If you’ve been interested in Night Terrace but not sure if you wanted to buy the first season, well, now’s your chance to get in on the ground floor: we’re releasing Night Terrace episode one, Moving House by John Richards, for free!

Why now? In one week, on March 27, we’ll be launching the Kickstarter campaign for season two! So we thought this would be a great way to let potential new fans check out the series before they decide to back it. As with our first season Kickstarter, we’ll be offering a discounted price on the full season – and you’ll be able to get either or both seasons through as campaign rewards! (Though note you’ll have to wait until the end of the campaign on April 24 to get your copy of season one that way.)

The free episode has a brief intro and outro, but is otherwise exactly the same as the version found in the season one download, and there are several ways to get it.

You can download the mp3 from us: Night Terrace: Moving House (free version)

You can stream or download it through Soundcloud:

And you can also listen to it on YouTube, with a brief video introduction from Ben and Petra:

We hope you enjoy Moving House, and please, spread the news to your friends! We’d love for as many people to hear it as possible.

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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)

Thanks to 170 amazing backers so far, the Kickstarter campaign for Night Terrace has already exceeded its base goal and is now at over $11,000! That means we have the base budget required to fund production of the first series –  but we’re only half-way through the campaign, with two weeks left to go. You can still back the series and watch our pitch video by clicking here.

So where do we go from here? And if you’re not a backer, why would you jump on board at this stage? Well, there are lots of reasons – here are eight of them!

1. You get a discount! The final retail version of Night Terrace will be $30 for the eight-episode first series. Pre-ordering through the Kickstarter saves you $5 – even if you only pitch in $10 for the first two episodes. (You’ll get a discount code or link to buy the whole series for $15 later.)
2. Most of our rewards are exclusive! USB keys, signed CDs, scripts, the vinyl…are all exclusive bits of Night Terrace stuff you won’t be able to get once the Kickstarter is over. Not to mention the chance to be mentioned in an episode, perform a line of dialogue or become an associate producer!
3. Pledging now helps us reach our stretch goals. These are targets above the campaign goal, and if we reach them, we’ll make extra bits of Night Terrace content!
   • At $12,000, we’ll produce The Making of Night Terrace, an audio documentary with discussion, interviews and outtakes. It’ll be available to anyone who backs the campaign or (even after the Kickstarter) buys the full first series.
   • At $15,000,  we’ll make a prequel series of mini-episodes, The Adventures of Eddie, about our hapless sidekick before he meets Anastasia. This one is exclusively for backers of the campaign (of $25 and up).
   • …we might have another one planned. But we don’t want to be presumptuous.
4. To maximise our chances of making Night Terrace happen, our base goal represents the minimum amount with which we can reasonably make the show – which means paying everyone involved (and there will be more than twenty cast and crew) only a minimal fee. This isn’t the sexy side of crowdfunding, but everyone is going to work hard and the more money we raise, the better we can pay everyone for that hard work – and the more we can afford to ask of artists, designers and actors.
5. Being involved in a crowdfunding campaign makes you part of the project. We’ll be celebrating that on Night Terrace with the launch party for backers of $50 or more, but also, once the campaign ends, by keeping you all up to date with pictures and news from the production of the show. It’s not a reward in the campaign sense, but it feels good to be part of something like this!
6. If you’re anything like me, you’ll forget about the project after a while in between when the campaign ends and when the show is finished – so you’ll get a nice surprise when that email arrives with your download code! And you’ll get actual non-electronic mail (yes, the e stands for something!) if you pledged for one of our physical rewards. EVEN MORE EXCITING!
7. The whole team gets excited every time we receive a pledge! This happens almost in real time as John, Petra, David and Lee check the site every five minutes. (I get instant notifications via my phone so it’s in real real time for me.) Wouldn’t you like to make us happy? Wouldn’t you? What are you, a monster?
8. Think about the future! The more listeners and backers we get for series one, the more likely it is we’ll be popular enough to make a second series…

We hope that’s convinced you! But if not, in any case you’ll be able to buy the series when it’s down – though after all our Kickstarter backers get to listen first. Which I suppose is a ninth reason!