I have a big imagination and a way with words. Who’d have thought. It helps with the voice acting as well. Once one gets past feeling daft, you can put yourself in the place of the character. This is helped by me writing the characters mostly like the people who play them. A bit of a cheat but we are all complete untrained amateurs here so it was a ploy that appears to have worked.

I had to tell Richie “it’s not a comedy” many, many times during the gestation of Clear Skies 1. He was very happy when people started comparing it to Red Dwarf. Sigh.

John’s expertise when it comes to sarcasm, snipey comments, and blowing things up meant he fitted the character very well. He also has a healthy interest in science fiction, allowing him to easily lend his distinctive and powerful voice to the ensemble.

Dan was happy to reprise his role in Clear Skies 2 and, much like myself, took it as an opportunity to improve on what he did the last time. As an example of this, he actually read through his lines before showing up for the recording session. That was a unique occurrence in both productions. What professionalism.

However, Brian was so good, I couldn’t not have him back in Clear Skies 2. With no phone calls to relatives this time ensuring the accent is quite different, he delivered the goods once again, in a smaller but still effective role. So I killed him off again. Awesome.

Mark has contributed to Clear Skies in other areas, namely this website design and maintenance, texture recolouring, and some other artistic stuff. He is a semi-pro photographer and through that a bit of a photoshop whiz, and knows his stuff about arty design and things and stuff (I’m out of my element now, can you tell?).

I knew Kevin would be extrovert enough to be up for the job, as when we used to work in the same office, Kevin once threw a shoe at me. Well, two in rapid succession actually. Who throws a shoe? It is the stuff of legend in our workplace, especially as I then threw them out of the second floor window. And then found out they weren’t actually his shoes, he’d mimed taking his off from behind his desk. Oops. I’d like to make clear that we did this well before George W Bush made it into a popular overseas sport.

Richie Powles read her opening dialogue, blinked at it, and commented “Blimey mate, that’s a lot of questions isn’t it?” really meaning, “you’ve written this badly”. I replied “I’ve written it for Shazia”. “Ah, right”, he said, relaxed, and carried on reading. Marvellous.

I’ve learned that to do voice acting, people need treating in a myriad of different ways in order to get them in the mood, get motivated, and deliver the lines in character. But for the first time, a prop was required to do this. In order to act all superior, Paul put on a pair of tinted glasses that have been mysteriously hanging around the windowsill of my study for about a year (I have no idea where they came from). When Paul put them on and looked down his nose at the script, he was a changed man. I wasn’t complaining and it made a great photograph for the archives.

As well as voicing more minor roles, Andy threw himself into texture creation and model reskinning for Clear Skies 2, to which I am very grateful as I have no skills in that area and probably never will. He even spent real cash money on a book and a tutorial DVD in order to quickly learn what was required. As a reward for his dedication and commitment in the face of other personal projects, I changed a major character model just as he was finalising the reskinning job, thus binning all his hard work. Hopefully he has forgiven me by now and not subtly written something rude on the back of Jared Mason’s nice black jacket.

To my delight, Andy acted in the complete opposite fashion. He showed up to record his voice precisely three days after I asked if he could do the role, which was the earliest opportunity I had, and on top of that it was straight after a nightshift. He had been awake for over 24 hours when he recorded his lines, and did a sterling job to boot. Redbull, cookies, and Left4Dead kept him awake for the rest of the day after that – the least I could do after he put himself out so much to bail me out of a pickle.