It was a great interview and I really enjoyed chatting with the next group of storytellers to come out of Baylor. We chatted about the types of stories we explore, what sort of interaction contributors can expect to have, and the interesting connections between the Post-Apocalyptic and Gothic subcultures in Depleted.

Besides helping to encourage new content from the World of Depleted, you’ll be getting a smorgasboard of great digital extras:

-3 Special Uncompressed Tracks from the Soundtrack, including two custom Remasters from Oakwood Sound Design
-The Original Sonic Sketches for Skeletons of Depleted MP3 Collection (these were the actual tracks created by David Todd Singleton that the score was sculpted around, so this gets you into the raw original mindset before the 2012 final CD)
-30 HQ Behind-the-Scenes Day 419 photos suitable for printing and framing (HR .JPG)
-3 High Rez 300 dpi T-Shirt designs (including two designs that are in both color and black and white) that are suitable for reverse printing (HR .JPG)
-10 1600×1200 HR Computer Backgrounds (HR ..JPG)
-Special Flash Video Collection of:

–Early Rough Cut of the Ending
–Color Grading Comparisons of key scenes
–4 In-Depth Interviews, including lead actress Kat Carney (Jenna Whitmore), lead actor Eric Henninger (Nash Fitch), and armorer Gabe Kinerknecht.
–Gavin Spy Video of Jenna Whitmore Prior to the Fall

-Special Writing Collection featuring:

–Day 419 Shooting Script (PDF)
–2 “Day of the Attacks” news radio scripts (PDF)
–Full Blood of Martyrs Short Script (PDF)
–The Official Day 419 Novella (both PDF and EPUB, for smart devices)
–The Official Day 419 Epilogue (PDF)

All this for only $17.49!

But hurry, as this limited edition DS-1 DVD won’t be here much longer and the 50% off pricing ends on January 15th, 2012!

For all of our fans who’ve been so supportive, as a Thanksgiving treat, we’re providing the official Day 419 Novella in ePub format for you to download and read wherever you happen to be!

Just click the link below to download the Day 419 Novella with lots intriguing insight to Jenna, Gavin, and all the people you’ve come to care about!

Day 419 Novella EPUB Download

Happy Thanksgiving and may you cherish your family and friends in this time of festivity,

Jeremy

We’re extremely excited to announce our new Logos of Depleted contest which we are teaming up with MicroFilmmaker Magazine and Corel to bring you! Many of you have read about some of the different Factions in World of Depleted and now we’re going to give you the chance to test out your creativity to design a logo for nine of those Factions and to test out Corel’s new MotionStudio 3D software while you’re at it!

Winners will be featured in a special gallery on Corel’s homepage, have a chance for their logos to become the official representation of the Faction they designed for in World of Depleted, and receive one of SEVEN Corel prize packs, ranging from the $750 Total Art/Photo/Video line to a full copy of their $100 Corel MotionStudio 3D package! To make things more fun, there’s no limit on the number of entries you can submit, so feel free to let the artistic muse take you where it will!

To get all the details and submit your logo(s), go to the full page at MFM! But hurry, the submission deadline is December 31st and you wouldn’t want to miss out on your chance for fame and glory during the rush of the holidays!

On Halloween, we bring you a special treat, that’s only the least bit tricksy!  Fans of Depleted can downoad the epub of World of Depleted: A Tale of Cymbrogi, Volume 1: Family Retreat.  Optimized for e-readers like the iPhone, iPod, and Android, you can read it on any .EPUB software.  Tomorrow, we’ll also make the .PDF available!

Happy Halloween and may you enjoy the new story that gives you greater insight into the Cymbrogi, Gavin Hesterdale, and other fun people within the World of Depleted!

-Jeremy

Our audio people at Oakwood Sound Design had recently discovered a local printer that they were very impressed with called, Quality Duplication.  (I know, the name is not unlike Lexington’s #1 China Buffet.  However, much like the restaurant I just mentioned, we were wise not to discount them due to their name!)  I had a chance to meet with John Hendershot, who runs the company, and he printed up some proofs for us, which were very impressive.  As such, I think we’ll be doing all of our speciality DVDs with him!  (As an added bonus, his rates are incredible on multi-disc sets, which is an area that CreateSpace/Amazon.com have big problems with.)

So, here is the proof test below.  The print looked great and allowed us to find a few  layout errors in our design that were simple to correct once we knew how they’d show up.

DVD Proof Set in Sunlit Window

For our fans, we’re excited to let you know about some really great DVD-Rom features that are included with the DVD, to give you extra bang for your buck when you put it into your computer!

Included will be:

• Day 419 wallpaper backgrounds, plus never before seen WoD faction backgrounds
• Digital versions of the Day 419 novella in both PDF and ePub
• PDF of the secret Day 419 epilogue
• High rez T-shirt designs for two World of Depleted factions
• PDF of the secret Blood of Martyrs script
• The entire MP3 album of “Skeletons of Depleted” by David Todd Singleton
• Three different HQ songs from the official Day 419 sound track
• The Shooting Script for Day 419
• 2 Mid-Attack Radio Announcement scripts
• The secret spy footage of Gavin Hesterdale
• And more!

As always, I want to thank our fans and fellow contributors for your patience and enthusiasm!  We really couldn’t do our part of this without you!

-Jeremy
Director/Writer “Depleted: Day 419″

Depleted: Day 419 Cover (Initial design by Craig McDaniel. Photography by Nate Eckelbarger. Featuring: Kat Carney, Eric Henninger, and Tim Smith)

Our fans have been excited about the new Contributor Beta which we’ve been working hard to get up and running.  While it’s not quite yet ready to be revealed, we are now ready to release the anticipated novella adaptation to the Depleted: Day 419 film.  For folks who wanted to know more about what drives Jenna Whitmore, you’ll now get a chance to see more of where she’s coming from, what drives her, and what connections she has with Gavin’s visions and the Neo-Palidins!  (And, if you haven’t yet seen the Day 419 film, be sure to check it out at the Viking Depleted Page or on our YouTube Channel!  )

If you’d like to read through it, you can download the .PDF right here: Day 419: Novella (PDF)

Members of the Dark Dreamer faction get a special treat, as they have access to the .EPUB version of the Novella at no charge.  If you haven’t signed up and gotten approved, you can still come and check out the Dark Dreamers and get in on some of the cool secret access that they have within the world!

Image Courtesy of Artemis Addams, 2011.

Cincinatti's trendy new goth club, The 86 Club, was where Gothicon occured.

Those of you who’ve been following World of Depleted for awhile have doubtless noticed that with some of the new contributions coupled with some of the in-house story arcs have had a decidedly Gothic feel to them.  From the prophetic seer Gavin Hesterdale and his visionary Dark Dreamers to the brutal and shrouded NIR and their penchant for crucifixes to the bloodthirsty Reapers and mysterious Bloodborn to the cloistered Order of the Steel Rood to the fact that this is referred to as the Black Sandbox, few people have failed to note the  presence of Gothic symbolism and imagery throughout the World of Depleted.

Fenix in an abandoned rooftop!

With themes that are extremely evident to many in the Gothic community, it made a lot of sense to chat with some of them.  As I’ve always felt a kinship with the Gothic mindset, when I had three different people talk to me about Donna Sheey, a woman who was spearheading the Cincinatti Gothicon, a special invitation Gothic event, I felt like I had to chat with her.   When I got her contact info and called her up, we had a marvelous conversation and I immediately felt a kindred connection with her.  As we talked over the next few weeks, she felt that our work with World of Depleted would have a definite connection with some of the folks who would be at Gothicon and invited me to come up, have  a table at the conference, and chat with those who attended.

Smon Bjorn, of the Indie band, Dark Valentine, showed how the right wardrobe combined with a Depleted background can be perfect together!

Gothicon was held in Cincinatti’s amazing new 86 Club, a Goth Club that bridges an old mortuary (which still has a crematorium) and an old movie theater (that last showed films in 1977 with the then-released Star Wars).  Complete with a few older areas that are still totally Depleted-style, the Goth club was incredible.  However, more incredible than the club itself were the people!  Whether the Gaelic term “cymbrogi” or the more modern term “kindred spirits” is used, they both mean those who are essentially cut from the same soul cloth and that’s exactly what I found here.  People with cutting intellect, brilliant creativity, and truly wicked senses of humor!  (During the Conference, the streets around the club were almost abandoned, which was very strange for downtown Cincinatti until we heard from one of the local restaurant owners that a rumor had spread that we were all vampires.  The locals had decided to stay safely inside until they were sure we were all gone! Now, I have no reason to believe anyone at the conference would’ve spread such a rumor, but that didn’t keep any of us from finding it rather hysterical!)

Niko rocked some of the tribal fashions present in Depleted and showed that there's more than black and red in the Gothic arsenal.

Amongst the very cool people I met were a 16 year old girl who goes by Niko who’s already written a post-apocalyptic novel, a makeup artist that has worked on both films and TV shows called Drakke, and a brilliant prop creator named Thom who combines studies of the supernatural with complex physics like string theory.  All had fascinating ideas to discuss and Thom is already working on new props for the World of Depleted after we met this weekend!

One of the most touching young men that I met this weekend goes by the name of Zion and he’s a classical singer with a fascination for scoring.  We sat down and chatted about a lot of the hard elements we were exploring in Depleted and he really connected with the material and the brutal world we were portraying.

Shortly thereafter I discovered that he was one of the featured speakers, talking about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.   As I sat down to listen to his testimony, I discovered that he was one of the people who survived a brutal shooting at the Colorado Springs YWAM in December 2007.  He literally saw one of his best friends shot to pieces before his eyes by Mathew Murray (who would escape the complex and show up a day later with a thousand rounds of ammo to begin gunning down people leaving a New Life Church, until he was shot and killed by an off-duty female security guard).  Miraculously, Zion was the only person in the section of the building he was in who wasn’t shot.  As such, he was able to get to his cell phone and alert an entire group of people from the hall, who were returning from a bowling trip to get as far from the complex as possible and to call the cops.  The call literally saved the lives of everyone on that outing, for, when they received the call, their van was just about to pull into the parking lot of the YWAM building where the enraged Mathew Murray had managed to lock himself out of and was desperately looking for anyone he could kill in his rage.  Without that call, the YWAM shooting would have made Columbine pale in comparison.

To say that I was left with chills is the understatement of the year. Zion went on to talk about how the stress and anxiety doesn’t catch up with you until time passes and you delve into the things you’ve repressed. Over the course of 3 and a half years he’s battled through what happened there and, even as soon as of 3 weeks prior to the conference, had a nightmare so vivid that he somnambulatorily tried to throw himself out a second story window. Thankfully, he woke to find himself hanging out the broken window and was able to pull himself back in safely! While undoubtedly extra steps have been put in place for the future, he went on to say that these night terrors have become rare and the rest of his recovery has been coming along very well. He credited his relationship with God for many of the miraculous things that happened to him and the fact that he could now begin to look into the future more than a few months!

As he completed his talk, it was almost as though the entire room started to breathe once more. I was privileged to have heard his story and to be reminded again of the things we must endure long after we’ve “survived” something horrific. Obviously, as we look at  a world like Depleted, Zion’s story is a reminder to me that no survivor gets to where they are unscathed. It’s self-evident that his words will not leave me the same in my personal life, but, more than that, I shall also take his words with me into the Black Sandbox and, perhaps, someday, Zion may join us there, as well. Only time will tell!

If you haven’t signed up as a contributor yet, it’s super easy to do and you’re able to download the .PDF versions of any of the contributor stories, in addition to just reading them on the site!

With no further ado check out the newly canonized:

Shards of Glass #2: Reap the Whirlwind