A New Composer and New Actors Join the Star Trek: Unity Team!

Over the last few months, Matt and I have been busy working on the Unity series and we’ve made some significant progress on several fronts of the project.  As the title of this post points out, we have landed a professional composer who has written a brand new main title score for our animated series.  We have also attracted the interest of several professional actors, many of whom have been cast as new principal characters you’ll see in our animated series, as well as some guest roles you’ll hear in our next episode.  We have also cast a new actress to take over the role of Chief Engineer Amara Cohen as part of our bid to continue to build and improve on our series.

In the coming months, we will be arranging interviews with

Star Trek: Unity is now on Twitter!

As the title of this entry points out, the Star Trek: Unity project now has an account on the social networking site, Twitter.  As with our blog, the goal with this account is to both increase awareness about our project as well as to provide our audience with another means to keep up to date on the latest news regarding our internet drama series.

With the use of our blog, podcast and now Twitter, we want to give our audience a choice for how to keep track of our series’ developments and the latest news regarding the release of our upcoming episodes.  Given the fact that Matt and I are both using Twitter for personal use (@TopGunMB and @TanveerNaseer, respectively),  it just seemed . . . well, logical to set up an account for Star Trek: Unity as well.

So, if you’d like to “follow” our project on Twitter for the latest news and updates, our account name is  “@StarTrekUnity” or you can simply click on our Twitter button found in the sidebar on the right.

Unity’s Matt Boardman is a proud Daddy once again!

Today is a very special day for one of the key players behind our series.  Matt Boardman, my co-executive producer on this series, as well as our Graphics and animation guru and the voice of our series lead, Captain Ken Anderson, and his lovely wife Aubrey gave birth today to a baby girl!  Mom and baby are doing well and proud daddy Matt is, well somewhere between Cloud 9 and 10.

Cadence Aurora Boardman was born early this morning and weighs 7 lbs, 5.6 oz.  As Matt told me earlier today, her older brother Bauer is eager to play with his new baby sister.

I want to wish my very best to my creative partner in crime and dear friend the very best for his growing family.

NOTE – Doug Drexler, who worked in the make-up and art departments on “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”, “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Star Trek: Enterprise” as well as working in the Visual Effects department on “Battlestar Galactica”, posted a congratulatory entry on his blog to Matt and his family.  Nice to see so many are joining Matt in celebrating this most special day for him and his family.

Notes From The Director’s Chair #2 – Changes, Changes

This project update focuses on a number of changes that we’ve made to our project, both in terms of what information we’ll be disseminating to changes in casting. To start this off, let’s look at some of the changes in regards to the overall series before getting into any specifics.

First, we’ve decided that from now on, we won’t be releasing news updates regarding the status of the production of our episodes. The reason for this is quite simple – we want to streamline the information we provide to our audience to only those items that would be of interest to the general public – in other words, no more information dumps. As such, the only news we will be releasing in regards to our episodes is when they’ll be released. I know with our past two episodes, I made it a point to keep our audience up to date on where things stood production-wise. Well, from now on, we’re going to change our focus to only releasing information that is relevant for our audience since frankly, production schedules are really for internal logistical matters.

And it’s with this new perspective regarding what project developments we deem pertinent to share that I am announcing the following – I am currently at work

Notes from the Director’s Chair #1 – What’s Next

Now that “Disunity, Part 2″ has been released, I wanted to post an update about the project in order to bring our audience up to date.

At the moment, I am busy with the pre-production work on our third audiosode which I will once again direct, but which I’ll be writing solo this time. It’s going to be quite different from our previous two episodes, especially considering that it’s a whole new storyline and a stand-alone episode. However, it will be similar to “Disunity” and “Disunity, Part 2″ in that it will feature a story with a strong social commentary component, focusing on an issue that to-date hasn’t received much attention for discussion. There’s also going to be a few new guest voices that will be featured on this episode that I think will also help give something fresh and new to our series.

“Disunity, Part 2″ Now Online!!!

“Disunity, Part 2″ is now available for download on our website. As mentioned earlier, there are 4 different formats available on our site for you to download – a single, high-quality MP3 file, a single low-quality MP3 file, a set of high-quality MP3 files (one for each act), and a CD image file (tutorial on how to create the audio CD is included in the zipped folder). A reminder that the MP3 files have been optimized for headphone/earphone listening while the CD version has been mixed for listening to on stereo speakers.

You can download your own copy from our episode download page –

“Disunity, Part 2″ Release Date Announcement

The team behind “Star Trek: Unity” are pleased to announce that the next episode in our series, “Disunity, Part 2″, will be released on Christmas Day – December 25th – at 12PM EST.  As was the case with “Disunity”, we will be offering this episode to our audience in 4 different formats -

- a single, high-quality MP3 file.

- a single, low quality MP3 file.

- a set of MP3 files, one for each act of the episode.

- a CD image to burn to make your own audio CD of the episode.

We will also be offering this episode on our podcast, so there are plenty of options for getting your copy of this episode.

And just one more note about these formats – the MP3 format has been mixed specifically for listening to this episode through headphones/earphones.  If you’d like to listen to this episode through a speaker system (ie, home stereo system, car CD player, desktop speakers, etc), I would recommend you download the CD image in order to ensure you get the full effect of this episode.  For information on how to burn a CD image to make an audio CD, check out the tutorial found in the zipped folder for the CD Image (this tutorial uses free, open-source software so you don’t have to worry about buying any programs to do this).

Star Trek: Unity Project Releases Animated Series Teaser Trailer

Today we opened the door to our animated series just a crack with the release of the new Star Trek: Unity teaser trailer.  This trailer gives the public their first glimpse at what the animated part of our series will look like. Of course, keeping true to the spirit of the teaser trailer concept, we’re not showing any plot or story details that will appear in our animated series – in fact, the scenes shown in this trailer were created specifically for this work to represent where we are story-wise in our audio-only episodes. Regardless, this teaser trailer provides some tantalizing revelations about our series, some of which have never been made public – until now. How’s that for a tease?

As you’ll see, our teaser trailer got its inspiration from another one that was the source of much talk and speculation

ST Unity Project Update Podcast #1 Now Available

The first in what we hope to be semi-regular podcast project updates is now available through our podcast feed.  The podcast features Matt Boardman and myself talking about the status of our project, including the latest news on our next episode, “Disunity, Part 2″, as well as something we’re currently working on in regards to Unity’s CGI animated series.  To download/listen to this latest report from the front lines, click on our podcast feed button seen below.

”Disunity, Part 2” – That’s A Wrap!

I’m thrilled to announce that production on our 2^nd episode “Disunity, Part 2” has been successfully completed! Although the production time ran a bit longer than I wanted it to, something that I’m already making plans to address for our next episode, we still ended up getting this episode in the can faster than our first one, so we’re getting there. Most importantly, though, I think you’ll see some marked improvements in some of the performances as the actors become more familiar and relaxed playing their characters.

Of course, while the cast can now kick up their heels and relax, I’ll now be locking myself up in the editing bay to put together a cut of this episode. Without question, this episode is going to be a lot darker and maybe even a bit disturbing for some. To that end, I’m planning on including an audience advisory so people know what to expect.

And so, with production on “Disunity, Part 2” now over, the next big announcement regarding this episode will be the most anticipated one – the announcement of this episode’s release date.

Stay tuned!