Susan Cirrincione

Susan Cirrincione will play Lieutenant Commander January Howard in Polaris.

Susan has combined a career as a model with acting assignments that include television dramas “The Kill Point” and the pilot for “Three Rivers” as well as upcoming features “She’s Out of My League” (Dreamworks) and “Love and Other Drugs” (20th Century Fox). Other recent appearances include national commercials for brands like Mercedes-Benz and participation in the “Visit Pittsburgh” tourism campaign for her home town.

About the character

The outbreak of galactic war a decade ago transformed the loose trade confederacy of the United Worlds into a military alliance with what remains of Earth’s once vast empire. Most officers serving aboard Polaris are either recruits from local planetary fleets or graduates of officer training programs established in the first years of the war.

“Howie” Howard is the exception. A top graduate of the Royal Naval Academy on Meridian and scion of a noted military family, she serves as Polaris’s intelligence officer.

We had quite a productive day at the stage yesterday (Sunday). The parts of the production are beginning to gel.

We’ve constructed just enough of the Command Deck set to begin walking through possible blocking and camera angles for the opening scenes. Alex, our DP, showed me some ways to frame the actors given the various levels and configurations of the set. He discussed where to put the dolly tracks. We talked about lighting with reference to movies like “Crimson Tide” and “The Hunt For Red October.”

Doug, our construction supervisor, set up tools and equipment to do considerably more precise work than I’ve been able to manage with my jigsaw and drill. He also explained to me the difference between bow and crook in lumber (which shows you how unqualified I am to build anything).

Paul (who has to fly this spaceship when it’s completed) and I leveled out the platforming and made a run to the hardware store for carpeting and more construction materials. I guess we’ve now got about 70 percent of the materials that we’re going to need to finish main construction. Then Paul worked his ass off carpeting part of the Command Deck while I walked around waving my arms and talking about the Big Picture - a division of labor which sadly suits my napoleonic proclivities.

And Alex re-introduced me to an electronic props fellow named Carl who in turn introduced us to a whole new dimension to bringing some of the instrumentation on the ship to life.

Saturday I hung out with the Farragut folks (I was gonna say “helped out” but I’m really really working on the “lying” thing) at their “Just Passing Through re-shoot and recruited a few pretty exciting folks to round out our cast as well as another expert prop maker who’s willing to lend us a hand on design and fabrication of a key prop.

My biggest challenge at times like this is to turn my ego down a notch below “11″ and let myself be led by people who know more than I do about everything. I’m surrounded by them right now, and for that I’m grateful.

Jason Lee keeps doing amazing things as he refines the design of our ship. This version adds “hyperspace sails” of which he says:

I decided to try to have the best of both worlds by making the sails transformational. Ordinarily, they are folded back in a standby position like you see in the first sketch, but they can also rotate forward into a “deployed” position, probably when the ship is about to jump into hyperspace.

There are two new renderings of this latest version in our Concept and Design Art Gallery, and you can see more of Jason’s work at Vektor Visual.

This weekend, in addition to getting together with other folks to keep building Polaris on our stage, I’m going to be involved in the shoot for Starship Farragut’s latest short. Hopefully I’ll be a help in some way rather than a nuisance. The Farragut folks have been an enormous help and support to Polaris, and several of the group’s principal members are among our cast and crew. If you haven’t checked out http://www.starshipfarragut.com yet, go do that now.

I’ll wait…

John Broughton (Farragut’s “Captain Jack Carter”) also has his own blog devoted to things Farragut and beyond, at My Captain’s Blog.

As for us, we’ll have another casting announcement early next week, and maybe some more pictures of the sets.

Garrett Melich

Garrett Melich will play the enemy military leader Andros Gaitanis, in the independent science fiction film Polaris for United Worlds Entertainment.

If Garrett looks familiar, you may remember him in the closing scene of the 2007 movie “Rescue Dawn” with Christian Bale and Steve Zahn. Currently, he’s completed work as a Secret Service agent in the comedy “Law and Disorder” (where he also faces off against Polaris cast mate Paul R. Sieber) for Beaver Dam Productions. Garrett has done work as a fight choreographer and heavy in the upcoming Roman Pictures production “Signals” and is slated to play the character of “Grayson” in Roman’s “Time Refugees.”

Garrett will be featured as an FBI investigator (and in a separate segment, as an accomplice in a 1983 murder enactment) in the Investigation Discovery series “Prison Wives.”

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More cool stuff today from Jason Lee. Regarding the detailing on this newest iteration of Polaris, he says

…additions include the ring at the aft end… and what I’m calling “mission module hard points” one on either side of the forward fuselage. I envision these as mounting locations for sensor arrays or other scientific equipment relevant to the ship’s original role as an exploration vessel. When the Polaris was refitted for service in the United Worlds Navy, these hard points served as mounting locations for the ship’s weaponry.

Jason has much more to say at his blog Vektor Visual, a site you should bookmark (his work includes some of the best Trek CG modeling and design you’ll see). His skill as an artist and eye for detail are making this ship come alive in a way beyond my best hopes when we began, and I’m really pleased that he’s working with us.

For a better look at Jason’s latest Polaris work just click on the image in this post - to see more of his art and of other design work on Polaris visit our Galleries.

In other news, I should have a couple of major casting announcements this week. You all check back, y’hear?

Polaris is about two months from the beginning of principal photography.

We moved into our stage about three weeks ago.  It took about a week to get set up with electric and heat, get locks on everything etc.  Then the producers, construction crew and director of photography (or: How To Make A Few People Sound Like A Lot Of People Through Creative Titling) did a walk-through to discuss requirements.

Ray Stantz has become our unofficial mascot:

“Wow. This place is great. When can we move in? You gotta try this pole. I’m gonna get my stuff. Hey. We should stay here. Tonight. Sleep here. You know, to try it out”.

Then a couple of us rented a truck and hit Home Depot.  We got about seventy percent of the materials and tools we’ll need to complete set construction into the place.  Eager to get down to work on building stuff at last, I immediately drilled a hole in my thumb.  It’s already like old times in Austin.

Quite a bit of the action in Polaris takes place on the main Command Deck of the ship, and that’s the set we’re currently working on.  You can see the concept rendering for the set as well as a couple of images of the early stages of construction in our Sets and Locations gallery, or by clicking on the images to the left here.

Yeah, those are Burke chairs - I own a bunch of them and I think they look cool.  I know that some folks will think we’re ripping off that show that used them years ago - The Brady Bunch.