When we wrote the characters for Lunatics! , we didn’t really give a whole lot of thought to how easy they would be to cast. It was only after that, that we started to seriously consider how hard it might be to find someone to play Anya convincingly. In the story, of course, Anya is a native Russian who speaks English very well. If we cast an American voice-actress who would then play the character with an accent, it would undoubtedly sound noticeably fake. Also, if she ever had to speak Russian, it would mean a real loss in credibility for anyone who understands it.
Lex Quarterman first auditioned for Sergei, because he’s also fluent in Russian, but after listening to his demos, we decided he would be awesome as Tim Farmer (and actually Tim probably would speak Russian). Tim, of course, is the teenage son of Anya Titova and Josh Farmer, who feels dragged along against his will, although we think he might just be enjoying the fame and attention just a little bit.
Update on our Kickstarter Campaign: “Meet Mechanical Modeler Chris Kuhn” – we’re at about 4% of our goal still which may not seem like much, but it’s still $1778. Remember that you won’t lose anything for trying – if we don’t make it, you’ll never be charged. And you won’t be charged anything until Aug 20th in any case. We can still make it if we can let more people know about the project. Link after the fold…
The task of converting the set of modelsheets drawn by Daniel Fu to 3D character models is a pretty tricky one. It requires a definite artistic sense of form in 3D, the ability to follow an inexact pattern, and of course, a great deal of skill with Blender. In addition to modeling the basic form represented by the modelsheets, the modeler also has to create a range of “shape keys” to represent different facial expressions. This is how we generally animate facial expressions. Blender does a kind of “morph” from the neutral position to one or more extreme points of facial expression (this is different from how we animate arm and leg motions, which are based on skeletal deformations of the character mesh).
We knew what we wanted to do with the personalities of the characters for Lunatics! , and we had back-stories, descriptions, and a few personal details. But we didn’t have characters, and I intentionally left some creative room there, because I felt that a real character designer could do a much better job. I had done something similar to this for a game project years back, and my first choice was to contact one of the designers who had worked on that project – Daniel Fu . Of course, years had passed, and he’d gone on to different sorts of work. He’d also done his own online comic series with ” The Retriever “. So I felt pretty lucky when he agreed to do the designs for us.
Two of our major character parts in “Lunatics!” are played by the extremely versatile veteran character actor and voice-over artist, Paul Birchard. We are so lucky to have this guy on the project, and he really breathes life into these two characters: Joshua Farmer and R. Allen Emerson.
We have a great voice cast on “Lunatics!” which is one reason I really, really want to see this finished. One of the first characters introduced is “Hiromi Lerner”, voiced by Karrie Shirou. The part of Hiromi Lerner is tricky. She’s a subtle character — it’d be really easy for her to come off as a stereotypical homemaker role and thus dismissed, but the thing is, she’s somebody who’s decided to do this role on the Moon . Inside, Hiromi is like iron, and you could argue that she’s the one that really holds that colony together.
Over the course of 2012, we had a total of over 30 people work on Lunatics! But there was still a lot to do in 2013. We got a huge boost from mechanical modeler Chris Kuhn joining the team this Summer: Lead Mech Modeler: Chris Kuhn
I’m pleased to welcome our new character modeling expert, Bela Szabo (a.k.a. “contmike” in some circles). This puts us back on track for a crowd-funding campaign launching late in this month, if everything goes as I expect.
