This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.

Today marks five weeks until we start shooting Ren Season Two!

The big news is that, after four or five days of auditioning in London, plus several Zoom sessions, we have cast many of our supporting characters – and most importantly our new Ren! We’ve yet to decide when and how to announce this, so you’ll have to wait a little while to find out who is the new Girl with the Mark.

Gradually we’ve been moving all the props Kate acquired during Born of Hope and Ren Season One to the studio, as well as gathering the wood needed to make the sets. At the start of April we plan to hold our first Making Weekend – details soon! – and begin construction in earnest.

Yesterday we had the first fight choreography session for the season, planning the start of the big ambush scene in episode 203. Ronin Traynor of IDFight gathered a team of fight performers who kindly gave their afternoon to help us visualise the fight in a set made of cardboard boxes (pictured above). We even managed to squeeze in a couple of extra auditions while we were there.

Producing a series like this involves quite a range of tasks. Just to give you an example of what I’ve been up to this morning:

– Connecting actors with our fight choreographer, Ronin Traynor, to arrange training sessions

– Confirming the use of Norton Armoury’s pieces again for the Kah’Nath soldier costumes

– Discussing who is going to make soft foam versions of that armour

– Arranging a van to transport props to our distant locations

– Advertising for crew

– Speaking to a potential editor for the series

– Checking the shooting schedule with some of the cast

– Compiling notes from the directors to send to our make-up artist, Becca Youngs

And this afternoon Kate and I are going to start storyboarding the horse chase using action figures!

This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.

Those of you who followed or were actually involved in the making of Season One will remember Ren Studio, the factory in Caxton, Cambridgeshire which we took over for five months. It was our set, prop and costume workshop, our production offices, and ultimately where we filmed most of that first season. It also became like a giant student house as a lot of us lived there for several weeks!

Season Two is a slightly different beast because there’s much more location filming, but we still need a warehouse space to build two of our keys sets in. I have been searching for somewhere since late November, and this week I finally found it: a grain store on a farm near St. Ives, Cambridgeshire. Like the Caxton studio was at first, it’s not much to look at now, but over the next couple of months it will gradually fill with props, costumes and sets, and more importantly all the amazing people who will give their time, elbow grease and love to will Ren: The Girl with the Mark back into existence. And you could be one of those people! You’ll be the first to know when we open up the studio to everyone to come along and volunteer.

Plenty of other things are happening as well. The main one is casting. We’ve already held one round of auditions for our new Ren, and other roles will follow shortly. Huge thanks to everyone who has applied, produced a self-tape or come along to a physical audition. Sadly we can’t cast everyone, but we massively appreciate the time and effort you put in.

The other week we moved all the costumes from Season One and Kate’s earlier production Born of Hope to a double garage where designer Suzanne Emerson is sorting through them and coming up with looks for the new characters. We are so lucky to have this amazing stock as the basis for the new season, along with the new costumes that Suzanne and her team will create.

Meetings and conversations in recent days have covered such diverse topics as how to deaden the reverb in the studio for good sound, how many walls a tavern needs to have, and how do you make a dead deer (apart from the obvious way)?

We’re also still hunting for some of our locations, and we’re pleased to have found a lovely old stone bridge in South Wales that will be a huge part of Episode 203, as well as some very cool hilltop ruins not far away from it.

Currently we are on course to start shooting in late April. Stay tuned to follow our progress!