About

The show

The Varren Arcane Contracts is an urban fantasy told as a video drama: drawn, voiced and scored, one season per member of the crew, each season told from that person’s point of view. A new episode every week. Every episode is free, here and on YouTube.

Watch it here, or on the channel; short clips run on TikTok and Shorts. Once a season is complete, the whole thing goes up as one film.

How it’s made

Each episode is an illustrated drama: the story is written as a script, drawn shot by shot, performed by voices, and cut together with music. It takes weeks per episode and a pipeline that stays one episode ahead of what you see.

I make it with AI, and I’d rather you hear that from me than wonder. The world, the people in it and every turn the story takes are mine; AI speeds up the grinding part — getting a scene from “I know what happens here” to something I can look at and fix. Then I fix it, repeatedly. That is the job. What I am not doing is typing a prompt and publishing whatever falls out. You would know by episode two.

Who makes it

I’m Sara Richards. I live in Paris with my husband and my son, I have a day job, and the show happens in the hours around both — early mornings, late evenings, the occasional stolen Sunday. I have been reading fantasy since I was old enough to sneak books that were far too old for me, and what I make is fantasy with a love story in it: the big world and the strange rules are there, but the thing I care about is two people wanting each other badly and everything standing in the way.

The list

Signing on is free and it is the one thing I ask. In return you are always one episode ahead: each new episode opens for you here before it goes public on YouTube. With it, your name in the credits when the season ends.

You get one email the moment an episode opens for you, and nothing else. Every email carries a one-click way out. Opening an early episode asks you to sign in with a code sent to that address — no password, about twenty seconds — and that is all an account is: your address, and the fact that you are on the list. No ad profiles, no tracking pixels, nothing sold or shared. Want it all gone? Write to me and it is deleted, no questions, no wait. The privacy page says the same in longer sentences.

Write to me

One inbox, read by one person: sararichardsauthor@gmail.com. An episode that won’t play, a theory about a character’s terrible decisions you need to tell someone, a rights or press question — same address. I answer everything eventually, usually within a few days.

— Sara