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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.

Currently I feel like I’m doing all possible stages of the filmmaking process at once.

I have just reviewed the current draft of the Season Three script preparatory to writing a new version.

Chris Dane and I have just cast a new character who will appear in that season and also in pick-ups for Season Two which go before the cameras this coming weekend.

Those pick-ups of course require all the other pre-production tasks like organising crew, transport, locations, insurance and so on. Rose and Ash have been busy preparing props and miniatures too.

On Thursday morning we film a few shots with a skeleton crew and a horse and rider, then on Saturday we return to the farm to prepare for our main pick-ups shoot the next day.  And the following Thursday we’re heading to the Peak District with another small team to get some landscape shots.

Editing of the season is ongoing. Cat and I spent last Monday refining episodes 201-203, which have now come to life with temporary music and even a few VFX shots here and there.

Nine people are presently working on the visual effects for the season. We have about 80 VFX shots, similar to Season One, so it’s a huge part of the work. Shots underway at the moment range from the spectacular, like Ren using her Mahri abilities, to things that you won’t even notice, like painting out modern lights.

Dale has been busy editing the sound for 202, and he’s just taken delivery of 201 and 203 to start work on those. This includes building the background sounds that give the setting realism and atmosphere, like the chattering of tavern-goers or the keening wind of a lonely hilltop.

Last night I held a screening of the edits as they currently stand, inviting several friends who hadn’t been involved in the making of this season (though some were key to the making of Season One, namely co-producer Michelle Golder and scenic artist Amanda Stekly). The aim was to see if people who hadn’t been on set or read the script could follow the story and if it was pacy enough to hold their attention. It’s an important part of post-production and I’ve done it with everything I’ve produced or directed. It always picks up problems you can’t spot because you’re too close to it, and sure enough I came away with copious useful notes.

Pretty much the only thing we aren’t doing at the moment is writing the music, but that will come soon enough!

This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.

I wrote most of this post at 4am, unable to sleep. Yesterday I was one of six people – the only six people in the world – who watched Ren: The Girl with the Mark, Season Two.

The directors and editors have spent the last couple of months sorting, sifting and assembling the 4TB of footage we recorded in late April and throughout May. Filmmaking can be likened to creating a jigsaw puzzle: the script is the picture on the box, the shoot is when you make the individual pieces – often so absorbed in the details that you forget about the overall picture – and the edit is putting those pieces together… but will it look like the picture on the box? I’m always pleasantly surprised when it does.

We certainly have made and are making something pretty special. By the end of the season you really feel like you’ve been on a journey, and the emotional moments in the finale particularly pack a punch. It’s all very exciting.

The reason I couldn’t sleep is that my mind was turning over all the things that have to happen next. Having had a relatively easy couple of months while the directors quietly got on with their cuts, I am now in the position of assessing and organising all the work required before the season is fit to be watched by more than six people.

Firstly there are pick-ups to shoot. Pick-ups are parts of scenes, or occasionally full scenes, that didn’t get filmed during principal photography, due to lack of time or other unavoidable circumstances. (For example, we had a few shots of a horse that we couldn’t do because the steed in question had an injury.) They can also include new shots or scenes that were never scripted but which, with the hindsight afforded in the edit suite, you feel the show needs in order to tell the story properly. Pick-ups can also include reshoots, if something doesn’t work as well as you hoped in the context of the edit. We have all three types of pick-up on Ren Season Two, so it’s now my job to organise getting the relevant people, props and costumes back together and filming them. (I know that some of the cast and crew read this, so a bit like when a newsreader says “The family of the deceased have been notified”, I should say that everyone needed has been contacted. We will need extras again though, so look out for more info about that.)

Secondly there are the visual effects. A list of all the VFX required in episode 202 has existed for several weeks, and five of them have already been ticked off. I’ve started compiling similar lists for the remaining episodes, and then the shots need assigning to people with the relevant skills. There are about half a dozen people contributing VFX so far, but this will need to expand, especially as we nail down exactly what’s required in 201, which is by far the most VFX-heavy episode. VFX on Ren varies widely and includes digital matte paintings (like the village seen from afar), particle effects (like the glowing energy of the Mahri spirit) and compositing (last week I added a window to a wall that never had one).

Thirdly there is the continuing editing process. Two of the directors are still working with the editors to refine their cuts, and then I will need to spend some time polishing up the season as a whole.

Fourthly there is the soundtrack. Dale has already made a start on editing the dialogue from 202, but pretty soon he’ll need to start on other episodes. It also won’t be long before Rob will want to begin composing the music.

So that is where we’re at now.

The other thing I’ve been doing, but now need to put aside for a while, is the new title sequence. (Look out for a tiny sneak-peek on my Instagram account this Friday.) In the process I dug out some old versions from Season One which have never seen the light of day, so I plan to bring you a special Patreon video about that in the not-too-distant future.

Don’t forget The Mouth of Truth is coming up this Thursday evening, with guests Rose Collis and Ash Finn. You can submit your questions for them by commenting on the post about it below. See you then!