This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.
Not really a week, just a single day. A day of shooting solely flashbacks, with a different cast and a skeleton crew, but a sizeable number of extras and fight performers.
After a week of slowly starting to organise and disassemble things at the studio, we set off on Friday night for the Suffolk Coast. 27 of us were staying at a bunkhouse called Darsham Country Centre. (Only as I write this have I realised how appropriate that figure is, 27 being the number of Mahri spirits in universe.) The team included both of the original creators, Kate Madison and Christopher Dane–one helping with costumes and the other donning a familiar costume to reprise his role as Karn–and directors Alan Hay and Mark Hampton.
Early on Saturday morning many cooks were in the kitchen to fry up a hearty communal breakfast and fortify us for the long day ahead. Our location, a five-minute drive down the road, was the beautiful Thorington Theatre, an al fresco wooden structure surrounded by trees. Filled with birdsong and dappled light, it was a peaceful place to work… though the costume and makeup departments had a busy few hours getting our 11 fighters and another 11 background artists ready to go before the cameras. Not to mention the principal characters of Karn, Tallan (played again by Soorya Mahendran) and a newcomer played by Amber Doig-Thorne.
Aside from some scant drops of rain, and a minor accident when our camera assistant Nicolas Hepburn put his foot through a broken wooden stair, the day went well. By the last scene things were quite frantic, as the sun dipped low and the clock ticked past wrap time, but an extra half hour was enough to complete the material and snap a cast and crew photo! Then followed all the packing down, loading up and travelling back home.
The rest of the bank holiday weekend found the faithful few carrying on the work at the studio, stowing props and flats in the hayloft, and loading trailers full of steel pillars and more flats to go into storage elsewhere. As I write we still haven’t finished. The final push to clear the grain-store is still ahead of us this weekend.
And the first writers’ meeting for Season Four is in the diary for the weekend after that.