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.
Although we didn’t quite succeed with our attempt to fund the voice recording on “No Children in Space” and “Earth”, we were able to proceed slowly anyway, and completed a basic animatic for “No Children in Space”, with voices and soundtrack. We’ve also, since then, been joined by mech modeler Chris Kuhn and new character modeler Bela Szabo, who are already working on models to finish production of “No Children in Space”.
Although we may replace some of the voices later on, I have now completed assembling the voices for the pilot episode, and I have now started working on the full sound mix wit effects and sound. I have also spent a considerable amount of time refactoring the Blender source files for the project — there is a lot of scaling, matching, and linking work that needs to be done. I also recently found a problem with my system that may explain some of my frustrations with Kdenlive.
Despite missing our Kickstart goal, we just completed our cast reading for both the pilot “No Children in Space” and “Earth”. This went very smoothly — even better than we hoped. We’ll now be working on recording the lines and putting together an animatic to guide the animation production process. It’ll probably b pretty quiet for awhile as we work on this.
We completed the principal cast read-throughs for both “No Children in Space” and “Earth” as scheduled. Everything went remarkably smoothly and we finished in about half the time I estimated it would take.
Since we decided to have Paul Birchard do the Allen Emerson character (first introduced in “Earth”), I thought maybe I should share his audition for it. We enjoyed it a lot. This of course, is the same “Art Now!” interview that Rosalyn and I voiced earlier. I have to say that Paul a whole lot better than I am at the part! Of course, Paul is playing both the interviewer and Emerson here.
The core part of this stage of the project is the audio production. I’m not certain that I’ve put the voice cast video up on this project, so as we are approaching the last few hours, let me do that: These are: Vernoika Kurshinskaya, playing Anya Titova Farmer Paul Birchard, playing Joshua Farmer Lex Quarterman, playing Timothy Farmer Ariel Hancock, playing Georgiana Lerner Karrie Shirou, playing Hiromi Lerner William Roberts, playing Rob Lerner Additionally, Sergei Oleinik will be playing Sergei Titov in the pilot, “No Children in Space”, and Paul Birchard will also be playing Allen Emerson in “Earth”.
This is just going to be a quick update, because I’m working on storyboard animatics today, but we have just passed the halfway mark — in fact, we’re at 52%. Of course, we only have about 30 hours to make the other 48% if we’re going to make. But consider this thought — if each of you found just one other person willing to put in as much as you did, we’d be done. So a few shares through your friend networks online or offline might be enough to do it.
We just tried our first teleconference with three of the principals for “Lunatics”, I plan to meet the others on Friday for another test call, and then we’ll be all set up to work o Saturday morning when we do our table read for “No Children in Space”. Our Kickstarter is currently at 40%, with just over 2 days left: http://kck.st/RTCwZs
