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?