What Happened in Ancient Rome?

Hi folks,

Wishing you the very best for the coming week from everyone at Rusty Towers!

Firstly, we hope you enjoyed the promotional posters we shared at the end of last week for Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later. We’ll be sharing these publicly on Wednesday (5 points if you can guess why we thought Wednesday may be an interesting day for some of these posters to be shared!). In the meantime, as we said on Friday, as we are wrapping recordings this month, we’re now very much in the editing stages of creating this show, which is due to be released in the spring. As we get closer to launch, we’ll be sharing video and audio trailers. If you can’t wait, we recommend checking our creator, David K Barnes’, other work including Wooden Overcoats, or our own Inexplicables, which stars Beth Eyre as Meredith, who will be playing Fulvia in Cry Havoc.

Meanwhile, we were pleased to fully launch our BackerKit surveys to all Kickstarter backers on Friday. We’ve been adding to the BackerKit FAQs over the weekend, but if you have any questions please reach out to us. If you haven’t received an email from BackerKit and were expecting one, and you believe you have signed up using an iCloud email address, please let us know your preferred email address in a message via Kickstarter, so we can change it manually if needed. The deadline for surveys is 31st March, and are especially important if you have any physical items we need an address for so please make sure you’ve completed them in good time.

Next up, we have some updates from the RQ Network! Firstly, we’ve been really enjoying sharing some teaser images on Instagram and Twitter on behalf of Harlan Guthrie, creator of Malevolent, for a new project he’s working on: Deviser. There’s not much we can reveal yet about this show, but we recommend following @devisercast on Instagram or Twitter so you can stay up to date with all of the announcements and play along with some of the mysteries Harlan has created…

Speaking of mysteries, if you enjoy ARGs and internet sleuthing, you should listen to What Happened in Skinner, an Ambie-nominated mystery thriller. We spoke to showrunners, Katrina Braun and Aaron Blanton to find out more about the show, their inspiration, and how they came to make the show.

1. Tell us who you are and a bit about What Happened in Skinner?

We're Katrina Braun and Aaron Blanton, the showrunners and two members of the six-person creative team behind What Happened in Skinner (or WHiS), which also includes Kaitlyn Gaskill, Annika Bennett, Sam Z. Morrison, and new addition Estelle Olivia.

WHiS is a mystery / thriller set mostly on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest and focused on the shadowy occult group called Auremana. It's also an exploration of some issues that we've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about in real life, including religion, legacy, and the nature of storytelling.

In the first episode, an armchair investigator develops a fascination with a series of Internet breadcrumbs suggesting that something sinister is behind a string of disappearances on the remote island of Skinner, Oregon... which also happens to be the hometown of her ex-girlfriend. When she realizes that her ex– and others– might be in danger, she sets off for Skinner in search of answers, with the help of thousands of real-life players looking for clues online. What they uncover is both more sinister and more complicated than anyone could have predicted...

2. What got you into podcasting?

WHiS was initially supposed to be a ten-minute horror short film. But as we started putting more and more into the world and the backstory, it got too big to fit into ten minutes– or for that matter, into anything we had the financial resources to shoot. So we turned to audio, but tried to keep the immersive feeling of a movie or TV show with the sound design and performances. We used other media too, setting up an interactive story to accompany the podcast that played out on Reddit, Discord, and other websites– one of which led to a "livestream" of our original 10-minute short film (which kicks off the plot of the podcast). Ultimately, our 10 minute short turned into about 10 hours of audio content over the course of a 12-episode season. Oops.

3. What are you most proud about What Happened in Skinner?

Honestly, it's the connections we made with the community who followed along in real time. To see people care about our story and want to get involved in it is one of the most fulfilling things we've ever experienced. And we loved letting the characters interact directly on Discord, and incorporating some of the real investigating our fans did into the podcast. This show was made largely from our living rooms in New York, Oregon, and California by a group of friends working day jobs. It was self-funded and self-produced, and our first ever foray into podcasting– So it was hard, but amazingly fun. And all our WHiSpers made it so worth it.

4. What's next?

We'll just say that there's more to explore in the world of Skinner and Auremana, both present and past. Things have been quiet for a while since the end of the first season, but there are starting to be hints of turmoil within and around the Auremana covens. You can join us on Patreon if you want to follow along as we find potential clues, or just keep your eyes open when you're wandering the internet...

What Happened in Skinner is available to listen to wherever you find podcasts, or on the Rusty Quill website. You can also listen and find additional content on the What Happened in Skinner website. You can now also find What Happened in Skinner merch designs on our Teepublic and Redbubblestores!

Finally, due to some unexpected delays, we won’t be able to share the bonus content we had planned for this Friday. We’re working on an alternative, but weren’t able to confirm what it is in time for this newsletter, so we apologise that this is a “TBC” message this week.

Have a good week all!

The Rusty Quill team