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.
