Welcome to the world of AetherEdge! A 3D animated adventure set in a dystopic future, a wanderer without a past battles alien races and their fearsome constructs.
We’ve finally launched our Kickstarter Campaign!
Who We Are
This project has four creative heads: Trey Buongiorno, Michael Contardo, Andy Pace, and Benjamin Rhoades. We’re all graduates of the University of Central Florida’s department of Character Animation. During our time there, we participated in the creation of two short films, GaiaSpora and Ember. While we learned a lot in that program, we’re ready to do something a little more ambitious. We wanted to take the aspects that we loved from some of our favorite 2D animated TV-shows, such as Samurai Jack and Clone Wars, and translate those themes into a beautifully rendered 3D-animated environment. If you want a simple comparison, think of our goal as something like Samurai Jack meets Final Fantasy.
We should be clear though, we’re not simply trying to recreate our favorite shows in 3D. Rather, we’re trying to capture the essence of what made those shows so very entertaining, and how they inspired us to dream big. We also wanted to stray away from the simplistic stories that are often present in animated shorts these days—those looking for a quick laugh, or resorting to cliche to get a point across. Our goal when writing for this series is to capture the mythological scale of Greek myth. Stories that have import and relevance many thousands of years after their origination. We’ve got an original story with a lot room to grow, and we’d love the opportunity to tell it!
Why Kickstarter?
The ultimate goal, for us at least, is to turn these ideas into a series that can be published either for delivery on TV or the web. We’re not quite there yet, though rest assured that we have plenty of ideas for how to make that happen. As of right now, we want to develop a proof-of-concept.
For us, a proof-of-concept basically means that we introduce some of the world, the characters, and the style that we want to achieve were we to enlarge this idea in a full-blown series. The full proof will only be around 3-4 minutes. Just enough to show potential investors (like you!) that we have the talent and the vision to follow through on our promises.
In order to achieve the level of polish that we believe our short needs to meet, we are asking for your help. We will be using the money from this Kickstarter to pay for the services of a talented musician to compose a score just for our short—and also to hire a sound effects artist to provide that extra little bit to push our proof into greatness!
The Bigger Picture
Though we are asking for a modest amount, we also have a loftier goal! Since we hope to expand on this project, we want to be able to grow our team by bringing in other talented artists to help develop the world we have created. While the funding that we have requested is not enough to enable us to produce the series, if we can meet our goal it will demonstrate the viability of our project and be extremely helpful in convincing those fickle artists of why they should sign on.
So, if you like sword-fighting, robots, THE FUTURE, and 3D animation, this project is made for you!
Conclusion
Thank you for making it this far. To help us reach our goal, please head over to our KICKSTARTER PAGE. We’ve got a lot planned with this project, and we’d love to be able to bring it to you. Be sure to also join us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Getting the word out about our project is extremely important, and every like and share counts! We deeply appreciate your support, and we’re incredibly excited to have a chance to realize AetherEdge with your help.
