EVERY LEGEND HAS AN ORIGIN. THIS ONE STARTS IN STONEGATE.
Independent Cinematic Storytelling
Every story starts with a spark. Ours became a universe. StoneGate Cinematic Universe was born from the idea that independent creators can build worlds that rival the big studios—stories with discipline, edge, and soul. We merge technology with storytelling, realism with imagination, and art with intent. From the shadows of StoneGate City to the unknown worlds that follow, every frame is crafted to make you feel something real. This isn’t about chasing trends. It’s about creating stories built to last.
THROUGH THE DIRECTOR’S LENS
GO BEYOND THE SCREEN
Subscribe to the StoneGate Cinematic Universe on Substack for a closer look inside the process — story development, Unreal Engine production, visual direction, and the mindset behind it all. This is the Director’s Lens: where the world of Becoming Hank Luciano and future SGCU projects take shape before they hit the screen.
EVERY DISTRICT HAS DATA. EVERY STORY LEAVES EVIDENCE.
DISTRICT LOGS — INTEL • UPDATES • CASE FILES
Welcome to the District Logs, a hybrid field archive and media brief from inside the StoneGate Cinematic Universe. Each post functions like a record pulled from the city’s case vault—reports, testimonies, and intercepted notes—but it also tracks what’s happening beyond the fiction: studio updates, creative features, and community news. From character dossiers and world-building files to production intel and behind-the-scenes drops, every log expands the narrative and keeps the universe in motion.
A NEW ERA OF INDEPENDENT STORYTELLING
StoneGate Cinematic Universe (SGCU) turns bold ideas into connected worlds with depth, style, and impact. Founded by Adam Dudley — creatively known as Hank Luciano — in Charlottesville, VA, SGCU is a lean, independent transmedia studio developing stories across graphic novels, animation, film, and interactive media—built in Unreal Engine.
Debut Project
Becoming Hank Luciano: StoneGate City began as a personal spark and now stands as a fully fictional crime-tech universe about betrayal, power, and reinvention.
First Release
District Files — Issue #1: BleakStone Point (graphic novel) An origin chapter following Sincere Cross before he becomes Hank Luciano—the choices, scars, and silence that forged him. A series of graphic novels is planned to roll out before the film, expanding the world in print first.
What’s Next
A 3D-animated expansion built with Unreal Engine and MetaHuman, progressing toward a playable third-person vertical slice and larger productions as the universe grows.
Genres
Launching with a crime-tech thriller and expanding into action, sci-fi, romance, and horror—always grounded in cinematic realism and visionary creativity.
How We Fund
This universe is ambitious—and expensive. We’re stacking diversified funding: crowdfunding, private investment, production grants, strategic brand partnerships, creative sponsorships, and limited merch/licensing to reinvest back into SGCU.
Our Why
SGCU exists for independent creators who push boundaries with originality, discipline, and imagination. We’re not building a moment. We’re building a legacy.
SUPPORT THE VISION — CROWDFUNDING • COMING SOON
At StoneGate Cinematic Universe, we build original, cinematic stories with independence at the core. This Fall, we launch our first crowdfunding campaign to kick off the world of Becoming Hank Luciano.
First Release
District Files — Issue #1: BleakStone Point A gritty, character-driven graphic novel that sets the stage for Hank Luciano’s rise. Created by Adam Dudley along with his co-writing team, in collaboration with select illustrators and world-builders.
The Bigger Picture
District Files will expand the world while the animated film develops in parallel using Unreal Engine and MetaHuman. Teasers and reveals will roll out during the campaign.
What Your Support Fuels
• Production: graphic novel pages, cover variants, and digital editions
• Film development: look-dev, concept art, and test sequences in Unreal/MetaHuman
• Story: screenwriting and world-building by Adam and his co-writer
• Sound and score: original music and cinematic sound design
• Print and distribution: collector-grade physicals plus global digital delivery
• Community and rewards: limited drops, exclusives, and behind-the-scenes access
This isn’t just a project. It’s a universe in motion. Tap in and build with us.
DISTRICT FILES GRAPHIC NOVEL SERIES — BHL • BLEAKSTONE POINT ISSUE #1
BLEAKSTONE POINT — EVERY LEGEND HAS AN ORIGIN
BleakStone Point is the foundation of StoneGate City—a majority Black and Latino district built on resilience, small-business grind, and cultural pride. Barbershops, bodegas, streetwear boutiques, indie studios, and family kitchens share the same blocks. Working and middle-class families keep the pace steady while creatives and entrepreneurs push the line forward. But BleakStone isn’t one note. On the rougher edge sit Havoc Heights and Redwood Flats—the hood, the trenches. Boarded fronts. Corner hustles. Sirens you know by sound. Opportunity runs thin and the rules are face-to-face. And still, community breathes—porch-watch elders, block cookouts, kids aiming past the street. Sincere Cross—before the world called him Hank Luciano—grew up inside that pressure. Every streetlight, every siren, every silence set his code. BleakStone taught him loyalty, loss, and how to move when the stakes are real. BleakStone Point is more than a district—it’s contrast and resilience in one frame. One half grinding toward progress, the other clawing through chaos. Between them, the start of a legend—born from a city that burns and rebuilds in the same breath.
THROUGH THE DIRECTOR’S LENS
GO BEYOND THE SCREEN
Subscribe to the StoneGate Cinematic Universe on Substack for a closer look inside the process — story development, Unreal Engine production, visual direction, and the mindset behind it all. This is the Director’s Lens: where the world of Becoming Hank Luciano and future SGCU projects take shape before they hit the screen.
Graphic Novel Series — District Files
Every district has a story. Every page pulls you deeper.
District Files is the foundation of the StoneGate Cinematic Universe—a layered world built district by district, character by character. Each issue reveals another corner of StoneGate City and the players fighting to control it.
This series moves if the community moves with it. Crowdfunding is coming soon to bring the books to digital and print to fuel what comes next.
Issue #1: BHL — BleakStone Point
The journey starts in BleakStone Point, a district defined by silence, scars, and shadows. This opening chapter follows Sincere Cross in the early stretch of his life—ending with the betrayal that shatters his world. He’s shot, forced to flee the city, and the path toward Hank Luciano begins.
What to Expect
District-based arcs: each book spotlights a different part of StoneGate City with its own culture, politics, and pressure. Teasers for upcoming districts will roll out before launch.
- New characters and factions: crews, insiders, and rivals expand as the map widens.
- Cinematic worldbuilding: each issue feeds directly into the planned animated film built with high-end 3D tools (Unreal Engine, MetaHuman).
- Collector-first releases: print and digital editions, select variant covers, and campaign-exclusive drops.
The blueprint is built. The vision is locked. Tap in and help bring District Files — Issue #1: BleakStone Point to life.
THE STORY STARTS WITH THOSE WHO STAY CONNECTED
YOUR ACCESS UNLOCKS THE CITY
Stay ahead of every drop. Subscribe for updates on the Becoming Hank Luciano series, upcoming campaigns, and new projects from the StoneGate Cinematic Universe.
FICTIONAL CHARACTERS | STONEGATE CINEMATIC UNIVERSE
FEATURED CHARACTERS
ALLIES. ENEMIES. KINGS. QUEENS. KILLERS. CREWS. StoneGate isn’t just a city—it’s a battlefield of agendas. This is where the players surface: the ones who run it, ruin it, and try to survive it. From crime families and corner crews to covert ops and rogue officials—every name carries weight, every move has consequence, and nobody’s hands stay clean for long. Crews | Factions | Power Moves | Ties & Rivalries
Hank Luciano (Sincere Cross - BleakStone Point Issue #1)
Founder, Obsidian Systems Group | Strategic Commander, Black Signal Unit
DISTRICT FILE: BleakStone Point, Isla Veridia, Stonegate City
Birth Name: Sincere Cross (BleakStone Point – Issue #1 only)
Legal Identity: Hank Luciano (20 years later)
Status: Alive
Affiliation: Black Signal Unit (covert action team), Obsidian Systems Group (corporate cover)
Charecter Profile:
Sincere Cross / Hank Luciano
Before the name, there was Sincere Cross — a disciplined mind from BleakStone Point. By day, he worked as Lead Diagnostics Technician at Hayes Signal & Repair, known for precision and quiet focus. His private reality ran deeper: a strategic, air-gapped hacker and planner who handled protection and tech favors for allied crews — timing windows, blind zones, clean exits. He moved around guns and drugs but never stood on corners; he monetized protection and timing, not street sales. He only carried outside on hot runs. Nyla Vex was the trusted contact who could turn his plans into motion.
After a failed heist and a near-fatal setup, Sincere vanished, and the city wrote him off as dead.
Twenty years later, he returns as Hank Luciano — colder, refined, fully in control, with a new mindset and presence: more mafioso, trading the hoodie for a custom signature suit and black fedora. What began as survival became strategy; what was once chaos became empire-building. In StoneGate City, ghosts don’t rest — they reinvent.
NYLA VEX
Director of Field Operations, Obsidian Systems Group | Covert Ops Commander / Strategic Enforcer, Black Signal Unit.
DISTRICT FILE: BleakStone Point, Isla Veridia, Stonegate City
Birth Name: NYLA VEX
Nickname: VEX
Status: Alive
Allegiance: Ally (Hank Luciano, Catalina Rojas, Black Signal Unit)
Affiliation: Black Signal Unit (covert action team), Obsidian Systems Group (corporate cover)
Charecter Profile:
Sharp-minded and fearless, Nyla Vex built her name from the ground up. Known for her confidence and calculated calm, she’s the strategist who sees three moves ahead when everyone else is reacting. Behind the glare of neon lights and chaos of StoneGate City, she’s the balance between control and danger—driven by loyalty, survival, and the vision she and Hank Luciano share.
CATALINA ROJAS
CEO, Obsidian Systems Group | Intelligence Operations & Mission Support Specialist, Black Signal Unit
DISTRICT FILE: BleakStone Point, Isla Veridia, Stonegate City
Birth Name: Catalina Rojas
Nickname: CAT
Status: Alive
Allegiance: Ally (Hank Luciano, Nyla Vex, Black Signal Unit)
Affiliation: Black Signal Unit (covert action team), Obsidian Systems Group (corporate cover)
Charecter Profile:
Catalina Rojas (CAT) — raised in the fictional city of Nueva Sombra, she’s elegance and danger in one. Years ago, Nyla Vex pulled her out of a situation that should’ve ended her; since then, Catalina has been Nyla’s strategist and right hand—loyal, precise, unshakeable.
After the chaos in StoneGate City, she kept everything clean, quiet, and moving—the mind that turns pressure into plans and fallout into order. She stands beside Nyla Vex and Hank Luciano with an unbreakable bond: loyalty, discipline, intent.
DOMINIC VIRELLI
Founder & Chairman, Virelli Group | Power Broker & Criminal Financier, Virelli Crime Family
DISTRICT FILE: BleakStone Point, Isla Veridia, Stonegate City
Birth Name: Dominic Virelli
Status: Alive
Allegiance: enemy
Affiliation: Virelli Crime Family
Charecter Profile:
Public face: billionaire philanthropist, power broker, patron of the arts.
Private reality: architect of the Virelli crime family, with reach into real estate, private equity, ports and logistics, unions, nightlife, art auctions, and media buys. Judges shake his hand. Bankers take his calls. Favors move like currency.
BLACK SIGNAL: THE BLACK VAULT
Location: off-grid, high desert range beyond StoneGate jurisdiction
Status: air-gapped / compartmentalized / zero-trace
Twenty years after the heist—and after years of quiet planning and private build-out—Hank Luciano and Nyla Vex returned with more than a score: they built an army. With Catalina Rojas running the legitimate front at Obsidian Systems Group, the pieces fell into place. Obsidian covered the optics; Black Signal built the teeth.
Cut into rock and buried under decoys, The Black Vault is Black Signal’s command core—less a hideout than a full-spectrum operations engine. Thermal masking, spoofed transponders, and a logistics shell that reads as nothing on satellite keep it invisible by design. What started as contingency became infrastructure: labs, bays, and networks that run shadow ops in plain sight.
What the Vault runs
- Cyber & EW: air-gapped development labs, zero-day tooling, signal denial, and deep counter-forensics.
- Industrial Ops: targeted disruption, systems manipulation, and covert reconfiguration of critical assets.
- Extraction & Transit: black routes, drone overwatch, rapid exfil, med/stabilization, and cold storage.
- Intelligence Fusion: HUMINT/OSINT blending, dark-web monitoring, persona farms, and live threat scoring.
- Tradecraft & Logistics: forged credentials, clean gear fabrication, and off-book supply chains.
- Counter-Surveillance: ISR drills, spoof grids, anti-drone umbrellas, and misdirection protocols.
Leadership & Role: Catalina maintains the public façade—Obsidian’s boardrooms and contracts—while Hank and Nyla run the machine beneath. The Vault turns data into movement and plans into pressure. It’s where strategy meets execution, and where misdirection becomes a tactical advantage.
Design Intent: The Black Vault isn’t a base—it’s a war engine. Built to flip switches in the digital realm, move assets in the physical, and vanish before the city notices the difference.
OBSIDIAN SYSTEMS GROUP
Publicly: an elite cybersecurity and digital-infrastructure firm headquartered in downtown StoneGate City. Obsidian ships hardened networks, end-to-end encryption, red/blue team ops, and real-time threat intelligence for banks, private institutions, and quiet government work.
Privately: the hidden backbone of Black Signal—StoneGate’s most surgical ops unit.
Two decades after the heist that wrote Sincere Cross (Hank Luciano) off the map, Obsidian expanded in silence—mirroring the city’s arteries, embedding failsafes, and mapping backdoors no one else can see. Now, with Hank back in the wind and Nyla Vex directing field strategy, Obsidian runs the grid that keeps them untouchable.
What Obsidian really does
- Surveillance lattice: persistent citywide telemetry—traffic cams, private feeds, sensor dust—fused into a live ops picture.
- Access engineering: bespoke exploits and covert credentials for one-tap entry into “secure” systems.
- Counterintel & misdirection: scrub trails, salt false leads, rewrite timelines in hostile networks.
- Continuity ops: dark-site comms, asset extraction routes, and emergency power for when the city goes black.
Leadership
- Catalina Rojas — Chief Executive Officer: by day, she’s the polished face of Obsidian Systems Group—securing contracts, managing investors, and keeping the company spotless on paper; by night, she safeguards the cover, moving resources and intel to keep Hank and Nyla’s operations invisible.
- Hank Luciano — Founder: by day, the architect behind Obsidian’s secure systems and innovation; by night, the strategist commanding Black Signal’s criminal activities.
- Nyla Vex — Director of Field Operations: by day, she oversees Obsidian’s logistics and deployment strategy; by night, she commands Black Signal—executing precision missions that keep their empire alive and their enemies guessing.
Obsidian Systems Group is more than a corporation. It’s the city’s shadow OS—trusted by the public, weaponized in private, and always three steps ahead.
EVERY VEHICLE IS A WEAPON. EVERY ROUTE IS A MISSION.
WAR MACHINES OF STONEGATE
Street-coded. War-ready. Moved by allies and enemies alike. In StoneGate, every engine has intent. Whether it runs with Black Signal or rolls under a rival crest, a vehicle isn’t just transport—it’s leverage. Survival, intimidation, control. SUVs rule here—urban tanks wrapped in quiet. Armored. Tactical. Amphibious when it counts. From low-profile recon rigs to ghost-black command units, every build broadcasts the driver’s code. This section maps the signature rides on both sides—spec’d for city heat, off-road evasion, and full-tilt conflict. Some run for order. Some for chaos. All for power.
THROUGH THE DIRECTOR’S LENS
GO BEYOND THE SCREEN
Subscribe to the StoneGate Cinematic Universe on Substack for a closer look inside the process — story development, Unreal Engine production, visual direction, and the mindset behind it all. This is the Director’s Lens: where the world of Becoming Hank Luciano and future SGCU projects take shape before they hit the screen.
POWERING A UNIVERSE. BUILT FOR THE SCREEN. DESIGNED FOR THE FUTURE
A GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE
At the core of StoneGate is a real-time production stack built to scale. We’re pairing Unreal Engine + MetaHuman with virtual production and AI-assisted workflows to create assets once and deploy them everywhere—film, animation, gameplay prototypes, trailers, social, even immersive experiences. Every character, prop, and district is authored as interoperable IP—clean topology, modular rigs, master materials, and world rules that carry from a two-minute teaser to a feature-length animated film. What we build isn’t just content; it’s digital infrastructure that compounds. Why it matters: Speed & control: Real-time lighting, blocking, and renders keep iteration fast and the look consistent. Transmedia ready: The same assets drive graphic novels, cinematics, interactive demos, and live activations. Partnership-friendly: A scalable library built for licensing, co-production, and distribution—plug-and-play for brands and platforms. Back us early and you’re not just supporting a story—you’re helping stand up a scalable cinematic IP ecosystem engineered for the next chapter: bigger worlds, sharper releases, and smart partnerships that take StoneGate everywhere.
ARTISTIC VISIONARIES
BEHIND THE SCENES: WORLD ARCHITECTS
StoneGate isn’t an accident. It’s made—frame by frame, line by line—by the people who architect it. Our crew spans concept artists, writers, 3D generalists, technical directors, sound designers, and editors. They turn rough sketches into living districts, faces into legends, and scenes into moments you feel. From napkin notes to Unreal renders, from character bibles to final grade, every choice is deliberate—world logic, texture, light, and motion working as one. These are the builders behind the shadows and the skyline—the pulse of the story you’re stepping into.
Adam Dudley (creatively known as Hank Luciano)
Founder & Creative Director
Adam Dudley is the visionary behind the StoneGate Cinematic Universe—an independent creative producer and entrepreneur from Charlottesville, VA, turning bold ideas into living worlds. He builds through story, visual development, and strategy, laying the SGCU foundation from the ground up: universe design, early scripts, and the first-wave visuals.
Adam leads creative direction and production strategy across all SGCU projects, including the debut title Becoming Hank Luciano. While he engineered the early phase largely solo, he’s now assembling a sharp network of artists, writers, and designers to scale the work—pushing indie film and animation with a cinematic, next-gen edge.
THROUGH THE DIRECTOR’S LENS
GO BEYOND THE SCREEN
Subscribe to the StoneGate Cinematic Universe on Substack for a closer look inside the process — story development, Unreal Engine production, visual direction, and the mindset behind it all. This is the Director’s Lens: where the world of Becoming Hank Luciano and future SGCU projects take shape before they hit the screen.