Unless I run into any unexpected difficulties, I should have a forum up later on tonight, or by tomorrow. It depends on how much trouble I have reworking the theme/graphics. Since I’m not a hot programmer, my attempts at changing forum templates are occasionally disastrous.

I’m having second thoughts about the Gated Community idea – a gut feeling saying maybe this isn’t the way to go. Going “closed” has an “in order to save the village we had to burn it” feel. It’s inherently against the nature of what I’d like to accomplish. Besides, sites like Daily Kos have no trouble raising money as non-Gated Communities. I’m going to go ahead and make the forum open and try to raise money through donations. Hopefully, as with Daily Kos, there will be no trouble raising money because people agree with what I’m trying to do.

Here’s the first test –

I’m going to change the goal of the project, initially, from creating a live action movie, to creating an Advent Children style 3D anime. I’m going to follow the example of Elephant’s Dream and A Swarm of Angels and make the art available under a copyleft license. Probably (99.999%) the one A Swarm of Angels is using, though there is some discussion on OpenBusiness.cc about whether A Swarm of Angels is Open enough. I won’t go any more Closed than what they are doing, only more Open.

Going all 3D is ambitious, maybe mad, but what it means is you will have all the toys available to play with. If it were cell animation, you’d have to learn how to draw cell animation to create new scenes. If it were live action, you’d be limited to whatever had been captured on film. But, with 3D, the barrier to creating new scenes is much lower than cell animation. And the actors are always available, and always young, forever. It will take more of a community effort to pull off, but it will give much more back.

For those who don’t like anime, going 3D means it will be possible to convert the film (or episodes, that might be better) to a realistic CG film. I worked on the two most realistic CG films made so far (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and The Animatrix: Final Flight of the Osiris), and while I’d probably prefer that look it is hellaciously difficult to pull off, to say the least. Shooting for the moon is difficult enough. Pluto can wait.

On to the test I mentioned –

As a test, we’re going to try to hire a professional Japanese anime artist to design a character.

Here’s the program. YOU will go HERE:

Region Free

and pick out the one you like best. Keep in mind the art I’ve done so far, especially these illustrations:

This story is not so cutesy, so an artist who specializes in Di Gi Charat style 12 year old Lolitas is not the best choice.

When you’ve made your pick, join the forum (which I’ll work on putting up today), and let us know what you like. We’ll talk about it and make a decision, then I’ll see about the rates the artist charges and their availability. Then we’ll take donations and hire them if we can.

Sound good?

Go to it!

Update –

Here is the thread for the character design test. We’re going to be stuck with the standard subSilver phpBB theme for at least a couple days, but the forum works fine.