Sneak Peeks + Survey Reminders!
almost 3 years ago – Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 10:45:24 AM

Hi backers! 

Dropping a note with some updates and reminders!

BackerKit Surveys will be locked after this Thursday, July 15, 2021. This means:

• on 7/16, credit cards will be charged for shipping costs and any items you’ve added to your BackerKit survey.
• you will be unable to make further changes to your survey after then.

More Questions on BackerKit Surveys?

If you haven’t completed your survey yet, please do so ASAP.  You will still receive your order, but there may be a delay in the delivery of your items and many add-ons will become unavailable.

Then We Will Start to Fulfil your pledges!

The first thing to be delivered will be the digital version of Volume 1.  We are aiming to get this to all of you who pledged for it before the end of July - and that will make you the first people to read it, ahead of comic stores, bookstores and pre-orders!

Once you’ve read, we’ll be so grateful if you, please rate and review us on Amazon and Goodreads to help us spread the gospel.   Early reviews will help drive pre-sales and pre-buzz and we count on you, our most intimate readers, to give glorious reviews.

PHYSICAL COPIES - have been printed and are currently on the water from South Korea.   Unfortunately, like the rest of the world, we’re still experiencing significant delays in freight shipments due to the impact on global supply chains and border crossing which is the hangover of COVID, and so we don’t anticipate being able to ship hard copy Vol 1 until end August, but we will keep you informed.

Work on Vol 2 continues apace.   Here is some Art from the final chapter 9, sneak peak!

And we are starting pre-production on the audiodrama.  Arvind is writing away, casting is nearly complete and schedules are being drawn up.  More in the next update!

Take care - and get ready for GRAY…

Feel free to message us with any questions!

All the best,  Brittany

In other news, check out a new Kickstarter project from our friends, CISCO KID & YOU - a documentary feature film with an important focus on LGBTQ+ communities.

A lyrical and haunting portrait of the contemporary American West, Cisco Kid is a vérité documentary about Eileen, a young queer dreamer who moves to a desert ghost town in southern Utah, determined to build an independent life.

They’re already fully-funded on Kickstarter, but they have ~1 week left to meet their stretch goal! Get your hands on rewards such as exclusive access to the film and custom enamel pins here.

New Add-On Items, Backer Surveys, & Smoke Tests! // Look for Emails from BackerKit
almost 3 years ago – Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 10:18:19 PM

Hello everyone! 

Brittany here from Team Prodigal - I'm one of the Producers on GRAY! 

First, 

announcing that we've created some awesome new "add-on" items in your pledge surveys! These include GRAY goodies as well as one-of-a-kind items for Jagged Little Pill & Dirk Gentlyfans! :) 

Our pledge manager BackerKit allows you to switch your pledge level, buy extra items, and purchase additional goodies that were not previously available via Kickstarter.   

More questions on filling out your survey? Check out the BackerKit Backer Help page here! 

Second,

updating that backer survey smoke tests are out! That means a small % of you will have received an email from our pledge manager BackerKit- this is your official backer survey, please complete! This is a test to ensure all items are reflected on your survey as they were specified in the campaign.   

Did you receive your survey and it seems a bit off? Not to fear! Your survey should have info on how to contact BackerKit's pro help team - let them know if anything is amiss, we'll fix it straight away! 

Haven't received your survey yet? You will shortly! All surveys should be delivered to your inboxes by Thursday the 24th by end of day PST (California time) if not sooner! (Be sure to check your spam folder.) If you do not receive it by then, please message us via Kickstarter, and we can resend the link / adjust the email address associated with your account.  

A quick reminder that everyone must fill out a survey in order to receive your items. For digital rewards, this is how your items will be fulfilled, and for physical rewards, this is how we collect shipping information to fulfill. 

As long as all goes according to plan, we're hoping to lock surveys on July 15th.  That means if you don't complete your survey before then, your shipment will likely be delayed. 

Thanks for your patience here and looking forward to bringing GRAY to (eternal) life with you...

-Brittany 

PS MAJOR thanks to BT & the team at BackerKit for all their help! Let us know f you're thinking of using BackerKit for a future project - we're happy to lend any pointers. :)

Updates! Backerkit!
almost 3 years ago – Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 06:39:52 PM

Dear Lords, Ladies & Lovers:

Backerkit at last

First, our apologies for delay in your Backerkit surveys.  There was back-ground jiggery-pokery to jigger and, well,  poke.  It's all done now and the surveys will deploy tomorrow sometime and so will be in your hot in-box no later than Thursday.

Next, some production updates :

Graphic Novel 

Volume 1 is coming off the printing press in South Korea as we speak!  We hope for it to be on the high-seas by middle of July and en-route to you by early August.  Slightly later than previously hoped, but as we hope you understand, printing and shipping and all sorts of international logistics are more challenging in our pandemic world than once they were... 

Art on Volume 2 

Progresses apace.  Some samples below. 

Audiodrama

Our casting is almost complete!   News coming soon. 

Our writing is NOT!   I am about halfway through episode 3.  What is happening which is interesting is that individual episodes are becoming longer than the originally planned 20-30 minutes, instead more like 30-45 minutes.  It may work out that this breaks down into 6 longer episodes rather than 8 shorter ones. 

Same amount of story, just breaks in a different place, for story reasons.  But it is fun and I have a big chunk of time set-aside in July to finish up all the writing.  That will put us on course to record over August and post in September, getting you episodes coming out in the fall. 

We are also in talks with some very interesting partners on the distribution and production side about the audiodrama to make sure we can make it in the best way possible and get it to the broadest possible audience. Nothing concrete yet, but very exciting and we hope to have more to tell you soon. 

I'm very aware this is a bit of a "wait and see" update, but know there is so much activity happening behind the scenes here, and we'll promise more concrete stuff soon. But in the meantime,  here's some art: 

toodles,   Arvind 

Happy Towel Day! Pledge Manager Coming Soon! Updates!
almost 3 years ago – Thu, May 27, 2021 at 05:51:09 AM

A message from Dorian Gray

My Lords, Ladies & Lovers:

Here we are, in our post-campaign lives.  Does the sun shine a little brighter for you, as it does for me? Good,  happiness shared is happiness doubled.  Misery shared is also misery doubled, but that's a paradox for another day. 

Today, I have for you instead, three updates and an offering:

1.  You will shortly be hearing from our pledge-management partners at BackerKit, with questions, surveys and chance to refine your pledges with add-ons and upgrades. They will treat you kindly, or rough, not as you deserve, but as you prefer.  Such is service. 

2. Casting on the Audiodrama is proceeding apace.  We will have anouncements to make soon, but three more wonderful 'tors have joined our company.  Most exciting of all, we have found our Speranza!  We can't tell you who she is just yet, but you will be the first to know once we can.  

3. Art-work on Volume 2 of the graphic novel is also apace.  Eugenia is just finishing up pencils on Chapter 8 (of 9), we will share some of her finished pages next update. 

The offering.    Today is "Towel Day", the day where we celebrate the genius of Douglas Adams, a writer and thinker as ahead of his time as  Oscar was of his.   To help with that, we offer you this little short-film, in the Dirk Gently universe, staring Hannah Marks and Samuel Barnett ( next to be heard as our very own Baron Klaus Arnheim) and by GRAY creator and Dirk Gently Executive Producer, Arvind Ethan David.   

Watch and enjoy.  --  DG  (That's Dorian Gray, not Dirk Gently, but hey, #EverythingIsConnected) 

Moderation is a Fatal Thing, Nothing succeeds like excess.... WE DID IT!
almost 3 years ago – Thu, May 20, 2021 at 09:34:06 PM

884 of us. $60,314! 269% funded.  30 DAYS DONE. 

Thems some nice numbers to wake up to, on this first day of our post campaign.    Just to be totally honest, though, it's actually a relief for the campaign to be over and not to have to live and die the next 30 days to the shape of the graph and the beep of the KS alerts...! 

This update will be a list of exhausted and breathless thank yous, like an award's ceremony speech made by Gwyneth Paltrow, with the full knowledge that she is louder and more powerful than any play-off music could ever be...  

THANK YOU, to Brittany Chapman, our producer who orchestrated and ran this Kickstarter campaign, the very model of a modern major-crowdfunding-general.   To Sean Chia who provided brilliant design and marketing support,  to Ahndiana Flores who designed all our KS assets and the wonderful Tarot and Postcards, to Aniket Bhatt who cut our beautiful KS video and trailer, and to all at Prodigal who have been working on GRAY for more than 2 years now. 

THANK YOU to Chris and David, our amazing pledge manager and advertising team at Backerkit (who you will be hearing from VERY shortly with your post campaign survey); to the team at WayToBlue who helped us build out our Facebook following in very short order, and to the fabulous folk at Kickstarter, Oriana and Elise for advice along the way. 

To our press team, Jeremy & Kat at MotivPR who have been out pitching GRAY into the ear of everyone who will listen and even to those who won't.

To our publishers, Clover Press, Ted & Robbie who commissioned this and saw it through thick and thin (which is good, thick or thin, or is that a cultural preference?), and to the team on the audiobook - producer Mandi Price and director Milena Govich as well as Brittany - whose work is just beginning.  

To the GRAY artists:  Eugenia Koumaki, Diana Greenhaigh, Joana Lafuente: ladies, you take my words and set them into pages of beauty.  Thank you.  Now stop reading this and get on and finish Chapter 8, all these nice people are waiting! 

To our cast:  Lauren Patten, Richard Schiff, Samuel Barnett, Neil Brown Jr and Kiran Deol -- thank you for signing up for this adventure before it was clear it would happen.  Our cast will be growing in the next few weeks, and we have exciting announcements to come about who is joining our band, stay, as they say, tuned.  Thanks also to our fabulistic casting director, Venus Kanani for helping pull together the cast and to Justin Lillehei for wrangling agents.

To all our blue-tick friends who helped spread the word on social:  Jewel Staite, Neil Gaiman, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Stephen Fry, Tyson Ritter, Osric Chau, David Baddiel and I'm sure many others I'm forgetting - THANK YOU for using your power and platform for good (and for us). 

To other Kickstarter creators who spread the word about us: Unbound, Arcane Wonders, Winslow Dumaine, Out of the Box, Madeleine Holly-Rosing, our partners at Hatch Escapes and The Wild Optimists: we thank you and its an honor to be part of the KS creator community with kind and talented folks such as you. 

& most of all to all of you, friends, family and strangers, 884 of you, the Sisters of Gray, our Lords, Ladies & Lovers who gave of your money and your time to help us make some dangerous art. 

We'll get right to it.   

Arvind