Season 1 now complete!
Interview with Director Loren Small
You directed all the episodes for this first season of Remnants. You also edited them all. What is your process and how does the one job effect the other?
Since I knew I was going to be the editor on Remnants, it directly impacted the way I directed. Basically, I edited the project in my head as we were shooting. I’d figure out what angles would cut together, or how to stage the action, and how the dialogue would flow as we were shooting, and then carry those directly into the next scene. (Or previous scene sometimes, since we shot out of order.)
It made the directing process easier in some ways, because I didn’t have to cover all the bases an editor would want me to cover. Since I was doing the cutting, all I had to get was the footage I wanted. It was a production that was very much not made in post, but really on set.
The big thing I wanted to do on set was spend my time working with the actors. We had a really short shooting schedule, so we didn’t have a lot of time to work the scenes. So knowing how things would cut let me maximize my time by working on their performances in specific shots, or if I knew the edit would impact their performance in a different way I could bring that to them on set. Also, the performances and ideas from the actors would inform my decisions, allowing me to reshape the edit in my head on the fly.
Post-production was a lot easier since I had directed. I knew what all of the shots were already, so if I was looking for a specific moment for a scene, I knew when and where it had been shot, what reel it was on, and which performances I had liked on set. There wasn’t a second learning process that an editor goes through when they step up to the footage.
So all around, being director and editor had a lot of plusses, and allowed me to work in a seamless flow from my original imagination of the script from pre-production all the way through to posting episodes online.
You mention actors’ performances or ideas informing your decisions — was there ever a time on set where you had to completely rethink they way you were going to shoot a particular scene because of how the actors approached it?
There were several times during production where we would come to a scene and I’d ask the actors how they thought their character would do it. We’d walk through the action and discuss the dialog, and only then would I decide how I wanted to shoot it. I can’t think of specific examples, but I know a lot of the staging came directly from this.
I don’t remember anything causing a complete revision of my original thoughts. In general, the actors and I were on the same wavelength, so it was either more performance or blocking changes rather than seriously changing the flow of an episode.
Is there ever a time that it’s a conflict of interest for the director to be the editor?
I’m sure there are instances where this can be the case, but overall I would say there is no conflict for the director to also be the editor. There was a point in time when editing was an incredibly specialized job, but the democratization of technology has made editing much more accessible. This isn’t to say there aren’t reasons to use an editor if you are a director, but rather that new avenues of filmmaking are available, which can be both a fantastic experience and adventure if you are willing to try them.
Some reasons you might choose NOT to edit as the director:
- Lack of technical skill.
- Avoid burnout. It can really help to have someone else managing files and worrying about all the technical details of an edit. It can be really great to have someone operating the computer while you explore the edit together. Which leads us to:
- Wanting another pair of eyes. If you have been the main person on the project, it can be great to have an editor to help you explore the work that has been created and to offer unbiased advice. There is so much that goes in to production that by the time you hit certain shots or scenes, you can have feelings about them that have nothing to do with what is actually on screen. One scene may have been shot 30 times because the actors had issues with the lines, making it painful to watch every time it pops up on screen. A good editor can get you through all of that and spot a lot of things and provide creative solutions a director would never think of.
- More than another pair of eyes, bringing in a collaborator. A good editor is truly the final storyteller on a project, being the one who physically (in the days of film) or at least digitally creates the final sequences that the viewer will watch from all the various elements produced. An editor can bring his own voice to a project, and in partnership with a director take a film to new heights.
But on this particular project, editing and directing seemed like they would work well together, since it was a guerilla sort of project to begin with. And fortunately, that seems to be how things worked out.
Did you have a particular visual style in mind when shooting Remnants?
I thought a lot about the visual style going into Remnants, and ultimately came up with what I like to call the “No Budget” style. Basically, although there are a lot of very stylish films that I love the look of, I decided that we didn’t have the time or money to light the show much. So that dictated the rest of the look, calling for lots of handheld work and so forth. But I knew that I wanted to stylize the show a bit, so I also did some color correction in post production that pushed the look a little bit, so it doesn’t play out as just documentary style footage. I think we found a pretty good balance and that the show has a distinct look which lets you know it is fiction while still maintaining some interesting grounding in reality.
If time weren’t a factor, is there a certain style you would have liked to incorporate into Remnants? Is there a director who’s approach you might have emulated had we the ability to?
If time were not an issue, and budgets allowed for it, I would have loved to move the visual style into something more reminiscent of 24. I would have loved to really push some of the situations the actors were in and made the whole series a bit more frantic, and perhaps even incorporate some split screen elements or multi-camera elements. More talking while running around rather than having the actors sitting in one place. I also would have loved to incorporate some of the lighting elements and steadicam shooting of a show like The West Wing. I’ve always loved the low, soft lighting of the show, which allows for lots of shadow, and I think the walk-and-talk aspects of that show might have leant themselves really well to some of the things Remnants does.
You’ve alluded to certain constraints the production had. Could you discuss some of the challenges the shoot presented?
The production, while certainly not the most difficult of productions ever, had its fair share of constraints and challenges. The largest of these was the lack of budget, which formed the basis of the rest of the constraints. As a self-funded-call-in-all-your-favors sort of production, Remnants could not afford to pay for anything. Seriously. I can count the number of things bought for the production on two hands. The rest was borrowed or volunteered. Actors were volunteers. Crew was all volunteers. The catering was volunteered. The house we shot in was borrowed. The snow was donated by God. Guns were very real and borrowed. At least one police officer was real and volunteered his time. It was pretty amazing how many people gave up a lot to work on this project.
But that also created scheduling issues. We shot during the school year, so some people had class schedules we had to work around. Other people had real jobs, so they could only get away for certain times of the day. It was a logistical nightmare to get everyone together at the right times to get through all the scenes, let alone have time to really work a scene with the actors. Compounding all of this was the fact that we had a limited time (about 8 days if I remember correctly) to shoot the entire season of 9 episodes. For those wondering, we shot about enough footage to make a short feature film. In 8 days. So yeah, challenges.
But those were also our opportunities. I think, having spent so long with this project, I see a lot more of the problems. I think if you just sit down and watch for the first time, and don’t know the struggles that went into it, there is an interesting story being presented that is pretty entertaining.
So no excuses from me for anything, just realization of the reality of doing a production like this. There is stuff I would do over if I could, and I certainly would have loved to have more time and more budget to work with, which in turn would have made the show more solid. But we did with what we had, and I can be pretty proud of our all-volunteer-almost-zero-cost web series.
What are you most proud of or what was/is your favorite aspect of Remnants?
I think the action sequences work really well in Remnants. There are really some great moments during those sequences, and I’m probably the most proud of them.
Loren Small is a freelance producer and editor based out of Nashville, Tennessee. You can keep tabs on him and his ongoing work at www.COGfilm.com
