With shooting on Ender’s Game up and running under the direction of Wolverine’s Gavin Hood, producer Roberto Orci has begun updating a weekly blog about various elements of production. And a couple of new entries have appeared online, covering production design and some of the preparation the younger members of the cast have been doing for the film.

Ender’s Game, which adapts Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi novel, finds Asa Butterfield selected as one of the young recruits for a floating battle school designed by a future Earth to train up new warriors in the fight against an alien threat. It turns out he’s more of a prodigy than anyone expected and quickly becomes a master tactician.

But there is a price to be paid, especially in terms of his family’s emotional attachments. The latest blog entry shows off Ender’s room at home, with Orci adding some commentary. “The more futuristic the world, the more invisible its technology. So why shouldn’t Ender’s room look just like any normal kid’s room? And not every future is a dark dystopia. The world that Ender lives in is a world worth saving. That’s why he is willing to leave his family to go into an orbiting Battle School and risk not seeing his sister, Valentine, again until they are both adults. That doesn’t mean this world doesn’t have rules. Ender’s parents had to get permission from the state to have a third child, and if Ender ever had any doubt if he was unwanted, his mother and father’s shock at having their son recruited to be a future leader and transferred to space makes it clear to him that they’ve always loved him.”

And the other entry? Well, that features Butterfield and some of the other young actors being shot into space so they can experience what it feels like. Oh, all right, they weren’t actually launched into orbit: they merely trained in the Manned Manoeuvring Unit at Space Camp. The lucky scamps.

Ender’s Game is set for release on March 29 next year.