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.