Don't Go Through Pre-Production Alone

[Above: how my desk looked during the last two weeks of pre-production on Ren. Being able to juggle two spreadsheets at once feels like I've unlocked a new level of organisational skill!]

    Late last Thursday night, I traveled back from the Ren: The Girl With The Mark shoot and crashed into my bed (and not a tent!) for the first time in a week. The bigger the shoot, the bigger the post-shoot come-down, and I'd likely be struggling with that right now if I hadn't thrown myself into three back-to-back jobs from the moment I got home.

   I will have so much to say about Ren over the coming months, I'm sure. It may well turn out to be the best thing I've ever directed (time will tell on that one - it's gonna take a lot for anything to knock Night Owls off my top spot!). But I can say with full certainty that it was the most challenging thing I've ever done, in my career at least, and there was so much to organise on the run up to the shoot.

   As a result, I learned an important lesson about pre-production - and about myself - which I wanted to quickly share with you all ahead of my upcoming annual 'Summer Update' blog post, which is always a hefty article.

   What was unique about pre-production on Ren was that it sort-of started without me, or rather, our production stages were out of sync. Four episodes were filmed back-to-back, with four different directors, so by the time I was doing my final director prep, the rest of the crew were already filming episodes two and three, and they were doing so in beautiful, remote Welsh locations, often without signal when I had queries and wanted to reach out to any of them. Gorgeous BTS images were drip-feeding onto my Instagram, and I had serious 'fear of missing out' as I scrolled through them in solitude from my tiny box-office in Derbyshire. It was quite a lonely time.

   Of course, once I traveled down to Cambridge and met up with the excellent crew, ready to shoot my episode, we all bonded and re-bonded very quickly, and everything felt wonderful again, even in the face of such hard work. All my unanswered questions got answered, and anything I'd worried about had already been sorted, ready for us to step into the studio and work our magic.

[Above: The four directors of Ren Series 2, captured by the lovely production photographer Emma Barrott. Yes, I am genuinely that much shorter than the other directors. I call this 'imposter syndrome in a photo'.]

   Although everything ultimately worked out great, it really struck me how much pre-production had affected me on this occasion. I've attempted (and mostly managed) to adopt a more chilled attitude about film shoots these days, but the last week or two of pre-production is always going to be the most intense time, when the to-do list is still huge and the days left with which to tick things off are getting fewer and fewer. And with a project on the scale of Ren, that to-do list was enormous.

   My anxiety reached a peak when I was packing to leave for the shoot. I couldn't find a bag that was big enough to fit everything I needed to take with me - which, on a normal day, would be a minor inconvenience. But on this occasion, when I was carrying the most stress (and being somewhat of a drama queen at the best of times), I massively overreacted. I saw it as a bad omen, bemoaning along the lines of: "if I can't even manage this first, small task without difficulty, how is the rest of the shoot going to go??"

   Cue my wonderful, always-patient partner Edward Harvey stepping in. He calmly looked at everything I had to pack, and after a few short moments said, "what about the gazebo bag?" 

   This was a genius suggestion, and something that I never would've thought of alone, particularly not with the doom-and-gloom mindset I was holding onto at the time. I would've been wallowing in self-pity on my bedroom floor if I hadn't had someone there to offer a second opinion.

   At that moment, it really struck me how important it is to have someone to springboard ideas off of. The saying goes that a problem shared is a problem halved, and that's never been more true for me than in pre-production. I do still strongly advocate for 'director's alone time' ahead of a shoot, I do think that's important too, but if I look back to all my good memories of pre-production, I always had supportive people around me. The week before cameras rolled on A Different Place last year, co-producer Charlie Clarke and I both had large to-do lists that were stressing us out, so she came over to my house, I ordered us the best brunch, and we talked over each others' worries until there was nothing left to worry about. We both cracked on and got so much done, feeling much calmer just by having someone sat a few meters away.

[Above: exactly one week before cameras rolled on my episode, Edward persuaded me to get out of my office and go for a walk. We went to the graveyard and surrounding woodland where I shot all my teenage films, as well as part of Stop/Eject. It really helped calm and ground me, as well as reminding me how far I've come.]

   In 2014, when we were in pre-production on Night Owls, we had to completely re-cast the project (purely due to actor availability issues) less than a week before the shoot. That kind of situation is always massively stressful, and yet I have fond memories of the way we tackled it. I met up with Night Owls' two producers, Lauren Parker and (the dearly, dearly missed) Sophia Ramcharan, and we went to Lauren's office where she stocked us up with chocolate and mango juice while Sophia calmly went over our options. Not only did we find a fantastic new (award-winning) cast for the film, but I remember laughing that day, in spite of the fact that - when I first walked into that office - I had felt like 'the worst had happened'.

   The film industry is a vast and wondrous thing where literally anything is possible - and I mean that in terms of what goes on behind the scenes, not just what you see on screen. There are very few challenges that can't be overcome, even if it takes work sometimes. But you always need two, three, or even more heads to come together to make that happen, either because it opens you up to new ideas you hadn't considered before, or because it means you have someone to rant to until your own mind feels a little clearer.

   So that's it - that's today's big lesson. Never do pre-production alone. It's as simple and true as that.

   That's the first thing I'll take away from my time on Ren. As for everything else... you'll have to wait and see. I'm certainly excited to get into the edit and see how my episode comes together. It was a breathtaking shoot, in more ways than one, and hopefully I'll be able to share more with you all soon.

Sophie

P.s. If you want to see more updates on Ren (not just my episode, but all the others too) before anyone else, please consider supporting the project on Patreon.