I’m currently doing the sound-design for the Audio Drama: picking music tracks from the track library, tryin to figure out what ambience and sound effects to use, and moving the voices into scenes.
As we’ve already mentioned in an earlier update, Lunatics! will start out with two soundtracks — one in “original language” and one in “English-only”. These tracks will be nearly identical most of the time, but they will handle the few cases of characters speaking other languages differently.
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.
During the Apollo era, Walter Cronkite, the famous TV newsman, told a story about interviewing Neil Armstrong. He had asked him what he and Buzz Aldrin would do with their last hours of life on the Moon, should the Lunar Module Ascent Engine fail and strand them there. He was hoping, he said, for some poetic response about doing a last experiment for the benefit of Mankind or contacting their loved ones back on Earth. What Armstrong actually said, though, is something any one of our major characters in Lunatics! would understand implicitly: “Well. I imagine we’d be working on that engine.”
The path we took towards the concept for the pilot episode was pretty convoluted. It arose out of a number of constraints we were trying to deal with when we were planning to launch the “Lunatics!” series. Both “No Children in Space” and “Earth” are drawn roughly from Rosalyn’s original short story, “The Arrival”.
Thanks to everyone who supported our Kickstarter on our Moon Day opening, and thanks to everyone who helped spread the word about it! You never really know what’s going to happen, and I do hate the sound of those darned crickets. So I’m really grateful that we had some noise on our opening day. That’s a little complicated to say: First, and most importantly, it is better than any of our previous Kickstarter campaign attempts, including our successful pre-production campaign! So that’s a really good sign.
