Following these guidelines increases the chance that your submission will be accepted as Canon. Please take a few minutes to review them.
Legal Requirements
♦You must be of legal age (i.e., the age of majority, not a minor) in order to have your submission accepted and to enter a Contributor Agreement.
♦You must have already agreed to the terms of the Contributor Agreement and submitted it before submitting any work.
Submission Guidelines
How do I get my work accepted into Canon?
- Be respectful of other Contributors. This means play nice with other Contributors’ Ideas and be respectful of their creations. Do not kill, humiliate, degrade, or irrevocably damage another Contributor’s characters, places, things, etc. without their permission.
- Read through the official information about living in the World of Depleted before you begin your work and make sure any plot ideas you have are supported by this world.
- Tell your part of the World of Depleted story one character at a time.
- Your Work opens more doors than it closes in the larger World of Depleted story. Don’t try to solve the world’s problems — focus on solving your character’s problems.
- Only submit your own original Work — no plagiarism. (Obviously, we are not referring to the use of other people’s content and ideas as provided for in the Rules, but rather the elicit use of work that you do not have the right to use.)
- Have someone else watch or look over your Work before submitting it for technical errors.
- Have someone who has no vested interest in you being “happy” watch or read your Work and tell you their honest opinion of whether it’s interesting or not. (For films, consider submitting them to MicroFilmmaker Magazine, where they will do a very in-depth critique for the price of a festival entry.)
- After you finish your first cut or draft, put it aside for a week before reworking or rewriting it.
- Make sure your Work is clearly set in the World of Depleted.
- When in doubt, send a question, proposal or outline to us (via our Contact Us section of our website).
- If your Work is long (a feature film, novel, comic, etc.) or large in scope and you’d like some feedback before you get too far down the road, feel free to send an outline or synopsis of the story to us via the Contact Us section of our website (located in the About Us menu). Please use a subject line starting with “PROPOSAL” followed by the title of your Work. (Folks who do this may well discover that they’re working on something where we already have some very cool story points or elements of mythology, which we’d be happy to let them utilize if we know about it ahead of time.)
- For feature length films, novels, novellas and comic (or any extended work), please submit a first scene, chapter, or installment — that’s how we’re going to publish these accepted Works to the website. (And if you’re off track at the very beginning, it’s better to know it as soon as possible.)
How to NOT get your Work accepted as Canon:
- Submit your first cut or draft without having someone else read it or watch it for both interest and technical mistakes.
- This is not Fallout 3™, Mad Max™, Resident Evil ™, etc. Do not submit stories about characters from previously published apocalyptic worlds. World of Depleted is a human-centric world; please, no zombies, aliens, vampires, or werewolves.
- Attempt to solve every mystery in one Work.
- Attempt to solve major elements of Depleted mythology without first discussing it with the Editorial team.
- Submit the story of the “greatest” fighter/killer/sniper in all of the World of Depleted (you would be in error).
- Include time travel in your Work (we foresee enough problems with continuity as it is).
- Submit a Work that affects everyone, everywhere in the World of Depleted.
- Submit pornographic Works.
- Submit Works that contain digitally altered images of recognizable personalities.
- Submit Works that contain content that you do not own the rights to and do not have legal permission to use.
Style Guides
Video/Film Works
Before submitting a video directly to us, upload the video to a password-protected or hidden video sharing page for us to preview. Send us the link to this along with any password we require. Once we have previewed it, it will be judged on its merits for rejection or acceptance. If we accept it as either Canon or Apocrypha, you will be asked to submit a file that we will optimize for the web.
♦Once it has been requested, we accept .mov, .avi, .flv, and .f4v files.
♦Resolutions accepted are 1080P, 720P, and SD.
♦Frame Rates accepted are 24P, NTSC, and PAL.
♦Audio should be at the maximum Quality for the format submitted.
Additionally, if your work is accepted as canon, you will be asked to provide either a “hard” copy or FTP copy of your work that can be mastered to DVD and/or Blu-Ray at high quality. (Content selected as Apocrypha may be requested for the same thing, although this may be requested at a future date, after Viking Productions has had a chance to observe how your work is being embraced by the community.)
Film Length Classifications
♦Less than One Minute – Flash Short Films
♦1-5 Minutes – Short Short Films
♦10-30 Minute – Medium Short Films
♦31-60 Minute – Long Short Films
♦60 Minutes & Up – Feature
Text Works in Depleted
♦Text file formats we accept are .odt, .doc, .rtf, and .txt.
♦Single space between sentences within a paragraph.
♦An extra space (Hard Break) between paragraphs.
♦Please spell-check and proofread one more time before submitting.
Text Story Length Classifications
♦Flash Fiction (Short, Short Story) is under 1,000 words in length.
♦A Short Story is 1,000 to 10,000 words in length.
♦A Novella is 10,000 to 40,000 words in length.
♦A Novel is over 40,000 words in length.
Artwork, Images & Comics
Art, Image & Comic file formats we accept are .jpg, .jpeg, .png or .gif. File size should be under 10 MB in size. (If larger, contact us directly to make arrangements.)
Digital Game Files
Digital Games should be included in one file. If not, please Coontact us. File size should be under 100 MB in size, unless otherwise arranged.
Audio Messages & Podcasts
The audio file format we currently accept is .mp3 and .WAV. Audio messages should be under 10 MB in size and 3 minutes or less. Audio podcasts or radio programs file size should be under 50 MB in size and 30 minutes in length.
Video Podcasts & Amateur TV
Video Podcasts & Amateur TV broadcasts set in the World of Depleted will follow the same rules as the other Video/Film Works.
Master Works Utilized List
While all use of other Contributors’ work or ideas requires appropriate attribution (as outlined in the Attribution section), you will also be expected to provide a a separate list saved as *.TXT document of all Contributor Works that has been utilized in your work, for accurate profit sharing to be factored and for simplicity in future Contributors utilizing your work. (With the exception of work that was originated by Viking Productions itself.)
The expected listing Convention for all names on this list will be: [Name of Work]. Created by [Name of Creator]. [Contact Email]
As such, if you used an excerpt from a short story, The Deadliest Road, by Contributor Thomas Wolf, whose email is timberwolf555@archlight70.com, you would write it in your MWUL as:
The Deadliest Road. Thomas Wolf. timberwolf555@archlight70.com .
(For situations in which you use content that was created by multiple creators, you will list each sub-creator on this list, as is explained in the Rules of Depleted.)
The expected naming convention for these text files will be:
“[NameOfWorkWirhoutSpaces]_[NameofContributorWithoutSpaces]_MWUL.txt”
As such, if Contributor Bob White wrote a Depleted novel called Killer Shadows, his MWUL file should be titled:
KillerShadows_BobWhite_MWUL.txt
Attribution
Non-Derivative or Non-Attributing Works
All Works should have, at a minimum, the following attribution, even if they do not feature Ideas from another Contributor’s Work (you used all original Ideas):
‘This Work set in the World of Depleted – worldofdepleted.com
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 United States
License’ **
(Note: For people publishing World of Depleted films or audio products on streaming sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and the like, this attribution–as well as any other forms of attribution needed–needs to appear in the text of each page that is utilized for this purpose.)
Fictional Work attributing other Works
If your Work set in Depleted features Ideas from another Contributor’s Work, the following attribution format and information should accompany your Work: “character, location, thing” created by [name of Contributor] in [Title of Work].
For example, if you wrote a short film that involved a character (Jed Huskah) created by Contributor Frank Job in his novel, Monsters Look Like, and you had Jed interacting with a covert group (The Shadow of Columbus) which was created by Contributor Jenny Swanson in her short film, The Darkness Lurks, the attribution in the credits of your Film should look like this:
‘”Jed Huskah” created by Frank Job in Monsters Look Like.
” The Shadow of Columbus ” created by Jenny Swanson in The Darkness Lurks,
‘This Work set in the World of Depleted – worldofdepleted.com
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 United States
License’ **
Image Works attributing other Works
If your Work is an image based on one or more Works by other Contributors, you may use the following attribution:
“This Work inspired by [type of original Work] [name of the original Work] by [name of Contributor]”
For example, if you wanted to create a drawing of an action scene from the Flash Fiction Work, “Death at Sunset” by Frank Milton, the attribution for your image would be:
‘This Work inspired by the story “Death at Sunset” by Frank Milton.
‘This Work set in the World of Depleted – worldofdepleted.com
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 United States
License’ **
Multimedia Works Utilizing Other Creators’ Content
If you work uses pieces of other content creators work, then you are to give attribution as follows in the credits:
Excerpt from [Title of Work] by [Name of Creator]
[Published/Released Date.]
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 United States
License’
If your short film included a vision sequence from the film ‘A Time To Fight’ by Contributor Nuna Fulka, which was released in 2010, the credit at the end of the film would be:
Excerpt from A Time To Fight by Nuna Fulka
Released in 2010.
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 United States
License’
(Followed by the World of Depleted Attribution information from above)**
**Unique Addition for Films: In addition to the base attribution, film works also need to have the following credit in the introductory credits, “Based on the World of Depleted, Created by Jeremy Hanke & Chris Tanchyk,” which will appear after the “Written by” credits but before the “Directed by” credits.