Thank you so much to those that have supported Sancho so far.

Also I trust everyone is having a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend.

This next update is a rough animatic of act 2 of the "Dead Girls Eye"

In place is just a scratch track of audio (myself, the writer, concept artist, and a friend all took turns to provide the voices for this). Not only was this fun to do, but it also helps bring another element together to start giving this story life. I like forward to achieving our funding so that we can identify some awesome voice talent to provide the real drama for these characters.

In the mean time enjoy this snippet for the story.

Cheers

For those that keep up on film and or even animated film, I am sure you have heard how expensive it can be to produce such projects.

Generally most people do not realize all that is involved or the cost associated with film productions of any nature.

Even the most guerrilla of live action filming will have significant budget items, such as camera equipment, editing software, petrol cost for getting to specific locations, marketing and more.

In this case Sancho is a Animated film. We chose to go this route due to my background in animation, and my strong connection to fine art. At first glance to the outsider this may seem a cheaper route, as their is no actors, cost of camera equipment along with respective crew, or searching for suitable locations and getting the production crew to said locations.

On projects of this scale its important to come up with real numbers, not just something picked at random.

So to begin with we start with a schedule, what can be accomplished in 3-4 months using artist/talent that

a. may have full time employment some where else

b. if talent are freelance in the first place, they may have other life things going on.

Why is schedule important? Having to tight of a schedule, with to much happening in the script can really make a productions budget skyrocket. If the budget is tight, then their is the tendency for film makers to become overbearing and drive the talent past exhaustion with little in return for reward.

The idea for a independent project such as this is to recruit talent to help on it, yet make it a enjoyable and fun experience for them, which in turn should make for a higher quality of animation and visual experience.

So with this in mind, we identified that the production at the minimum would need the follow.

2-3 Modelers

1 Texture/displacement map artist

2 Animators

2-3 voice actors

1 musician

1 sound designer

1 Concept artist

Now this gives a good snapshot for starting point in determining the budget.

With this in mind, the project will begin to break down as follows.

A. Kickstarter and Amazon(which is the payment system in place) each take a percentage as they should, since they are providing a service for allowing us to promote our project.

Their percentage is roughly 5% each, which factors out to 10% and thus $3000

B. The next item to account for is the rewards. To keep cost in check we chose many digital type of rewards, especially since we are becoming such a digital age. Though it is still awesome to received real world item such as art books and so forth.

accounting for printing, shipping, and other reward factors we have budgeted $5000 for this element.

C. As we mentioned the crew above, we have allocated $16,000-18,000. Depending on if the artist we choose are generalist or specialist then we feel this will be enough to hire the minimum and possibly a few extra artist in completing the 10 minute short film.

D. The remaining $4000 is budgeted for potential software or rendering needs.

Specifically their is about 5 plugins that would be very beneficial to the end look of the project and save in per frame rendering time. For those that do not understand, rendering is the process of the computer creating the final image as specified by the artist. Their is one image for every frame, and Sancho is 24 frames per second at the moment. When the computer renders it renders one frame at a time, and depending on the info in the scene can take as little as 1 minute to as much as 30 minutes to complete one frame. So far the scenes on Sancho are designed to render at around 5-8 minutes a frame at full HD. And we currently have 3 computers(18cores) for rendering, but with 4 budgeted we could either purchase another computer or two for rendering, or make use of a off-sight rendering farm that is very economical.

Now that you have made it through all of this dry material, I Thank your patience in reading through it all, and trust this will help inform those already invested and future investors of Sancho of what it takes to produce a 10 minute animated short.

Thank you.

To help promote the Sancho Short, the following poster design was created for flyer handouts.

The colors correspond well for the Fall/Halloween time of year as well.

The poster also takes ques from a old "The Good The Bad and The Ugly" poster.

Why choose this name for the main character you may ask?Around 2000-2001ish My CG supervisor at the time was Eric Hance, and I was working at Foundation Imaging. We were starting a new project, and he knew I enjoyed researching for the new projects, specifically in terms of look and lighting, since I was a Technical Director at the time.On this show which was "Dan Dare", a British comic sorta like Flash Gordon in terms of tech and sci-fi; On our episode their was a sequence story boarded out similar to something one may see in a western. At that time in my life, I had not seen to many westerns, except what I would glimpse going over to my Grandfathers house. So My CG supervisor understanding his crew well, and me, asked me to go watch "The Good The Bad and the Ugly" as their was several scenes in the film that would pertain to what we were working. On sure enough he was right, but he also indirectly lead me to one of my now favorite genres. Since then I have watched many, many westerns, some bad, some excellent, and some okay. All have different themes, or intensities to them. Some are super serious, while others are slapstick, regardless I became a fan, and the Sergio Leone Westerns are some of my favorite films. In these are some very rich characters, some only show up for a few scenes, though they still make a vivid impact. The name Sancho comes from his first two, "Fistful of Dollars", and "For a Few Dollars more". One the of the main bad guys Henchmen in each is Sancho, one has more of a role, but the bad guy always seems to place importance to this characters name and actions, but they rarely do much in the film. So this is where my characters name comes from. It is such a great name, that can be either Mexican, Spanish, or more in origin, and It has a certain ring to it. I thought it would be a great homage to one of the Western masters to have my character use the name Sancho.

If you want to learn more about Leone, please visit this link at IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001466/