This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.
It was an early start on Saturday, 27th July for the first day of filming on Ren 3. The cast and crew – a mix of newcomers and Ren veterans – convened at Burleigh Hill Farm at 7am, intending to capture the day’s dialogue scenes before a wedding kicked off in the next field at midday. Unfortunately many of the guests had arrived the night before and camped out, and there was noise from the get-go. That’s a future trip to Dale’s dubbing studio booked in already. The Helgoth set looked great though. Ash Finn and their art department (including many other Finns) had worked almost every hour of daylight for the preceding week to get it finished in time, and the insanely hard work certainly paid off.
The costume and makeup teams got their own big challenge the next day as we were joined by nine or ten supporting artists in addition to the six speaking characters, many of them with facial markings of some kind. Everyone was great, particularly given that the sun beat down mercilessly and several people had fur on their costumes! As the cinematographer, bright sunlight was not the weather I would necessarily have chosen for the mood of the scenes, but it actually lent an appropriate harshness. In combination with the lifeless ground, which farmer Mark had ploughed and compacted for us a week or two beforehand, the sun gave the images a Western feeling.
Day three found us working on the tunnel set inside the grain-store “studio”, which if anything was even hotter. In fact we ended up wrapping early because our brains were all so fogged by the heat! Fortunately it was one of the lighter days in terms of material to cover, and we still got everything we needed. Although much smaller than the Helgoth set, the tunnel had still required a huge amount of work to build, papier-mâché and paint, and it was very satisfying to see it look so good on camera. The final touch was a little shower of dirt and dust as Hunter opened the hatch and dropped in.
The next day we were joined by two new cast members: Katie Sheridan, whose own web series Match Not Found was on the festival circuit at the same time as Ren Season One, and six-year-old Jon-Paul Laidler. Hannah and Crina’s costume and makeup teams gave them fantastic looks. Jon-Paul did a stellar job and was completely unfazed by the madness around him, and Katie never complained once about all the climbing up and down ladders to reach the top of the tunnel set, despite being several months pregnant. After wrapping for the day, several of us stayed on to rearrange the Helgoth set into a new configuration, much as Season One’s village square was transformed into an alleyway partway through shooting.
On Wednesday, 31st July we started at 1pm so as to give us some hours of darkness to work with later on. We completed the scenes on the reconfigured Helgoth set, featuring Hunter and Helen Fullerton’s Sol, once again working in baking heat. After a meal break we shifted to a set positioned in the doorway of the studio, with additional set pieces rapidly assembled outside to be seen in the background. Sophie and Ian Frankham-Wells joined the crew to take charge of fire safety, because we were dealing with multiple flaming torches, one of which had to be thrown straight towards the camera! Needless to say, many precautions were taken. Shortly after midnight a wrap was called on episode 304, and director Ash Maharaj thanked everyone personally.
After a day off we hired a van and hit the road to Thorney Toll, a hamlet between Peterborough and Wisbech in northwest Cambridgeshire, where a farmyard of faceless warehouses hides the Grade II listed gem that is Canary Cottage. This delightful thatched shepherd’s house dating from the mid-18th century needed a fair bit of weed-cutting from Ash and Hans to make it look lived in, but provides a charming first image for episode 302. Next we drove down to Over, not far from St Ives and our studio base. There we had a delightful picnic by the river before setting up at the Manderson Trust, a local fishing club. Once it was dark we filmed a campfire scene, the fire reflecting beautifully in the water of the fishing lake. We even found time to toast a few marshmallows which 2nd AD Amelia Jabry had thoughtfully brought along.
Saturday, 3rd August found us back at Burleigh Hill Farm for several scenes in and amongst the trees, including another nighttime campfire scene. This was a pretty easy day, and we found time to add a couple of extra little scenes such as Hunter walking through a field with the low evening sun behind him. Another new character joined the cast: Noy, played by 15-year-old Lisa Garnagina. She and Alex had to sit in the path of woodsmoke for the whole evening, but the scene looked great and the lads camping nearby even kept the noise down for us, so Dale was happy too. The night marked the end of Cambridgeshire filming for Ren 3 Block 1, and we said goodbye to several of our crew, with many hugs all around and even a few tears.
Ross, Ash and I met up on Sunday afternoon to reload the van and set off to Hampshire for the last leg of the shoot. On the way we had to stop into IDFight in East London to collect weapons and crash mats, and poor Ross had to drive the van right through central London afterwards. We arrived at our Travelodge around 8pm and promptly went out in search of curry, over the eating of which we had the barest semblance of a production meeting.
We spent the next three days working at EyeLarp, a site for paintballing, airsoft and live-action roleplay games, in a beautiful forest near Fleet. Kate and I recce’d the site last year when we were looking for somewhere to do the horse chase, and although we didn’t use it in that instance, I remembered it when a palisaded camp of wooden buildings showed up on the mood-board of director Sherice Griffiths. (The scene had been written as a few soldiers camping out in the woods rather than anything involving permanent structures, but Sherice rightly felt that we needed to up the scale and visual interest.) These were to be our three busiest days, with around 40 people on set including ten or so stunt performers as Kah’Nath soldiers. The first challenge was to turn one of EyeLarp’s huts into a prison cell, a feat impressively achieved in a couple of hours by Ash and others, using a door, bars and other elements brought from St Ives.
Helen, Meg Birley and Steph Swan returned again as the erstwhile landlady of the Smoke and Ember, her daughter Tansy and fellow prisoner Devi. This time they all got to do fight scenes, which they were very excited about, and a brilliant job they made of them too. Ronin Traynor’s stunt team were troopers in more ways than one, putting up with the restrictive and uncomfortable costumes, and cheerfully throwing themselves to the ground at regular intervals.
Kitty and Jonnie who run EyeLarp were very kind and helpful to us, and also provided the catering which was absolutely delicious. Although we got behind on the Monday and had to wait out some rain on the Tuesday, we rattled through our packed shot-list on Wednesday and finished on time at 8pm, marking the end of 302 and block 1. Working in the shady forest had made a nice change to the unrelenting sun at Burleigh Hill Farm, and it was great to be able to shoot in any direction without the art department having to build every single thing in sight!
Despite not getting back to Cambridgeshire until 2:30am, Ross, Ash and I were back at Burleigh Hill Farm the next morning to unload the van and get it back to the hire company on time. After a well-deserved brunch we embarked on a solid two-and-a-half days of disassembling, packing, cleaning and tidying. This is the least glamorous part of the whole process and I must give huge thanks to Dan Edgar, Emma Fox, Kate Madison, Michael Hudson and Mike and Tina Finn, who all came back to help us take the set apart, strip polystyrene off boards, run stuff to the dump, drag things off the field, organise props, carry set pieces to the storage container and sweep the floor. Enormous thanks also to Mark Schwier who took time out of his busy days to transfer heavy wood to the bonfire with his telehandler, and who let us store not just props this time but also a huge number of set flats, which he crammed into his hayloft.
So another block of Ren filming is over, and the work shifts to editing and post-production, while advance pre-production for block 2 will soon begin, not to mention preparation for a new crowdfunding campaign. I must admit that after we failed to reach our Patreon target in April I considered allowing the series to die, but I’m very glad that I didn’t. The positive and friendly atmosphere making Ren is absolutely unmatched by any other project I’ve ever known. So many members of the cast and crew told me they had a wonderful time and learnt lots. Some even presented me with thank-you gifts, which seems completely the wrong way around! Thanks to all of you; you make Ren what it is.