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.
We’ve individually introduced our principal cast members: Karrie Shirou, Ariel Hancock, Paul Birchard, Lex Quarterman, Veronika Kurshinskaya, and William Roberts, as well as pilot episode guest star Sergei Oleinik. These are joined by a number of other very talented cast members in the pilot episode: Melodee M. Spevack
We found Sergei Oleinik, who is a voice-over artist from Moscow, via an online voice-over casting site. He’s a pretty great guy, and hardly made any fuss over having to do all of this acting in English. In the pilot, of course, he has to speak quite a bit of both Russian and English, which I think he managed very well. Sergei Oleinik is a voice-over artist, currently residing in Moscow, Russian Federation. He has worked as a translator, voiceover artist, and musician. He has been involved in many different projects ranging from international television productions to documentaries, music videos, and commercials.
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.
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.
