Space Fingers, in the form that it is, has been officially discontinued. I ultimately decided that the story was not ready to be produced. This decision to postpone, opened the doors to numerous other changes I felt would be beneficial to the story, but was unwilling to make during production. Most people don't know that this project has been reborn numerous times before, so let me give you a brief history of the project.
The idea behind Space Fingers was born roughly four years ago while I was making training videos for the multi-media equipment available at my college's library. I was enthralled by our cheap, little, video camera's ability to focus all the way up to the lens itself, something that required specialized lenses for our 16mm film cameras. As I was poking my finger into the lens, my mind immediately went to building little sets and making a live-action, finger puppet movie.
It was just a passing thought at the time and I pursued other projects until I graduated and moved to Chicago. At that point, all the resources I was used to in college were hundreds of miles away, and I only had the money to buy a cheap videocamera, resurrecting the possibility of making Space Fingers. I began writing the story and started working through the logistics of building sets and shooting the finger puppets.
I have a natural tendency to get carried away with ideas, so I found myself designing mechanical puppets, researching foam latex, airbrushing, and trying to locate model builders. At this point, I had moved well beyond a small, interim project to busy myself with, while saving up enough money to start a serious production. The exorbitant cost of the sets, models, puppets, lights, camera, etc., led me to the idea of producing the story as a 3D animation.
While I roughed out the details of the artistic vision (whether to use paintings for backgrounds, what style to use, etc.), it was the story that continued to evolve. When I finished writing Episode 2, I looked back and realized how dark the story had become, far from the light-hearted, finger-puppet movie it was originally intended to be. That was when I first questioned the continued use of finger puppets.
If for no other reason, I was sticking to finger puppets because of their simplicity. I was well aware that I did not possess the experience/skill/time to animate human characters, so my only immediate option was to continue with the easily-animated puppets. I was also struggling with a quality/time dilemma: I could start cutting quality (something very hard for me to do) just to get the project finished, or I could choose to invest the extra time that would be needed to push the project to a place where I was truly happy with it.
In the end, I gave up on the desire to quickly get something produced and under my belt. It was more important to honor the amount of time and energy I've already invested in the project, and to see it through to something I would be proud of. While some humor and sci-fi references will remain in the story, I am embracing the shift in tone that began in Episode 2.
Thankfully, there are only three moments in the entire series that have anything specific to do with finger puppets, so the transition to human characters (story-wise) will be very easy. It is fitting, that animating the human characters will take a significantly greater amount of experience, because I would like to take a year or two to really polish the script. During that time, I will continue to peck away at sets and objects, but I will focus more on little (I promise), interim animation projects to build my knowledge and ability.
So there you have it: the entire history of the project. While this major production shift will completely re-define the vision of the project, it has virtually no effect on the work that I have already done. On the positive side, this decision solves the issue of tone that I have been having for months. It also provides the time for me to hone my skills and produce something much closer to my artistic vision (one of the main reasons why I shied away from live-action production).