We completed the principal cast read-throughs for both “No Children in
Space” and “Earth” as scheduled. Everything went remarkably smoothly and
we finished in about half the time I estimated it would take.
This is a fairly challenging thing to set up. With actors in Los Angeles,
London, Glasgow, Dallas, and Moscow, it’s quite a challenge just to come
up with a time of day in which everyone is awake! To say nothing of
technical problems with the software and hardware for the call (we used
Skype this time around — we’re hoping to transition to a free-software
system for the next time we do a reading like this). But we managed to
get everybody together and we have a got a couple of recordings of it
that we’ll be using for reference.
I was really thrilled not only to see this happen, but also to hear these
actors working together for the first time as a whole group. They are all
really amazing, and I think being able to interact like this was particularly
helpful, especially for the “Earth” script, which is much more driven by complex
dialog scenes.
During the next couple of weeks, we’ll be recording
the actual dialog and mixing it together to make a “rough cut” of the
episodes. I will also be continuing to work on storyboards and
animatics.
