Our show doesn’t really have a single star. Instead we have an ensemble of several colonists, each of whom gets their own stories. But we also want to get them together as for ensemble moments, like this scene of the two main families having their first meal together on the Moon.
It’s kind of a challenge to develop and write for this many characters, and of course there are issues with balancing them. If you look into our “Artbook and Writer’s Guide“,
you can see that we not only wrote sketches for each character, but also for each individual paired relationship between the characters (that’s 28 individual pairings, by the way — that’s part of why ensembles get complicated). That was a great exercise — I hope you’ll download the PDFs and read what we came up with.
We use the free software package Audacity for audio mixing from the separately-recorded voices. Directing and working out the right intonation for the scene is done through a reading and practice conference call before recording.
One of the main jobs for the pilot episode is to introduce these different characters for the first time — one-by-one at first. As the story progresses, though, we see them interact more and more until we reach final scene of the first episode, where they’re all sitting down to their first meal together on the Moon — along with their guest, Anya’s brother Sergei Titov who we met earlier as the pilot.
I hope this gives a better idea of how our cast sounds together. I think we’ve really got a good balance here, and they’re able to make scenes like this work.
I think it also validates our workflow process – we practiced these scenes together in a conference call; each actor recorded their lines separately in their home studioes; and then I assembled the voice tracks in Audacity. I’m very happy with what we’ve been able to accomplish with this approach, and it means we can put together an audio performance in a global collaboration without the actors having to travel.
In this scene (in order of first appearance):
Karrie Shirou as Hiromi Lerner, Ariel Hancock as Georgiana Lerner, Lex Quarterman as Tim, Sergei Oleinik as Sergei, William Roberts as Rob, Paul Birchard as Josh, Veronika Kurshinskaya as Anya. The music is “Family House” by Fridance from “Mission #1” (Jamendo #a39495).
