With over eight million total YouTube views and 14 international awards, not to mention discovering Outlander’s Sophie Skelton, the indie fantasy series Ren: The Girl with the Mark has made quite an impact. While the team raise funding for new episodes on Kickstarter, we talk to director and co-creator Kate Madison to find out how the series came to life.
His big Desert Storm Humvee is loaded to the nines with every kind of computerized gadget, tracking device, telescope, radar, scanner, viral map, night vision camera, satellite radio, and electronic gizmo ever invented. The tires look like they belong on a tanker truck. I’m sure there’s a few guns in there too, maybe the same ones we encountered yesterday. A SWAT command mobile unit wouldn’t be as loaded. “Wow!” I say as he invites me to look inside.
-Hey, so Actor-Man here tells me you guys are shooting a movie, huh? -Yeah. And you are…? -Robert, nice to meet you. We’ve been watching you. -We? Who’s we? -All us neighbors. Through our telescopes. We live in that sub-division way down there. -You have telescopes at home too? -Sure, we all have telescopes. At home, in our cars, on our guns, you name it. -Oh… -Yeah, we were wondering what you were filming. We watched you all day yesterday. -All day? You can see that far? -Sure, I can tell you what you had for lunch. -Hopefully not what I shit for lunch.
He laughs. I’m not really kidding.
Director of photography Neil Oseman was nominated for six Best Cinematography awards for his work on the indie fantasy series Ren: The Girl with the Mark. Here he explains his approach to lighting the series, from simulating firelight, to placing a fake moon and enhancing character with hard and soft daylight.
Ren: The Girl with the Mark is an award-winning web series remarkable for the high production values it achieves on a micro-budget. A newly released video gives a behind-the-scenes view into filming one of the show’s biggest sequences.
When it comes to shooting elements for VFX, green-screen gets all the press, but it's not always the best way. Neil Oseman, post-production supervisor on the indie fantasy series Ren: The Girl with the Mark, explains how impressive visual effects can be created by shooting simple elements against a black or white backdrop.
Imagining the 14th Dalai Lama explaining in a public forum that Buddhist followers should not accept religious teachings out of faith, but rather through investigation and experiment, may feel surprising. Don’t religion and science typically clash? Yet, it makes perfect sense when viewing the documentary The Dalai Lama- Scientist, the latest film by Dawn Engle and Peacejam. This film paints a surprising portrait of the renowned religious leader as he engages with scientists during the eighties, nineties, and the new millennium.