This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.

Three days of filming on the latest block of Ren have been completed, and very successfully so.

On Wednesday we set off from Cambridgeshire in several vehicles for our location trip to Sandon Hall, Staffordshire, where two years ago we captured the cliffhanger ending of Season Two. We picked up the story right where we left off, with the Archivist (Florian Hencher) coming down the grand staircase towards Ren (Oriana Charles). The hall’s staff were just as friendly and helpful as ever, and it was great to start off the block in such a beautiful setting.

Thursday found us back at the farm in St Ives, where Ash Finn’s art department had transformed one end of the medieval barn – the same barn that housed Sol’s tavern in 2023 – into a castle bedroom. We made use of the arrow-slit windows, presumably used to defend against people who really wanted hay, and added a four-poster bed and fireplace which were entirely fake. It was Emma Robson’s first day as Eumaya, a new character, and Oriana’s first day in a new Ren costume!

The bedroom scenes were finished by lunchtime, and then it was onto a few simple pick-up shots for the episodes filmed last year. (It’s quite usual for extra bits to be needed once an episode is edited and we can see how it’s all working together.) Finally Alan Hay, director of 301, spent some time in the Archive set with Oriana rehearsing for the next day.

And what a monster of a day Friday was. Four and a half pages of script were scheduled (by me, I admit) to be filmed, quite normal for a low-budget production but not one as complex as Ren. Although it was all dialogue, which is much quicker to shoot than action, it comprised several mini-scenes staged at different points around the large Archive set. After shooting it all through in a wide shot, we broke it down into smaller chunks and worked on getting the close-ups and other angles needed to make the scene come alive on screen. Oriana and Florian had a huge amount of dialogue to get right and layers of performance to deliver, which they did brilliantly. It was such a long day, starting at 7am and not wrapping until 7:30pm, but we all felt an incredible sense of achievement when we finished with everything in the can and a delighted director.

Pub? Pub.