We grabbed a moment with David H. Lawrence at the San Diego Comic-Con to talk about Heroes, Goodnight Burbank and The Cabonauts. David is best known for his role as Eric Doyle – the Puppeteer – on Heroes. Chances are his next best known role will be on The Cabonauts as a gay space pirate!

I grabbed a few moments with Torchwood’s John Barrowman – Captain Jack himself – to talk about what his favorite sci-fi shows are – and what he thought about doing an episode of The Cabonauts…!

Three crazy days are now behind us. I’m still reeling. So what happened? Here’s a few highlights:

For me, it started with one hour’s sleep on Wednesday night (don’t ask) before getting into a car with business manager Phil Ashcroft as we bundled off to San Diego at 5am. After navigating parking (a task that took almost as long as the 2 hour drive), we found our passes and started setting up a table at the huge Wizard booth.

Nichelle arrived around 10am, and the buzz and lines began immediately. So many people approached her for pictures and autographs, all full of love and respect for her and her work – it was almost overwhelming. We spent that first day, Friday, dealing with the hundreds & hundreds of people who had to shake her hand, touch her, and tell her how much she’s inspired their lives. What a living legacy!

I also had a quick word with John Barrowman – Captain Jack from Dr. Who and Torchwood – and he told me he’d like to do an episode of The Cabonauts if his schedule permits. Don’t believe me? I managed to get it on video! I’ll post it later this week.

That night we had drinner and drinkipoos with Erin Gray and her lovely daughter Sam who’s going to be starring in a new online version of Buck Rogers as…Wilma Deering! Sam seems like an absolutely terrific person and I’m sure she’s going to rock the role – can’t wait to see it!

Saturday, it all started up again only we scored a major coup at the start of the day. We were set to premiere The Cabonauts trailer at the Masquerade Ball, an annual Comic-Con event that’s attended by 6,000 people but we weren’t sure at what point in the proceedings that it would play. Once Nichelle suggested that she’d be happy to introduce it, the people at Masquerade pretty much jumped to get her on board – and within seconds, we’d locked in a time for Nichelle to get up on stage. And that night, Nichelle surprised a massive crowd as she walked onto stage to rapturous applause. The trailer got the right amount of laughs and a big cheer at the end – which was pretty damn cool. By the way, a quick word about the people who attend the Masquerade Ball in costume – WOW. The outfits were amazing, truly mind-blowing, and kudos to everyone who participated.

We also interviewed David H Lawrence – Eric Doyle from Heroes – who revealed on video that he’ll be on an upcoming episode of The Cabonauts playing…(wait for it)…a gay space pirate. We’ll be uploading that at some point soon too! And I had a chat with one of the stars of Lost who seemed quite interested in coming on board the Scarad too. He’s off to Hawaii in a few weeks, so schedule permitting, later on down the road he’ll be singing and dancing for us

Sunday was time to wind down – Nichelle and I were at the Cabonauts table for a few hours then called it a day after lunch. We all left very happy in the knowledge that we’d done a lot of word-spreading and, of course, the trailer debut will be the stuff of legend.

If you’re one of the people who stopped by the table and picked up a Cabonauts poster, thanks! Glad to have you on board too!

By the way; the picture of Nichelle above is courtesy of SciFiCrush.com who stopped by to interview her. You can check out the interview here.

Feast your eyes on this! The Cabonauts trailer featuring Nichelle Nichols and revealing that in our pilot, it’s guest starring none other than Dollhouse’s Miracle Laurie (Mellie) and Buffy’s James C. Leary (Clem). The Scarad 27 has been cleared for take-off. Glad to have you all on board

Our second clip from our interview with Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols as she talks about her new role as CJ in The Cabonauts!

There’s quite a few sites reporting on the announcement that Nichelle’s co-starring on The Cabonauts; thought I’d list a bunch in case you want to see what people are saying (and commenting).

http://trekmovie.com/2009/07/07/nichelle-nichols-joins-sci-fi-comedy-web-series-cabonauts/

http://newteevee.com/2009/07/07/star-treks-uhura-to-boss-around-hayden-blacks-cabonauts/

http://news.tubefilter.tv/2009/07/07/star-treks-nichelle-nichols-to-star-in-the-cabonauts/

http://www.shadowandact.com/?p=7078

http://www.podcastingnews.com/2009/07/07/hayden-black-snags-star-treks-nichelle-nichols-for-cabonauts-web-series/

By the way, that picture above is a snapshot of CJ (Nichelle’s) office. The Cabonauts offices are stationed in orbit around the newly  terra-formed Titan (one of Saturn’s moons but you all knew that).

One of the most insanely fun things about the Cabonauts is the fact that we’re getting some majorly iconic sci-fi actors and actresses to play the roles of passengers. Well that was the initial idea. You write that into a pitch and then you scratch your head and ask “how the hell am I going to do that?”. First off, as I quickly discovered, agents are more than useless. I say more than because they actively try and put the kibosh on it. When you’re on a small budget, agents don’t wanna know – not because they’re concerned about their clients (that’s the LAST thing on most of their minds) but because it means the money they’re bringing in to their agency isn’t big enough to warrant their own jobs. Actually, it’s not really the agent’s fault; it’s a plan set up by the agencies themselves and Hollywood’s now a slave to it.

But not us.

Very early on, we met with an absolute angel with a massively impressive acting resume herself. Erin Gray – you will remember her as Wilma Deering from the Buck Rogers TV series and the mom from Silver Spoons – now runs a company that represents iconic sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre actors for conventions and speaking engagements. Over a lunch at the Daily Grill (the one in Studio City, on Laurel), Erin told us that she’d never been involved in casting before. I told her I’d never done a sci-fi musical comedy – and she was in!

While talking, she mentioned a couple of big sci-fi names that she was very close to. It squirreled itself away in my mind as people we could get in our backseat. It was only a few weeks later that I had the thought “What if we got PERSON X as a regular? How unbelievably frakken amazing would that be?” So I made a call, someone else made a call, Erin made a call, and the next thing you know PERSON X said…Sounds interesting. I want to see more.

So more is what I sent ‘em. A script. An outline. And a character breakdown lovingly created 100% for PERSON X. A week later, the phone rang. PERSON X had said Yes.

They. Said. Yes.

I think I jumped up and down and screamed like a 10 year old girl when I got that phone call.

PERSON X said yes? To me? PERSON X will be saying back my lines? Singing my songs? Acting next to me? Holy shizzles. This was big. So big that we thought it best announcing at ComiCon ’09 (not that I’d ever been). And here’s the great thing about ideas, especially ones that spring up around The Cabonauts – it’s going to happen. Daily Motion’s PR firm, run by the very professional Ephraim C., made a call and voila. Looks like it’s happening.

But it hasn’t stopped there. More and more people are expressing interest on a weekly basis. People from Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Enterprise, Buffy, Dr. Who (the new series), Alien Nation, Stargate… Every week, I get to have my own personal freak out when we get a call from Erin or some of other well placed industry friends who are reaching out on my behalf (thanks to Marti R too for some massive gets!).

Who’s next? There are some people I want to work with just ‘cause I’m a huge fan, so that’ll be fun, just reaching out and asking. I also think once they see the show they’ll say yes because it’s so different – but the sky’s the limit, and there’s only one way to find out!

So never having produced anything on this scale, I needed a set designer. I put the word out via Facebook (status updates are your friend) and got a few leads. With our budget, however, it was never going to be easy. A couple of people bowed out immediately, one of them mentioning that a friend had worked on James Cameron’s latest film Avatar and had gotten a lot more than I was offering. I really had to suppress the laughter on that one; first off, it was a friend who’d gotten that gig, not her, and secondly, um, er, we’re not producing the most expensive film in the world ever. Then a recommendation led us to Kim Seff who turned out to be a dream; she came in brimming with ideas and could work within the budget!

She showed Paul and I some of the designs she’d come up with and I wound up going with a bit of two of them; retro mixed with futuristic. Me and Paul went out to a car junk yard where they charge you $2 just to get on the lot. The cheek! But it ensures you buy something otherwise you’ve wasted two dollars. We picked up various elements of dashboards from different cars and laid ‘em all out in the driveway.

Kim then began transforming the pieces she wanted, along with buying more like Car Seats and car radios, etc. My garage quickly became a workshop as Kim was tasked with not just creating the interior of the Scarad (the spacecab), but also dressing CJ’s desk (CJ is the CEO of the Cabonauts Inc) and creating elements that we’ll be using a fair amount of – clone brains. We’ve bought more yellow spray paint than should be allowed and I’ve had to keep my dog well away as he’d only go and lick it all. She’s also been wrapping the car seats in discarded rubber bicycle tires for a unique look. I can’t wait for it to be finished!
CJ’s desk came from ManiaTV – an online production company that, when they folded, had a fire sale. We picked up a couple of things including a massive desk they’d been using to shoot one of their shows with. It’s now being dressed up with a cab motif as well as monitors and keyboards, etc. And a place just for Grandma’s clone brain. (What??? More later. . .)

I’m going to be posting a video of some of the work she’s been doing, assisted massively by Paul, so you can see the humble origins of the set.

I’ve always loved music – tons and tons of stuff but my heart is deeply embedded in 80’s synthpop. “Faggy English pop” as my friends called it but whatever you wanted to brand it, it was fun, poppy, at turns melodramatic, gorgeous and danceable. For instance, I love the Pet Shop Boys. And I still do. But my only experience with a piano was playing “Fur D’elise” as a child and winning some award for it. Back then, and to this day, I could play by ear (which absolutely kills your head) (I’ll be here all week; please remember to tip your waitress), but found it very difficult to read music and so subsequently decided I was much better off just listening to it.

Last summer, I dated a girl who loved to sing and compose music. One day while she was over, I pulled out my massive organ – bad choice of words – a keyboard I had laying in the back of a closet, plugged it up to the Mac and turned on Garageband. Within seconds, she was writing a song and asked me if I wanted to contribute a melody. I came up with something that she termed “complex” – and I thought “Wow. Maybe – just maybe – I could write music!”.

The girl and I broke up but she’d left me something far more valuable; the desire to start writing music. I immediately wrote a new theme tune for both Goodnight Burbank and Abi’s Teen Diary, replacing the far more gorgeous ones that Ryan Shore had let me use, but by doing them myself meant I didn’t have to worry about the costly licensing, etc, if we sold the shows to TV as-is as interstitial segments. All I had to do was something serviceable, it’s not like I needed to write a #1 hit.

So once that was out of the way, I thought “it’s time to write a pop song.” And that track has not only become the first song (for the pilot episode) but a template for what I did with the rest of the songs. They’re short – about a minute and a half or so – have a couple of hooks to them, are quite poppy, and quite retro, given that they sound quite synthy and 1980-new-wave-poppy. I’ve been writing the music first and then adding lyrics later (to those who want to know which came first), and all the tracks hew to this short, poppy format with little in the way of regular song structure (that being verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle 8, chorus chorus chorus).

Writing songs has been the most fun I’ve ever had sitting upright. Since I’ve never done it before, I’ve no pre-conceptions stopping me and so it’s all quite cathartic. I can’t wait for you guys to hear it. If you don’t like synthy 80’s stuff then hopefully you’ll just dig on the lyrics, the gorgeous girl who’ll be doing a lot of the singing, or the 15-person dance troup known as “The Cabinettes”.