William Roberts is an excellent and experienced actor, and he does a terrific job with the part of Rob Lerner, the colony leader. In fact, he’s so perfect at it, there’s isn’t much specific to say, except “it’s perfect”. He’s got the right tone, the right mix of inspiration and realism, and just that little touch of worrying charisma. You do feel that if this guy talked you into walking off a cliff, you just might do it. But fortunately for you, his heart’s in the right place.
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.
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).
