who can assist in the process.