“Hamlet”: Week 2

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Day 7 – 12/4/12

“Contracted as it were in one brow of woe”

Not sure how to feel about today. On the one hand we got some great shots, including our first one on the Technocrane. On the other hand, we spectacularly failed to make the call sheet.

Due to the workload on costume and make-up, we generally do not start our days with master shots because not all the cast are ready. Instead we start with singles and 2-shots which is always a bit confusing and inefficient, and the wide shot is done last. Not ideal, but I’m sure it’s the lesser of at least two evils. So we started scene 14 – the first proper Hamlet scene – with Ian’s single, on which I did some of my wackiest framing yet, giving him loads of headroom (even accounting for his Tim-Burton-esque top hat!) and letting the chandelier take up a lot of the frame. Sean loved it and went even further, having half of Ian’s face hidden behind Jonny.

A couple of set-ups later it was time for lunch and for the three-person grip team to bring in the Technocrane. This then sat idle while we picked off a number of other singles, followed by a shot which pulled focus between Claudius and Gertrude and their images on the CRT monitor at prompt corner. The original plan had been to use the theatre’s existing relay camera – mounted to the front of the circle – to provide the image on the screen, but when the chandelier was winched down into position its cable blocked half of the relay camera’s frame. The solution was to borrow the stills photographer’s tripod, mount Horatio’s camcorder on it and run a feed from there to the monitor.

At last it was time to put the zoom on the Alexa XT and mount the package on the crane. Turns out that it was a bit too heavy for the remote head we’d been given, and it struggled to keep the camera bubbled. The remote head was operated by me via a monitor and hot-wheels, which I’ve never used before. I found them surprisingly intuitive.

The scene’s lighting was inspired by a tribunal scene from The Handmaid’s Tale which had warm practical desk lamps and hard, cold beams of light on the accused. The beams were easy to create with the theatre rig, today operated by Will and Tilly from the theatre’s permanent staff, while the half-CTO-gelled fluorescents weren’t exactly warm (our white balance was 3200K) but at least neutral-ish. Additional theatrical lights picked out parts of the architecture, while Astera tubes supplemented the stage set’s florries for CUs. Characters at the edge of the stage were keyed either with Rifas or a 2K through a frame located in one of the boxes.

 

Day 8 – 13/4/21

“Now I am alone”

Yesterday we should have filmed our first soliloquy, “the play’s the thing wherein to catch the conscience of the king”. The only specific shot to be described in Sean’s treatment, it was the whole reason we hired a crane, and therefore had to be picked up today, our second and final crane day. It’s the most complex shot in the film, covering three minutes of monologue in a single developing shot, and unsurprisingly took most of the morning. It begins in CU on Hamlet, shot at the 250mm end of the Cooke Varotal, then zooms out. As the zoom is reaching its 25mm end the crane begins to move back, swinging, booming and contracting to pull back as far from Hamlet as possible, revealing almost all of the circle in which he is sitting alone. Halfway through the soliloquy, when the character has his big idea which will be the turning point of the entire film, he stands up and walks to the front of the circle, while the crane pushes back in towards him, with a slight zoom in too, to end on a low angle MS.

I operated the pan and tilt again, 2nd AC Ashton did the zoom, Aris was of course pulling focus, and the two grips and the crane tech manoeuvred the crane. And we weren’t the only ones doing a dance. Because the circle was only lit by four wall sconces (which were installed especially) and we had to reach an exposure of T3.7 for the Varotal, the sparks had to boom an LED Flyer and clear backwards as the camera pulled out. God only knows what the boom ops were doing! I think it took nine takes to get the shot in the bag; not bad going really.

Next we rehearsed Ophelia’s funeral, which included the final crane shot, a much simpler boom up and push in with a bit of a zoom from 25-60mm as well. We lit the scene with one of Zoe’s backlights streaming through the dock doors, gelled a golden yellow, plus some architectural spots on the set and a Jem ball as a key. When we moved into the coverage after lunch, we tried to keep the scene looking like it was all lit by that one yellow light, even though a few other sources were actually employed, including one skipped off the floor.

 

Day 9 – 14/4/21

“A touch, I do confess”

We were scheduled to film all of scene 79 – the duel – today. That’s a nine-minute scene with half a dozen speaking characters and a swordfight!

We started with the fight coverage while everyone had plenty of energy, breaking the fight into chunks. My angles were stolen wholesale from our two key references: the first fight in Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, and 2012 TV coverage of Olympic fencing. From the former I took handheld shots over Hamlet’s then Laertes’ shoulders (we tried using a double for Ian initially, but Sean wasn’t convinced and we quickly sacked him off) and long lens CUs to show the tension between bouts. From the latter I took a side-on wide shot of the duelling “runway”, zooming in manually as the combatants got closer together and zooming out again as they separated.

We punched hard light from the theatre rig through the metalwork and grills of the set, which enhanced every movement the duellists made as they passed through shadows and highlights. The set’s florries provided fill, a Jem ball over the king and queen gave them suitably regal illumination, and a Rifa was brought in for close-ups when we needed more shape. In the scene dock, visible through the open doors at the back of the stage, we relied on a truss of par cans which the theatre crew had kindly rigged to the ceiling for us a few weeks ago.

It’s going to be another busy day tomorrow picking up everything still left, including a couple of shots at the top of the scene and all the woundings and deaths!

 

Day 10 – 15/4/21

“The rest is silence”

Little to report today. We continued shooting the duel, and still didn’t quite finish. About mid-afternoon Ian finally realised that I was wearing a “What would Gandalf do?” t-shirt. He was very amused. “Keep it until tomorrow,” was his initial response to the sartorially posed conundrum, quickly followed by: “Fix it in post.”

 

Day 11 – 16/4/21

“The apparel oft proclaims the man”

We spent the morning in Claudius’s dressing room, the most cramped of all our locations. We used a 2.5K HMI bounced off a matt silver board to push more daylight in through the window, with two practical table lamps providing additional sources. The scene was fairly simple, with two characters conversing first with one of them on a sofa under the window and the other in a chair opposite, then later with both of them on the sofa. Coverage was conventional too, consisting of a wide (from a high angle, maintaining my CCTV theme), a 2-shot on the sofa, a shot-reverse for each half of the scene, and a couple of inserts. For the first half of the scene, one of the practicals served as our key-light motivation, and we added a small LED hidden behind a desk and a Fomex just out of frame. For the second half, the window was our key-light, so we stopped supplementing the practicals and instead put a Litemat on the window-ledge.

In the afternoon we moved into the paint shop, a space which Ophelia’s character has made her own, adding plants, guitars and various hippy accoutrements. The scene ran for about five minutes, and we managed to come up with a developing master shot that got us a lot of useful material, though it was physically demanding for me and the boom op, and also for the octogenarian Steven Berkov (playing Polonius). It was mentally taxing too, trying to remember all the various positions the characters stood or sat in throughout the scene, and then figure out what other angles were required to finish covering it. After some sticks coverage we were forced to wrap without having completed the scene. (We had originally been scheduled an entire day for it, but overrunning on the duel had a knock-on effect.)

I’m not entirely sure I liked the way the lighting turned out. I pushed for a Jem ball suspended over the main area of the set, which worked out pretty well even though it became a broad key sometimes; bouncing it back into people’s eyes gave an unpolished but still attractive look. Ben had rigged a series of par cans along the paint-splattered wall which picked out the set dressing nicely, but I can’t help wondering if the scene wouldn’t have had more mood and shape without them. What I did like was the three Astera tubes uplighting that same wall (which was mainly blue/violet), providing a nice colour separation from the warmly-lit aforementioned hippy accoutrements. Almost the only other source was our old friend the bulkhead practical, which was installed in an ante-room seen at the beginning and end of the developing master.

“Hamlet”: Week 2

“Hamlet”: Week 1

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“If the audience starts looking at the cheeseboard, we’ve had it.”

– Sir Ian McKellen

Following the well-reviewed recent cinema release of Hamlet, which I shot for director Sean Mathias in 2021, here is the diary I kept during filming. You can also go back and read my blogs from prep if you’re interested.

 

Day 1 – 5/4/21

“A king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar”

Our progress began with scenes at the stage door, one of the few spaces in the theatre that has natural light coming in. Gaffer Ben Millar and I considered trying to add artificial light outside to the main window which was backlighting the scene, but instead we opted to light through a little side window with a Fomex wrapped in unbleached muslin. After a minor hiccup about blocking and crew shows, which hadn’t been planned for because we spent the last two weeks rehearsing, we bashed through three set-ups including two using Wes Anderson-esque central framing and eye-lines very close to camera.

Next up was a scene in the substage, next to the boiler room. Here we installed a practical tungsten bulkhead light on the wall as our key, adding to the extant yellowy-green fluorescents that illuminated parts of the background, and the Fomex spilling down a staircase. Lots of black negative space in the frame added to the moody look.

After lunch – during which I sorted out the footage transcoding plan with line producer Stephen Cranny and data wrangler Max Quinton – we moved to the glamorous location of the gents’ toilets for Ian McKellen’s first scene. The location had been very flat and white originally, but Ben’s crew rigged three Astera tubes to the tops of two walls – the two walls that we were mainly shooting towards – and that created a nice wrappy backlit look. Director Sean Matthias embraced the weirder shots I had storyboarded, which I was very happy about!

We also had a brief scene in a corridor outside the toilets, for which we relied largely on the existing practicals. Ben had already gelled the fluorescent emergency lights, and for the ceiling lights we turned off the one closest to camera, left the one in the midground with its pre-existing 25W bulb, and put a 60W bulb in the background one to create classic dark-to-light depth.

After wrap Ben and I had a meeting with Zoe Spurr, the theatrical lighting designer, to work out a plan for the upcoming stage scenes. By that time my brain had clocked off for the day, but Ben did his usual trick of identifying the right solution that I was too tired to see. That solution is to use less of the theatrical lighting than previously planned, which I think is what most people on the production want. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow, with our first auditorium and stage scenes!

 

Day 2 – 6/4/21

“The woman will be out”

Both of today’s scenes required wrenching emotional performances from the cast, who delivered in spades. We began with a well-planned scene in the SL vom. This, I have learnt from a fortnight working in a theatre, is short for “stage left vomitorium”. I’m not entirely sure the theatre crew weren’t winding me up when they told me this. Anyway, it’s an enclosed little space opening onto a short flight of steps up to the stage. The walls are deep red and Lee had stuffed it full of booster seats in the same colour, giving it a rich and striking look. We used the Cooke Varotal 25-250mm zoom for the first time, which is an absolute beast, but enabled us to get a lovely slow push-in to Gertrude during a long speech. I stayed on the zoom for the rest of the scene for speed. The lighting was nearly all motivated by a practical in the ceiling, but we ended up adding quite a few other sources to make the look more flattering, including a Fomex on the ceiling wrapping the practical light, a 1K into poly as fill and tiny little LED for eye-light.

This little LED came in handy again for the second scene, giving a beautiful glint in the characters’ eyes. Here the main source was a Jem ball wrapped in unbleached muslin, which Sean particularly liked as a source. A 2K through diffusion in one of the boxes provided a second key for certain people. We saw a lot of the stage for the first time, and we used Zoe’s theatre lights to illuminate the metalwork of the set and give us a strong, graphical backlight. Ben added Astera tubes and Rifas to softly light the woodwork and separate it from the black walls. The hilariously low-tech wheelchair dolly was broken out for the first time, but the bazooka mount proved too wobbly so I ended up keeping the camera on my shoulder. The prism saw its first use too, mounted to a noga arm in front of the matte box to give us some weird blur and a slight kaleidoscope effect for a handheld shot of the mentally-ill Ophelia. One problem was that it kept reflecting the crew, the equipment and the boom, so that will have to be cut around.

 

Day 3 – 7/4/21

“Denmark’s a prison”

Today’s work was all in the auditorium and covered many pages of dialogue. We began at the back of the stalls, where the existing down-lighters (previously re-bubbled) and emergency lights (gelled with straw and ND) motivated all the lighting and genuinely provided a fair bit of it too. We used Rifas and Litemats wrapped in unbleached muslin to key the close-ups, and added some poly bounce after hearing via Susannah in make-up that Ian wanted a more flattering look!

In the afternoon we moved down into the stalls, where we had lots more text and twelve characters to cover! Needless to say, we went into overtime and still owed a couple of set-ups, despite covering large swathes with a few carefully-chosen handheld shots. By this point I was leaving the lighting almost entirely to Ben, as Sean was relying on me (with help from 1st AD Top Tarasin and script supervisor Jodie Woodall) to work out the coverage. Ben used several soft sources in combination with the auditorium’s existing practicals, which looked lovely but did give the soundies a few boom-shadow headaches!

 

Day 4 – 8/4/21

“The purpose of playing”

We began in the rear stalls again, this time introducing the tiny lighting box too, from which Claudius and Polonius spy on Hamlet as he asks one of the acting troupe to add a speech into the evening’s play. We turned out the house lights and motivated everything from two desk lamps and the stage itself, on which Hamlet was supposedly in the process of designing the play’s lighting. We used two Rifas (one through a frame) for the stage light, plus a 5K to give an edge on the seats. A small LED provided eye-light supposedly bounced up from one of the desk lamps. The other desk lamp, the one in the box, was genuinely bounced off white show card on the table to provide a sinister up-light on Claudius. An existing fluorescent tube behind him served as backlight after being gelled with .3 ND, while we brought Polonius up by hiding the little LED again.

We managed to cram the camera package – complete with zoom – into the back corner of the lighting box to do a lovely shot over Claudius through the lighting-box window to Hamlet and the player beyond. For the shots closer to these latter two characters, I switched to handheld shooting, having learnt the previous day that trying to set up sticks amongst the auditorium seating is a bit of a nightmare. Fortunately the handheld look worked well for this scene.

For the rest of the day we tackled part of the prologue for the first time. In this prologue, the cast are trapped inside the theatre without an audience and decide to put on Hamlet for themselves. I set the white balance right down to 2500K so that the stage set’s fluorescent tubes (which were daylight, but gelled with half CTO by us earlier in the week) went white with a touch of green, and kept the lighting fairly flat and uninviting. We used no haze and kept the theatrical lighting to an absolute minimum. I tried to pick up the pace and power through the shots so we could fit in the dropped material from yesterday – keeping the camera on my shoulder and encouraging simple lighting set-ups – but there were simply too many other elements to juggle, and though we made the day’s call sheet we did not repair yesterday’s damage.

My favourite shot of the day, and of the whole shoot so far, was done before lunch. It was part of the prologue, but a dreamy foreshadowing of Hamlet coming to life. I shot Claudius and Gertrude waltzing on stage with the blurry chandelier glowing in the foreground. All the lighting came from Zoe’s theatrical rig, there was haze aplenty, and most importantly we clamped a £4.99 pair of kaleidoscope glasses to the front of the matte box. On a 100mm lens, this had little effect on the actors but it splintered and repeated the chandelier lights in an utterly entrancing way. Combined with shooting at 48fps the shot was absolutely beautiful.

 

Day 5 – 9/4/21

“Poison in jest”

News of the death of Prince Phillip at Windsor Castle, literally across the road from both the theatre and our hotel, trickled through the crew this morning. This will likely affect production in several ways, the most immediate of which is that we have to move rooms within the hotel, the ones that look out onto the high-street being highly coveted by paparazzi with their long lenses and ghoulish ambitions. It was a day of ill health amongst the cast and crew too, and data wrangler Max had to step in to help out the reduced camera department.

Our first scene was behind the closed “tabs” (curtains) on the stage; we relied mostly on the set’s fluorescents for this, turning off foreground ones to give us more shape. Zoe provided a hard raking light on the back of the curtain. Outside in the auditorium, Ben used two Jem balls (one as hairlight, one as a key) plus 300W kickers from each side to illuminate Claudius and Gertrude.

The next scene was the play within the play, “The Murder of Gonzago”, or, as Hamlet dubs it, “Mousetrap”. Zoe of course took the lead in lighting this, making adjustments primarily to avoid casting nasty shadows on the leads. Ben again added a Rifa to key the close-ups.

We continue to stick very closely to my storyboards, which I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, we know exactly what we’re doing in advance, and I’ve given a fair bit of thought to the shots throughout prep, but on the other hand I sometimes wonder if there wasn’t a better shot that I failed to spot because I was following the boards by rote. I try to look at my spreadsheet and mood-board at least once a day to remind myself of my original intentions and keep myself on track.

 

Day 6 – 10/4/12

“This is the very ecstasy of love”

First up was a short scene on and under the stage; two traps were being used as the graves dug by Shakespeare’s pair of “clowns”. Coverage included a shot looking through a hole inside one trap to Llinos underneath the other, then rising up as she climbed a ladder onto stage level. For this we broke out the Easy Rig for the first time, to take the camera’s weight. Lighting below the stage was motivated by a bulkhead (the same one used on day one) with a warm Astera tube cheated in too, while on the stage a wonderful sixties handheld floodlight was sitting beside the clowns. Ben used a Rifa gelled with (I think) half CTB to enhance the slightly cold light from this practical, while a couple more Astera tubes and some low-level house lights prevented the backgrounds from going completely black.

Next we moved up to the circle bar, which Lee had so beautifully transformed from the ugly, white room of our first recce to a decadent gentleman’s club strewn with the refuse of an indulgent party. I had always known that I wanted low morning sun glaring in through the window, and Ben accomplished this using a 6K par for the larger window and a 2.5K for the smaller one, both gelled with Full Straw. The curtains, bolton and some diff on the window helped to shape this and ensure that camera shadows were not an issue even when I was shooting with my back to the light. Deeper into the room, an Astera tube on a DJ’s desk and a few floor lamps added to the light. Most of the nasty ceiling lights were turned off, but two or three were snooted with black wrap and allowed to spill a little onto the scene. Reverses were fairly simple, shooting into the window which threw beams of light into the smoke (pretty much the only time I’ll be doing that on this movie!) and using a Rifa or bounce boards to fill in faces. For a later part of the scene we added diff to the Straw frame and an additional diff frame inside the room to create a beautiful, creamy light on Alice’s face.

One week down, three to go!

“Hamlet”: Week 1

Ren: It’s the Final Countdown

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This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.

If you happened to be at the Season One wrap party, you’ll know that I’m a fan of Europe’s “The Final Countdown”. That is very much where Ren Season Two is right now.

Rob Westwood has been hard at work finishing the music, the last of which has now been delivered. The action scenes I’ve been watching for so long finally have the proper scale with his score driving them along. The emotional moments now soar where they’re supposed to. My favourite bits are the travelling montage in 202 and the last scene of 204 where… Spoilers.

By the end of this coming weekend at latest, the sound mix will need to be finished, to give me time to make the DCP (Digital Cinema Package, a special file format which all cinema projectors use), get it to The Light, have them ingest it onto their system and check it, with a little contingency time left in case anything hasn’t come out correctly. This means that I’ll be spending a lot of time over the next few days in Dale’s back garden murder shed, which is where I’m writing from now.

Dale is adjusting the dynamics of the hoofbeats in the horse chase, while Jesse adds a last few sound effects elsewhere in 201. Dale’s set a timer and we have to be off this episode and onto 202 within half an hour. The countdown clock’s ticking.

11:35pm. Now well into 203, the three have us have got irrationally excited about a horrible scraping chair sound effect. Is it as great as we think or is it delirium? (Pretty sure it’s great.)

“I can feel the blood pooling in my knees from where I literally haven’t moved for so long,” says Dale.

We go outside to stretch our legs and regain some sanity. Back inside, we plough through to the end of 203. It’s getting better and better.

Excitement is building amongst the cast and crew for the premiere and release. Yesterday I sent out almost 100 press releases. The day before I was interviewed about Ren by Les Gaddis for his Capturing Light podcast (out on Monday). Today I have interest in another interview, this time for a geek culture website.

Today… well, yesterday, because it’s now gone midnight… was the eighth anniversary of the Season One premiere. As you can see from the video above, it was a fantastic evening, buzzing with excitement and pride at what we had all created.

It’s been a long time coming, but the premiere of Season Two is now just a week away, March 7th at The Light in Cambridge. Remember you can get your tickets with a special 50% Patreon discount here, or you can enter our giveaway to have the chance of winning a free pair of tickets. Do not miss this opportunity to see Season Two on the big screen!

Will things ever be the same again? It’s the final countdown.

Ren: It’s the Final Countdown

“Ren: The Girl with the Mark” – Season Two Coming Soon

neiloseman

The reason this blog is so rarely updated nowadays is that I’m the showrunner of Ren: The Girl with the Mark, an award-winning fantasy web series. I first joined the project in 2014 as DP for director and co-creator Kate Madison, then helped with post and various attempts to get the second season made, before taking over as showrunner in late 2022.

Season Two was filmed last May and comes to YouTube weekly starting March 16th. Or you can binge all episodes from May 8th, get loads of bonus content and support the show going forward by joining our Patreon community. The Patreon page is also where I do all my blogging these days!

There is also a unique opportunity to see all of Ren Season Two on the big screen in Cambridge, UK on March 7th, as tickets are on sale here for the cast and crew premiere.

“Ren: The Girl with the Mark” – Season Two Coming Soon

Ren: Footsteps and Fighting

neiloseman

This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.

A single table lamp glows in the corner, reflecting off the padded walls. The padding is to deaden the sound, but it could equally be to deal with the insanity which is never far away when you’re watching short clips of a show over and over again, making the tiniest changes to the audio.

Dale works his way through every hit and block in 203’s fight scene, searching through libraries for the three or four sounds (maybe something metallic, the cloth, a squelch and a swish) that work perfectly with each one. Jesse sits on the sofa with another laptop and his headphones on, slowly but surely adding the footsteps to every scene in the episode. Just another Friday night mixing Ren.

A few days ago we summoned Ivan over from Norfolk just to re-record his ‘effort’ sounds for the fight. He even provided his own knuckle-cracking sound effect (though not using his knuckles).

The visual side of Season Two was completed a couple of weeks ago, when Mara Ciorba sent over the final version of the colour grade. The previous version was perfect… until I spotted a faint red reflection from the back of a parked car in one of Ren’s close-ups. On Team Ren, attention to detail is everything.

I’ll be honest; I had hoped to have the season out by now, but on the Cheap/Fast/Good triangle you can never have all three corners.

As well as the ongoing sound and music, work continues in other areas. I’ve been compiling a list of press outlets to spam about the series when it’s released, I’ve been testing the software that will make the Digital Cinema Package for the cast and crew screening, and I’ve been editing the BTS videos that will come out after each episode is released. I’ve also sat down with Ross and planned out the broad schedule for the year; given that I want to shoot Season Three this summer, certain aspects of prep have to start happening pretty soon. In fact, I’ve already started picking the directors for the five episodes, and confirmed the returning cast members.

The peripheral work continues too. Last weekend Steph Swan kindly recorded two more audiobooks, Water to the Well and The Trader from Helgoth, which Tavern Dwellers will get to hear over the coming months. Several people are now assisting Steph with our social media efforts, including Duncan Hallett who is developing our brand new TikTok account.

As I write the last part of this blog I am on a train to Norwich. There’s a networking event happening there tonight which might yield some useful contacts for the future, but I also plan to visit several of the city’s historic buildings to see if any might be suitable for Season Three or indeed beyond.

On Saturday I’ll be back in the padded room, debating how squelchy a hit should be or whether you need to hear the swooshing of a blade. Plenty more details to attend to yet.

Ren: Footsteps and Fighting

Ren: Should Old Acquaintance be Forgot?

neiloseman

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.

Ren: Should Old Acquaintance be Forgot?

Ren: Night on Horseback

neiloseman

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?

Ren: Night on Horseback

Ren: Gunpowder, Seasons and Plot

neiloseman

This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.

Look, you try coming up with titles for these posts.

This photograph was taken on Bonfire Night 2016, just eight months after the release of Season One, and I expect Kate was already fed up of people asking her when the next season was coming. (For those of you outside the UK, Bonfire Night, a.k.a. Guy Fawkes Night, the 5th of November, is when British people celebrate a man failing to blow up the king, by mostly failing to give themselves horrible injuries from pyrotechnics.) Two years before that I can remember several of the senior crew running around the Lyngarth village set with sparklers before toasting marshmallows over a well-used barbecue.

Bonfire Night 2023 has been somewhat quieter. I’ve tweaked a few visual effects shots and had a chat with Kate about what improvements in the production process can be made for next season.

All four episodes of Season Two are now picture-locked. A few weeks ago Ori and Alex came up to Cambridgeshire to dub some of their dialogue, some because of intrusive background noise, some to add extra plot details. Marked Ones at the Tavern Dweller level and above can watch my video blog from the day here. We finished the day with a cast and crew reunion meal. As I sat there chatting to the two Ashes about the upcoming first writers’ room session for Season Three, it certainly felt we had turned a corner. Although there is still grading, VFX and sound work to do on Season Two, the job of telling the story feels done, and it’s time to write the next chapter.

I actually wrote Season Three at the end of 2020, immediately after scripting my version of Season Two. I’ve tweaked it a bit since then, but I knew it was far from perfect and it seemed only right to reassemble the team who toiled away in 2019 to develop Season Two to now get Season Three licked into shape. If you’ve seen the YouTube video about us writing Season Two you’ll know that it was an… er… challenging process. Our latest meeting was no different and concluded after nine hours with us having found far more problems than we’d solved. But I came away with plenty of food for thought, and although the road will be rocky (and not in a good, chocolate-marshmallow-and-biscuit kind of way) ultimately the script will be much better for it. Certainly Russell T. Davies’ “Doctor Who: The Writers’ Tale”, which I’m currently reading, gives me confidence; he finds the process just as frustrating.

Talking of frustrations, am I – like Kate might have been in 2016 – fed up of people asking me when Season Two will be out? No, not yet. I hope to be able to answer that question soon.

Ren: Gunpowder, Seasons and Plot

Ren: Cutting it Fine

neiloseman

This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.

Since the pick-ups shoots in early September we have mostly been working on the edits. Aside from cutting in the new material from those pick-ups, we continued to address the notes from the test screening in August. For a while we seriously considered shooting new scenes, even going so far as to write them, but it’s amazing how much you can change a show by making a few surgical adjustments to the edit here and there. Cat’s worked very hard and the result was that when I held another little test screening in late September the issues identified before had almost all gone away, and a few more tiny tweaks will fix the rest.

All this might sound like there’s something wrong with the series, but that’s far from the case. I don’t know if anyone does test screenings in TV – there probably isn’t time – but it’s standard in film. There comes a point when the filmmakers have watched it so much that they can’t see the wood for the trees. And when they see it with an audience there are always things that land differently to what was expected. It’s all part of the process. Feedback from the last test screening was very positive, so we know we’re on the right track.

Cat has swapped over with her counterpart Arthur, who edited the director’s cut of 204 while she did 201-203. I sat down for an evening with Arthur to discuss final tweaks to 201-203. It was very useful to get his fresh eyes on them, and he was also very positive about how they’re looking, with only tiny improvements to suggest. Consequently 201 was picture-locked on Sunday.

Picture lock means that the selection, order and timing of the shots will no longer change. The focus then moves onto sound editing (only a very crude version of which is done along with the picture), scoring, visual effects and colour grading. We’ve already got ahead with sound and VFX, but now we know that takes and timings aren’t going to change we can really power on.

All being well, 202 should be picture-locked today. We have one last pick-up shot to film this coming week, then 203 and 204 should be locked next weekend.

Meanwhile I found time for a quick redraft of Season Three’s script, and our first writers’ room for that season will hopefully take place later this month.

In Patreon news, some Marked Ones should be receiving their first item of merch around now. Anyone who’s been a member at the Marketgoer level or above for at least three months has qualified for an exclusive Season Two mug, and as long as you’ve provided your shipping address it should be on its way to you. We’d love to see photos of you with your mug on social media! We’ll be sure to share them if you tag us.

Ren: Cutting it Fine

Ren: Picking up the Pieces

neiloseman

This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.

We recently completed four varied days of pick-ups shooting for Season Two.

First up was a Thursday morning at a farm in Warboys, Cambridgeshire. Here we captured at last the wide shots of Commander Othon riding a horse. These had been on the schedule for May 17th but had to be postponed due to the horse, Skye, having an injured ankle. She’s back in fine form now though, and her rider Matt got a tremendous gallop out of her.

Two days later about half a dozen of us assembled at good old Burleigh Hill Farm to set up for our biggest pick-ups day. Suzanne and I collected boxes of costumes from storage, Steph, Rose and the Finns hauled a load of props from their homes and before long we were kicking fabric around in the farmyard mud like it was April all over again. A corner of the Heretics’ Market came back to life where the tavern used to be (and mostly still is, Mark the farmer liked it so much).

The work done, we ordered a takeaway and sat around a laptop in the barn watching the current edit of the series. We discussed the feedback from the test screening the other week, and how some of the notes could be addressed.

The Sunday was full on, with around 40 people helping behind and in front of camera. We had various little bits to capture, but the main thing was the reshoot of the battlefield. We had hoped for wet, miserable weather to give it the right atmosphere, but instead it turned out to be the first day of a heat wave! Fortunately Mark came to the rescue. He had already run a cultivator over the site twice to turn the grass into clods of earth. Now he drove his crop-spraying tanker up and hosed the ground with gallons and gallons of water. Marked Ones at the Tavern Dweller level and above can see this and a lot of other things that went on that day in the video blog I posted last week. The day was a fantastic success, so thanks to everyone who was there and to all of you Marked Ones who funded it.

The following afternoon found Kate, Rose and I shooting the miniature of Karn’s house. At one point this shot had been scheduled for Sunday but, boy, were we glad we changed that! We worked at a leisurely pace, stopping regularly to review the footage on a laptop, make adjustments, and eat ice lollies in the shade.

On Wednesday night Kate and I travelled to Derbyshire with drone op Christopher Buckenham and Kaitlin Green, one of our supporting artists who had been drafted in to double for Ren. The plan was for us to spend Thursday touring the Peak District with Alex (Hunter), shooting travel montage shots of him and Ren, and a few other pick-ups for episodes 201 and 202. Unfortunately the day was beset by problems. After a few takes the Blackmagic camera stopped working, leaving us with just the drone. Later the controller app for the drone failed as well, meaning Christopher could only fly it blind and hope that it was recording (which it turns out it wasn’t about 50% of the time). Alex kindly lent us his phone to get back-up angles on, but after more than 300 miles of travelling we came home with quite a disappointing amount of material. The one thing in our favour was the weather, which was beautiful, and the locations that we did capture were absolutely stunning.

Ren: Picking up the Pieces