This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.
There’s so much going on at the moment, I hardly know where to start!
We now have a production designer – Rose Collis – and a costume designer -Suzanne Emerson – who actually played Ida in Season One, the woman who won’t buy Ren’s mushrooms! They have both been busy absorbing the huge amount of information on lore and backstory and connecting with the four directors as well as the people who have already started making bits and pieces. Some fantastic ideas have already come out of this process which I can’t wait for you to see.
Last week Chris Dane and I travelled down to Gosport, near Portsmouth, to reccie Little Woodham, a 17th century village and living history museum. This will be representing the Illin Crossroads, a place where Ren and Hunter stop off on their journey. Last season Chris had to build the village himself, so I think he was probably relieved to have one already made this time! The committee members who showed us around were very helpful and friendly, and we look forward to returning there to film in due course. Look out for a video about that trip in the near future.
Chris has also been busy creating a map of Alathia, which will be unveiled here on Patreon soon. Meanwhile I’ve been on some more reccies to look at a couple of local farming and transport museums to see if they have any indoor or outdoor spaces that might work for the scenes in the season.
Mike Rudin has been drying, repairing and reinforcing the Born of Hope cart ready for its new life as the Kah’Nath prisoner wagon. We convened the team to have a look at it so far and discuss how the prisoners will be chained and how they will get in and out.
Hans Goosen is developing a unique system of census records for Ren’s world, using beads and knotted strings since writing is banned. He explained it to me and Rose yesterday and we both boggled at how much effort he has put in to make sure that it would actually function and store the required information! It’s an amazing bit of world building.
Ash Finn is working on a variety of props including some recreations of documents from Karn’s house – oh, a tiny spoiler there perhaps!
At the weekend Becca Youngs, head makeup artist from Season One, and her friend Michelle popped over to Cambridge to experiment with stencils which will allow Ren’s mark to be applied much faster and more consistently than last time. They eventually decided on a sponge application and an acetate stencil, but not before punching some holes in one of my old silicone rubber baking sheets to see if that worked any better!
The team will continue to expand as we begin casting – there’s still time to apply at https://tinyurl.com/rencast if you think you could be the next Ren or Hunter! – and crewing too.