Teras Terrace

What is Teras Terrace about? Well, here's the premise:

Pretorius Technologies is a company that does cutting-edge research that... sometimes goes wrong. Occasionally someone gets accidentally mutated into a horrible monster, or some alien creature is somehow gated in from some distant part of reality. The company had to find some way to deal with these weird monstrosities it's brought about, so it established a gated community, the eponymous Teras Terrace, where all these creatures can live.

But then an ordinary human family is moved into the community by mistake...

My original plan for Teras Terrace was to make an animated short, and then use that to pitch it as a TV series. I have the script for the short written; I had actors record the voices; and I had rough storyboards completed (way too rough, though; I've learned a lot more about storyboarding for animation since then, and my original storyboards were laughably inadequate). I do still want to make that animated short someday—and I'd love to eventually get Teras Terrace made into a TV series—but that's no longer my first priority with it, for several reasons.

First... I just don't have the means to make a full animated short like this by myself. And I don't currently have the money to outsource it all, even if I wanted to (which I don't).

And second... Suppose I did sell it as a series. I wouldn't actually need a fully animated short for that; I could put together a pitch bible and maybe a rough animatic. Of course, the chances of my actually selling it would be slim, but even if I did, that would mean it would become the property of the studio or production company that bought it. And as I've developed Teras Terrace, I've kind of come to realize that... I really don't want to give up the rights to it.

So what am I doing with it? Well, at the moment, I'm continuing to develop it. I'm slowly working on the animated short. I may do an animation for the intro, with the theme song; that would be only about 45 seconds instead of eleven or twelve minutes, so it's a bit more doable (though still kind of a big endeavor). I'm working on a few other animated projects I want to pitch that I'm a bit more okay with giving up the rights to if necessary. Maybe someday when my skills in animation have progressed further, when I've got some more resources, and when I've maybe got some other projects under my belt and have some more bargaining power so I can maybe negotiate the rights, then I can pitch Teras Terrace as a TV series (or at this point I guess more likely a streaming series?)... but it's a bit premature to do that just yet.

One thing I do plan to do very soon, though, is start a Teras Terrace comic. This will serve three purposes. For one, it'll help me flesh out the world a bit more, and give me practice drawing the characters. (Okay, maybe that's already two purposes right there.) For another, if it develops a readership it'll get more people knowing about the project. But maybe most importantly, having a published product out there using this world and these characters should give me more leverage to retain the rights to them when and if I ever do sell it as a series.

In the meantime, though, feel free to look around the site and read about the inhabitants of Teras Terrace. And if all goes well... there'll be a comic coming soon.

You can in principle follow Teras Terrace on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, but to be honest I very rarely post anything to Facebook or Twitter. I should probably try to change that.

Oh... the Forum link is currently broken. Uh... sorry. I'll try to get that fixed soon.)