Excavating the secrets, scandals, and untold stories hiding below the surface of life, and giving voice to the characters who make or made those hiStories happen.
Exactly a year ago, you held the fate of a dream in your hands. We were asking for $40,000 to fund our moonshot. And in Kickstarter, if you don't reach your campaign goal, you get nothing. Now, remarkably, we are feeling the gravitational pull of the App and Google Play Stores.
Without you, we'd have never gotten our time-traveling machine off the ground!
No one's taking anything for granted, but a year on from our Kickstarter launch in May 2015, hosted by Julie Gribble and KidLit TV, we wanted to pause for a moment, take stock and recognize all of you who shared the vision strongly enough to reach out and help us cross that first finish line… before we cross the next one — toward which we inch closer every day!
As we like to say at Time Traveler Tours & Tales: It all starts with story. Putting the story back in history is what we're all about, and how we endeavor to #TurnHistoryOn.
Our story, Mary Hoffman's In the Footsteps of Giants, provides an extraordinary historical foundation as Michelangelo tours you around Renaissance Florence from his hiding place, a secret cell lost to history for 446 years, until 1976.
It was still 2015 when Mary delivered the draft manuscript, which gives you some idea of how long and hard we've been working on the editorial, technical, visual, and audio elements of our coming story app — the very things that set our tales apart.
I'm not sure our new tech partners at OnCell LLC (Rochester, NY's in the house!) knew what they were getting into when they eagerly agreed to join forces with us. But they have produced what we hope will be a robust and intuitive platform (meaning: the app will be as easy for parents to use as for the digital natives we're targeting). The best part is that together we're building something we can use for future projects from Athens to Zanzibar.
And speaking of getting more than they bargained for: Bob Marino. Anything I write will inevitably fail to express how much he has done these past few weeks to bring our project to the point of publication.
Which brings us to now:
Joe Bianco, our Michelangelo, is just about to wrap up our English-language narration. We can only imagine what Michelangelo's voice sounded like, but I'm betting if he knew English, it would sound an awful lot like Joe's lovely basso.
As we close production on the audio phase, Cynthia Carris Alonso continues to comb through the history of Renaissance art to pick out the perfect images to illustrate our story on the screen.
And the newest member of our ever-growing team, Elizabeth Dulemba, is working up some serious magic to make everything look as pretty as it can possibly be so we can launch our first iteration with pride. Take a look at our lovely new App Store Icon!
So here we are, a full year since I asked you to join me on this ride. Thanks to you all, fingers crossed, we'll be out with something for you to experience within a matter of weeks.
And we are so very excited, and so very grateful about that!
