It’s been awhile since we gave an update on our series, but as the title of this post says, we do have some big changes to share that make up for it.

First up, I’d like to announce that as a result of a lack of free time to work on our next episode, I’ve decided to stop work on it and shelve this episode. Also, given this lack of free time, I’ve decided to take a break from sitting in the director/producer chair.

In light of these decisions, I’m pleased to announce that Matt will not only be writing a new script for the third episode, but he will be taking a turn at the director/producer helm. Matt has already been discussing some very interesting story ideas he’d like to explore in this new episode, with a particular focus on addressing some of the loose threads left over from “Disunity, Part 2”.

With Matt now taking over work for our next episode, I will also be leaving it up to him to tantalize us with some exciting details and updates here on the blog as work on his episode progresses.

So, with the start of a new year, work will begin on a new episode under the direction of a new director/producer.

One of the many uniform concepts...

In preparing for our first animated adventure, there are a lot of things that have to be considered: What will the story be about?  What will the ship look like?  What will the characters look like?  What will the characters wear?  Wait…what?  What will the characters wear?  I have a hard enough time trying to decide what I’m going to wear on a given day, now we have to decide what these characters are going to wear??

Lets consider for a moment the normal duty uniform of a Starfleet officer during the time period in which Unity takes place (between Enterprise and TOS).  What would it look like?  We have some established guides based on what we see in both Enterprise and the Original Series episode “The Cage.”   Still, since this is an era of time that has never been seen on screen and print, we still have the freedom to do what we want.  Given the number of times that Starfleet’s uniforms have changed over the years (they changed 5 times with the TOS cast alone!) we have even greater freedom because it’s not out in left field to think that another variation could have existed between the time that Archer commanded the Enterprise and Pike’s captaincy.

Just one of the many things that we are working on as we move forward in the production of this series!

As I’ve mentioned in previous entries here on our blog, I’m currently at work directing the third episode in our four-part audio mini-series, a mini-series which will serve as the lead-in to our CG animated series.

Since directing and co-writing the first two episodes of “Star Trek: Unity”, I’ve received many compliments about the production and sound quality of our episodes. While working on this current episode, I thought it’d be fun to offer a glimpse of how the actor’s lines go from what we record in our recording sessions to what you’ll hear as the finished product.

I also wanted to use this as an opportunity to point out some of the realities we have to deal with in creating these audio episodes; production issues which we’ll still have to address when our CG series commences.

For example, one of the common questions I receive is where is our recording studio. This for me is always a pleasant compliment as the fact is that we don’t record our episodes in a studio. Instead, each actor records their lines using their own recording setup, after which I take these lines and use a variety of sound engineering processes to make the final cut sound as though the actors recorded their lines together.

One reason why this can be a challenge is that since every actor’s recording setup is different, there is the constant issue of managing recordings of different sound qualities – some people have a lot of noise, others sound a bit tinny because of a low power mic, and so forth. There’s also a problem some actors have with plosives – mic noise that’s created when you speak the hard “p” for example – as well as an uneven vocal delivery, causing certain words to sound as if they were swallowed.

Obviously, this makes the creation of these audio episodes a lot more complicated than simply compiling recordings to make a single audio file. However, if you listen to our first two episodes, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s worth the effort as it helps to create the clear impression that these characters are in the same room interacting with each other.

So with this in mind, I’d like to present this short podcast that I put together to give you a glimpse at the process that’s involved in taking an actor’s recording of a line delivery and transforming it into a finished cut. Aside from editing out my comments giving direction to the actor, what you’ll hear at the start is exactly what I begin with and at the end, you’ll get a pretty good impression of what the final piece will sound like when our next episode is released.

I hope you enjoy it and that it helps you to appreciate just how much work is involved in creating these audio episodes.

When we first started this crazy ride, I had never built a starship in a 3D environment before.  I’d experimented with some interiors, but never a vehicle of any sorts.  Still, I was determined to learn and from that the first starship Unity was born.   In looking back at this, I don’t think it’s awful, but there is definite room for improvement.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the great honor of getting to know two fantastic individuals, Doug Drexler and Douglas Graves (we call him deg).   For those who don’t know who Doug Drexler is, Google his name and be amazed.  He is a man of many talents and they are just too many to name here.   Through Doug’s blog (drexfiles.wordpress.com), I started to examine the detail and care that he had put into designing the NX-01 Enterprise in various posts that he had run about the tech of the NX-01.

deg was someone that I had met through Doug’s as well as John Eaves’ blogs.  deg is  a superhuman CG artist and chimpy king.   On his website Deg3D (deg3d.biz) deg shows off his variation of the original NCC-1701 Enterprise.

It was not long after seeing both of these fantastic starships in detail that I realized that while my Unity model was a great first effort, it was exactly that – a first effort.  Inspired by Doug’s and deg’s work, I set off to completely rebuilding the model that would be used for Unity.  I had a High School basketball coach who used to say that if you wanted to get better at something, play with people who are better than you at that particular thing.  I’d like to think that I’m a better CG artist today than I was the first time I built the Unity model and I can attribute part of that due to my association with these two great artists.

Here’s a little comparison of the bridge modules:

Not a whole lot of detail here!

A little more detail goes a long way!

After months of discussions, coding and designing, I’m happy to welcome all of you to the new site for our internet drama series, Star Trek: Unity.

Thanks to our new site design, you can not only download and share our first two episodes (along with our upcoming episodes), but you can also read our new blog where we will be providing regular updates about our series on a bi-weekly basis.

There is also an easier access to our podcast feed, which can be found in one of the links found in the navigation menu found at the top of our site.

You might have also noticed on the sidebar that in addition to our Twitter account, we now have a Facebook page for our project as well.  We’ll be using both of these social media outlets to help keep our audience informed of our latest blog posts and updates, as well as to engage with our audience about our series.

Until then, I’d like to invite all of you to wander around our site and check out the new digs. As you can imagine, we’re very excited about this new site design and I think it’s a great way for us to kickstart this new year.

Star Trek: Unity series co-executive producer Tanveer Naseer was recently interviewed by the team at NDB Media about the Star Trek: Unity series, including finding out some of the latest updates on this online drama series.

The live online radio podcast has interviewed many Trek and sci-fi alumni including Johnathan Frakes, Michael Westmore, Richard Hatch, Dean Haglund to name but a few.  We’re delighted that the NDB Media team has given us the opportunity to share news about our series with their audience and we look forward to being a guest on their show again at a later date.

If you missed the broadcast, you can listen to this interview by playing the file through our media player below -

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

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.

As we get closer to getting to work with these new members to our team, we’ll be doing interviews to introduce them to our audience, along with a sampling of what talents they’ll be bringing to our series.  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.

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 executive producer, is well underway working on getting the remaining work done for our animated series.

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.

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.