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 our new team members that we will feature on both our blog and in our podcast feed.  It’s our plan to use these interviews to introduce you to them and to learn more about their participation in our series.  In the case of the actress who will now be playing the part of Amara Cohen, we also want to use this interview to help our audience familiarize themselves with the new voice for this role, if not our focus on pushing our series on all fronts to make it even better.  We are very excited by these developments and we’re thrilled to welcome these talented individuals to our team.

On the episode front, work is well under way on our 3rd audio episode as well as early work on the 4th and final audiosode that will lead us into our first animated series episode.  On a personal aside, I have to admit I’m rather pleased with the script for our 3rd episode as it’s going to be a great introspective character story for our series First Officer, Commander Ann Welsh.  It’s going to be a wonderful character piece that will certainly be a major shift from the intensive, non-stop pacing of our last episode.

So be sure to subscribe to our blog feed or our podcast feed to stay on top of our upcoming introductions and interviews with some of the newest members to the Star Trek: Unity team, as well as the latest news on our upcoming episodes.

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.

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.

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 writing the remaining two audiosodes (Episode #3 and #4) and gearing up for directing both episodes this year so that production on our first animated episode can start in early 2010! Yes, that’s right, “Star Trek: Unity” is gearing up for production of our CG-animated dramatic series. In fact, Matt Boardman, my fellow co-executive producer, is well underway working on getting the remaining work done for our animated series based on the designs and creations from our Production Designer, Jami Avalos.

Another change we put into action early last month was dropping certain characters from our show as well as setting plans for recasting others. For the most part, this change in our casting is due to the realization that there are certain characters which we felt weren’t very interesting or compelling in terms of creating character-centered drama. And yes, the respective actor’s performances did weigh in on these decisions as they should if we are to be honest in our desire to make our production as polished as we can.

There are two characters, though, that we couldn’t drop from our series. One of these is the Chief Engineer Amara Cohen character as we have a very interesting character arc planned for her, something we’ve already placed a few hints of in our first two audiosodes. After working on these two episodes, we just didn’t feel the person we had playing the part of Amara was really giving the character the portrayal and feel that we were after and as such, we are in the process of recasting someone else for this part in our future episodes so that we can present the Amara character in the manner that we envision her. The other series character that we’ll be recasting is less of an issue for our series since this character is only needed for a cameo in an upcoming episode to complete a specific storyline thread that we’re developing.

As for what characters have been dropped from our series – and which other character it is that we are recasting – well, that detail I’m going to have to keep a secret for now since the character’s fate will be presented in our upcoming episodes and I don’t want to spoil that surprise. All I will say is that, aside from the Amara Cohen character, these other changes will come off being pretty minor since the characters in question were always meant to be supporting players for our principal characters of Captain Ken Anderson and First Officer Ann Welsh. Besides, none of these changes will affect the stories that were presented in “Disunity” and “Disunity, Part 2”. On the contrary, I think you’ll find that it only serves to enhance these overall storylines.

Okay, well that’s it. So now you know that if you stop by our website, blog or forum and don’t see any updates or news regarding work on our episode(s), no need to worry about what this could mean. On the contrary, we’re just enjoying keeping you in the dark.

Muwahahaha!

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.

I’m hoping to sit down and record a director’s commentary for “Disunity, Part 2″ to share some insights into how that episode came about and some of the challenges it presented, like learning how to compose an orchestral score for a dramatic work. More on that at a later date.

Matt and I are also busy planning out the wrap-up of our audiosode series and gearing up for the animated series. We are expecting to make some significant progress on that front this year and I know that Matt has been having a blast bringing some of our original set designs from our Production Designer Jami Avalos to life. Matt and I are also planning on doing another project update podcast – what we’re now calling the “Unitycast” podcasts – sometime shortly after production on Episode 3 starts so we’ll both have some interesting details to share about both the upcoming episode and our animated series.

All in all, things are going very well as we continue to move our series forward, tying up loose ends and narrowing our series and character focus so that we can create a truly entertaining and compelling science fiction series.

I’m planning on making more frequent entries to this blog to help keep our audience up to date on our series work and to let them know what they can look forward to coming from our project team.

Stay tuned!

“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 Episode Download Page

“Disunity, Part 2″ is also available via our podcast as a high-quality MP3 file. Here’s the link to our podcast which you can also find on our blogroll.

So there are plenty of options out there for you to enjoy the latest episode in the “Star Trek: Unity” series.

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).

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 – I’ll refrain from name-dropping so you can figure out which one for yourself – but we pretty much took the concept over and made it our own. I got the idea to use this other teaser trailer as the starting point for creating our own thanks to two simple words that appear near the end of their trailer and ours. This brief phrase not only sums up where our series is story-wise at this point, but it’s also a concise reflection of the work currently underway on our animated series. With the release of “Disunity” and the impending release of “Disunity, Part 2” coming soon, we know that we’ll be giving the audience a clear impression of the level of story-telling and production that we want to achieve with our series. Creating this teaser trailer provides us with the opportunity to demonstrate to our audience the level of quality in terms of both visuals and production design, as well as the originality of the aesthetics, that we are currently working on for our upcoming animated series in tandem with our audio episodes.

Given the fact that the full trailer for this Hollywood film is expected to be released to the public this weekend, we thought today would be the perfect day to release our teaser trailer. And I can tell you that Matt and I are both extremely proud of the end result.  You can watch the teaser trailer on the project website at the link below -

Star Trek: Unity Teaser Trailer

We’ll also be placing a copy on YouTube later this weekend, though our website will be the better place to view it since it will be in higher quality than the version that can seen on YouTube.

We hope you enjoy this sneak peak into our animated series as much as we enjoyed bringing it to life

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.

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!