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Dinosaur Train Role: Shiny, Annie, Cory
Date: Airing on PBSKids
Info: Official|IMDB
While She Was Out Role: Tammi
Date: ON DVD
Info: Official|IMDB
Trial By Fire Role: Meredith
Date: ON DVD
Info: Official|IMDB
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Host: Alan
Since: July 29, 2006
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© Everything Erika-Shaye & the Gair Family
what others have said
"As for the actress, the production had already cast young Kara in Season Three, for Kara’s haunting visions and flashbacks in David and Bradley’s Maelstrom. Erika-Shaye Gair was brought back and this time she would be asked to play piano. I was very nervous that I’d be asked to teach her basic piano, because teaching young children is not a skill set I can claim. However, I lucked out. Erika-Shaye had taken piano lessons for several years and was comfortable with the instrument. We hadn’t yet decided what she should play. I had an idea she should perform some disguised version of the Final Four / “Watchtower” Theme (I’ll get into more detail on this later). But, she started playing a simple piece she’d learned in her studies and we all felt there was potential there. The piece was a little too lively for what I knew would end up a very spooky, ethereal sequence. I asked her to slow it down. She pulled the tempo back a bit, but really didn’t make a difference. Then, I asked her if she could play it as slow as humanly possible, and the piece became a fascinating dirge. Nankin and DP Steve McNutt framed the shots in such a way that Erika-Shaye’s hands were never directly on camera anyway, but the fact that the young girl is actually playing a song on the piano comes through in her body language." [Bear McCreary, composer of Battlestar Galactica]"The piano takes another unexpected step in Kara’s dream (or nightmare) sequence. She’s walking across the completely empty hangar deck towards a young girl playing the piano. As I mentioned earlier, actress Erika-Shaye Gair who plays young Kara, actually played the piano on the set. She played a piece she’d learned in her own private lessons. Ever since I first heard of this sequence, I planned on scoring it with a horrific blend of digitally altered piano sounds, something like “Chopin-Meets-John-Zorn-Meets-Trent-Reznor.” In the temp score, Stewart and Andy simply played the live production track of Erika-Shaye playing the song she knew. And oddly enough, there was something even creepier in her performance that anything I could’ve done with crazy sounds. The cliché of a kid singing or playing a creepy song has been done to death in horror films. But, there was an authentic, child-like simplicity to her performance that was genuinely spooky and unnerving." [Bear McCreary, composer of Battlestar Galactica]
