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.
