We found Sergei Oleinik, who is a voice-over artist from Moscow, via an
online voice-over casting site. He’s a pretty great guy, and hardly made
any fuss over having to do all of this acting in English. In the pilot,
of course, he has to speak quite a bit of both Russian and English,
which I think he managed very well.
Sergei Oleinik is a voice-over artist, currently residing in Moscow,
Russian Federation. He has worked as a translator, voiceover artist,
and musician. He has been involved in many different projects ranging
from international television productions to documentaries, music
videos, and commercials.
Sergei Titov
The character, Sergei Titov, is first introduced as the Cosmonaut Pilot who flies
Hiromi and Georgiana into space on the Soyuz. He also flies them on to
the Moon in the Lunar Transportation System moon shuttle, as he is one
of the qualified pilots. Of course, the reason for this special service
is because Sergei is also Anya Titova’s elder brother, as we learn upon
their arrival at Iridium Station on the Moon.
Honestly, the fact that he has the same first name as the character
is a complete coincidence. We named the character well over a year ago,
before we ever met Sergei!
Two Soundtracks
We actually decided to make two soundtracks for Lunatics!
The first one, which I think of as the “real” or “International” soundtrack
is done in “original language”. That is to say, when someone is
supposed to be having a conversation in Russian, they are actually
speaking Russian. Most of it will still be in English, of course,
because most of the characters speak English most of the time anyway
(and the writer is American). Also, as this soundtrack is mainly
targeted at adults, it’s basically “unrated” — we’ll have looser
standards about language on it.
The second soundtrack is essentially the “English dub” — even when
characters are supposed to be talking in another language, it will still be
in English (at least for anything needed to understand the plot). One reason
for using this track is so that children or anyone else who has trouble with
subtitles won’t have a problem enjoying the episode. And since it’s the
recommended track for children, we’ll also make sure that the language is all-ages
appropriate. Most of the time, it won’t make much difference, but this
seemed like the right way to handle this issue.
So far, this has not required us to replace very many actors’ voices. Sergei Oleinik,
Veronika Kurshinskaya, Karrie Shirou, and Kristina Ponomarenko all
recorded different versions of certain lines for the two different
versions. The only voices we had to replace were those of of Nadezhda
Dmitrieva and Shamil Aminov, who play the two passersby in the
Kazakhstan train sequence (these were voiced for the English version by
Jami Cullen and Terry Hancock).
In the future, I hope there will be dubs into other languages, although for now,
we’re just committing to these two audio versions.
