We’ve individually introduced our principal cast members: Karrie Shirou, Ariel Hancock, Paul Birchard, Lex Quarterman, Veronika Kurshinskaya, and William Roberts, as well as pilot episode guest star Sergei Oleinik.
These are joined by a number of other very talented cast members in the pilot episode:
Melodee M. Spevack
Melodee is well known in the anime and SF fan community, so this part probably qualifies as a “cameo” performance. She’s the one doing the storybook intro narration in the prolog — as Georgiana Lerner relating the story in much later life. And she does it brilliantly. We wanted to get a very particular feeling for this archetypal storybook style — this is really a prolog for the entire series. It also establishes an important story fact — however bad things get, we know they made it to tell the story.
We had originally planned for this to be the only narration in the show, but she’s so good, it makes me wonder if we should rewrite a little so we can ask her to come back and do some more!
Karen Jagger
Karen is actually playing a named character – Communications Technician Tina Harris, USAF – from Iridium Station. In this episode, she’s just a voice over the radio, but we’ll get to know her better in episode 3, “Cyborg”, and probably some later episodes as well. She really gets the tone exactly right for this part. We found Karen through the Texas Film Commission.
Sophie Le Neveu
Sophie plays a couple of different roles in the pilot episode. She’s the talk show host and one of the “Street Interview Women” in the media montage. Sophie is originally from Britain, though she lives in the USA today.
Jami Cullen
Jami works as an actress and voice-over artist in Ohio, but also as a high-school science teacher. She’s been very enthusiastic about our project because of the accurate space technology and science. I’m hoping she’ll be able to share Lunatics! with her students before too long.
Kristina Ponomarenko
Kristina is a recent emigre from Russia, now living in Los Angeles. She plays the part of the space suit technician that helps Georgiana and Hiromi at Baikonur.
Miki Kuroki
Miki is the voice of the Japanese reporter in the press conference scene (in both Japanese and English versions). She’s also, very importantly, the one responsible for translating Hiromi’s lines in that scene into stylistically-correct Japanese.
David Jordan
David is a fellow filmmaker, directing his own project, “ZHackers” — a story about geeks fighting zombies on the University of Illinois campus. He’s also a pretty talented Python programmer involved in the Novacut video-editor project. In our production, he provides voices for one of the talk-show guests, and also “Astronaut #3” (the one busy with the tablet computer the whole time).
Nadezhda Dmitrieva and Shamil Aminov
Nadezhda and Shamil were actually cast and recorded by Konstantin Dmitriev, best known for “Morevna Project”. So I don’t really know them, but they did a very good job on these couple of lines in Russian, as the mother and son passing through the train in Kazakhstan (at one point we did consider doing these lines in Kazakh, but opted for Russian as a easier and still plausible choice).
Terry Hancock, Janet Hancock, Sylvan Hancock, and Nicholas Hancock
Lastly of course, I filled in a few lines myself, and also drafted my mother and two sons to do a few one-liners that we hadn’t managed to fill yet. As the Space Station controller voice, I got to reach deep into my roots to produce the sort of genuine Texas accent I’ve otherwise spent many years losing by watching British TV and moving to California for awhile. Janet (my mother) is one of the street interview voices. Sylvan is Astronaut #1 (the irritable one) and Nicholas is the boy on the street who also wants to go into space.
And that’s the full cast we assembled to finish the voice recording for “No Children in Space”, which has a lot of smaller parts due to all of the traveling that it covers. I’m very pleased with the results we were able to achieve — aside from a few small quibbles, I think we’re done with this part, and that’s why we’re crowd-funding mainly to do the animation so we can match this great voice work!
