We thought you’d all appreciate a peek behind the curtain at the Night Terrace production process, so we asked co-creator and “Sue” actor Petra Elliott to fill you in…

Here it is – the long awaited Night Terrace.

Well, for our backers at least. Those who supported the creation of this series as part of our Kickstarter campaign back in March can finally hear what we have been secretly squeeing about for months. (The rest of you, well… It’s coming. Soon.)

The feedback from our backers is so amazing and I’m glad you’re as excited to finally receive Night Terrace as we are to be delivering it to you! Now we’re at this point I can’t help but reflect on the journey of developing the series.

Since we last touched base with the completion of recording session number three, our sound wizard David Ashton has been hard at work editing each episode with all of the cast voice recordings, SFX, backer cameo lines. He’s also scored original music for a number of episodes. Each time I saw a new “Episode x – final edit” file ‘added to Dropbox’, the squee factor became immense.

Of course as each episode was finished we had to quality check them, and so I listened to all the episodes, multiple times. Like, a lot. So if something really bugged me as Not Quite Right after several listens, I was sure to pick it up! Then I made notes. Lots of notes. Some are really, really pedantic:

• Take this word and swap it with this one.
• Add .004 of a millisecond pause here.
• Should that door sound like a future space door, or a normal door?
• Overlap this persons line with the start of the next one.

I’ve resisted the urge to ask David to make my footsteps sound 10kgs lighter… ah the vanity! I listened to the episodes repeatedly and still didn’t get bored. So I know you’re in for a treat.

Choosing photos and sound clips for the trailer has also been a very interesting process. (An audio series needs images – who’d have thought?) What will give you just the littlest taste of the story without… well… spoilers!? (CAPS LOCK! BOLD!) We wanted to hint at the fantastic adventure and comedy in both writing and performance, without giving away the punch lines or the plot.

Following our super fun photo shoot with the amazing Steve Scalone, we began scouring through hundreds of pictures for the ultimate image. What will best give a sense of the characters, the adventure, the … sheer gingerness of the main cast? (That was accidental, for the record). For me personally, every aspect of creating the image of Sue was carefully thought out. Costume, make-up & hair, posing – shooting and choosing the right image for Sue’s character was so tricky – she’s so complicated, yet mysterious. The image needed to be true to her character, without revealing too much. I even had a Queer Eye For the Straight Girl session with John, going through my wardrobe to pick potential “Sue” attire. It involved me getting my gear off in front of John repeatedly. He didn’t care. Neither did I. I guess that’s a sign of a good working relationship – being “naked” in front of your associate. If only that were a metaphor.

Then we had to narrow 4 hours of story audio into a 15 or 30 second trailer. I even created a spreadsheet to capture one-liners or dialogue exchanges from each episode to use in the trailers, and coded it with ‘sci-fi’ ‘gag ‘story spoiler’ ‘SFX’ so I could filter it to the type of snippet we wanted. So lame!

Gosh, we’ve even been debating phrasing, capitalisation and punctuation in the names of the episodes. What size file is best to offer? In what format? But as with every aspect of this series, we are taking such care with all of these decisions to simply make Night Terrace the very best it can be.

As well as all the work on the main series, we’ve been hard at work preparing for the additional features, such as The Adventures of Eddie Jones, meeting Josh Kinal for interviews which will be included in the audio “Making Of” documentary and David’s pieced together some intriguing selections from the cutting room floor. Not to mention planning the official launch. It. Is. All. Happening. And we are so, so proud.

And so, so happy that those who supported us from the very beginning are getting to share in the adventures of Anastasia Black, at last.

We sincerely hope you enjoy what you hear.

Much love,

Petra
(and by proxy, John, Ben, David and Lee)