This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.

The Scottish love to tell you you’re getting Robbie Burns’ poem wrong, that you shouldn’t sing “for the sake of auld lang syne” where he simply wrote “for auld lang syne”, or that you should pronounce words like “take” and “brought” in the Scots fashion.

I mention this not just for a bit of gratuitous national stereotyping, but because dialect and idiolect are on my mind at present. At a certain point in the scripting process I like to go through each character in turn, reading only their lines, trying to make them sound distinctive and consistent. A couple of examples from going through this process for Ren Season Three today: “lovingly” became “beautifully” (because this character can’t conceive of the emotional value of an object); “I’ll bring your dinner” became “I’ll be bringing your dinner” (because this character is somehow Irish, despite Ireland not existing in Ren’s world).

Although I completed a draft of Season Three at Christmas 2020, and it pleased me, few things stand up completely to the twin tests of time and exposure to other humans. We tore it apart at the first writers’ meeting in October and only really started putting it back together in early December. Some ideas which I bent over backwards to make work in 2020 seem contrived and confusing in 2023. Many wonderful ideas I would never have thought of were contributed by Kate, Ash and Ash. In fact a few of Kate’s lines are still in there from 2019, when the events which open Season Three took place in episode six – yes, six! – of Season Two. Other ideas have come from Chris Dane’s spin-off novellas.

The push and pull of a writers’ room, the heat of creative friction, forges a script in a way that a lone writer can’t achieve. Kate feels we should concentrate more on intimate dialogue scenes. Ash F thinks we should be more ambitious. Ash M wants to reference (a) Doom Patrol, (b) Snyderverse Superman or (c) Stargate. Or, to be less glib about it: Kate offers an actor’s critical perspective on characters and the realism of their motivations; Ash F brings an archaeologist’s passion for world-building; and Ash M loves to explore the emotional depths of male characters.

The alloy we’ve ended up with, I hope, is a season about Ren and Hunter each coming to terms with who they are. With fights, flashbacks and elemental forces.

Tough decisions had to be made.  Although a season of Ren is about as long as a single episode of a conventional drama, it is not simply a case of writing a “normal” episode and chopping it into ten-minute chunks, even though the five-act structure for a TV series is a useful guide to how the narrative beats should fall across the episodes. I firmly believe that a season of Ren should cover as much ground as a season of The Wheel of Time or The Witcher. That means an incredible economy of storytelling is required.

I’m also a firmer believer that cutting things can add weight to what remains, make it really shine through. Losing the extra gang members who accompanied Ren and Hunter on their journey in early drafts of Season Two was the single best decision I made, because it gave so much more development room for Ren and Hunter themselves, and for the third main character, Commander Othon.

But three seems to be the limit of lead characters you can truly service in a one-hour season. At times, when editing Season Two, even that seemed a push; parts of Othon’s storyline will only see the light of day as deleted scenes here on Patreon.

So certain characters who might have appeared in Season Three no longer do, but fear not. Old acquaintances shall not be forgotten. (Yeah, tied that back to the opening, didn’t I? Boom!) One day they shall come back. Yes, they shall come back.

Until then, tak a cup of kindness and all the very best to you Marked Ones in 2024.

Oh – and remember, December 31st 2023 is the cut-off day for Master tier patrons to be included in Season Two’s end credits. Anyone joining the Master tier after that will have to wait until Season Three to see their name in lights. That’s one part of the season that definitely won’t be cut.

This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.Pop. There go my ears. I didn’t listen to the safety announcements so I have no possible way of knowing where the emergency exits are or what to do in the event of a water landing. I do, by way of compensation, have a pretty good idea of how episode 201 looks and sounds in less than ideal conditions. With the roar of the aircraft’s engines and the bright sunlight sliding about all over my phone screen, if I can still see and hear what’s going on in the episode then it’s a fair bet that everyone else will, wherever and however they watch it.

A fair bet, but not a guarantee. We all remember that battle scene in Game of Thrones where you couldn’t see what was going on. Even I remember it, and I don’t watch the show. It’s one of the hazards of filmmaking in the modern age that your work will be viewed on everything from the biggest flatscreen or home projector with the beefiest sound system and the lights dimmed, to the tiniest phone in the brightest daylight. It’s especially difficult with day-for-night scenes.

Day for night is, like it says on the tin, shooting night scenes in daylight. We’ve all seen those old Bond movies where the “night” is highly unconvincing (although poor transfer of the celluloid to electronic formats for broadcast is partly to blame there). Mad Max: Fury Road is a more recent example. The biggest Hollywood budget in the world can’t light up a desert (not quite true; Michael Bay did it for Armageddon) so the only reasonable solution is to shoot in daylight and grade the images to resemble night.

In our case it was never an option to light up the expanse of woodland required for the horse chase, not to mention the difficulties of working with animals at night, so the first six minutes of Season Two are simulated nocturnality. (Is that a word? Or just the address of Borgin & Burkes?) I think there‘s a whole technical article I could write about it, and probably will, but the challenge boils down to finding a level of darkness that is enough to feel like night, but not so much that you can’t see what’s happening.

Hence my review of the grade now, on a Ryanair flight to Dublin. Jonnie Howard’s debut feature Harvey Greenfield is Running Late (like this flight, by two hours) premieres at the Dublin International Comedy Film Festival tonight, and like a lot of the cast and crew I’m going over there to celebrate the end of that particular filmmaking journey.

Ren’s journey meanwhile continues. Over the past month we’ve completed the ADR for the season, with many of the cast visiting Dale’s back garden murder shed to record new lines or re-record old ones. On one occasion we packed the place out with about eight volunteers – mostly extras from the shoot – to record crowd “wallah”. Furnished with cheat-sheets listing nearby villages, suggested topics of conversation (haggling over a goat skull, looking for a potion to cure the pox) and how to curse like an Alathian, our brilliant Loop Group provided all the background chatter for the tavern and market.

Aside from that, Dale’s been spending his evenings jingling saddles, crunching gravel, stabbing vegetables and all that fun stuff that gives you a shed murderer reputation when you’re just innocently trying to fill a fantasy series with sound effects.

At the last count we’re down to 14 visual effects shots left to complete, out of 111. I’ve been assembling the end credits, always more time-consuming than you think it’s going to be, but very satisfying. I’ve also been editing a new trailer and a Season One recap video, so as you can probably tell the new season is not far away now, not far away at all.

Oh, and when it’s here, please don’t watch it on your phone on a bright and noisy Ryanair flight. What kind of philistine would do that?