Season 1 now complete!
Remnants: Complete Season 1
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Remnants: Season 1 – Complete from COGfilm on Vimeo.
Interview with Writer Scott Fogg
You wrote and produced Remnants. How did the writing process lead to your producing role, and what was it like watching your creation without having direct creative control during the production?
It was strange and wonderful.
For as long as I’ve been writing, I’ve found myself in the roll of producer — it was just that this was the first time I actually had the title. When I was in elementary school (and then again in high school) I would write little plays or skits for me and my friends to do for the class or for chapel. And since it was my idea, it was usually my job to put the whole thing together. So I’ve kind of been doing this my entire life.
However, this was the first time I really approached a project as a producer. I had a story I wanted to tell and I wanted it told as best as possible and so I felt the best thing I could do, for the story, was relinquish the role of director to someone else. I suppose that’s when I officially became the producer; when I approached Loren about directing Remnants.
After that, my job became one of making sure we had everything we needed to tell this story. And while it’s always strange to invite someone in and have them critique your writing, I knew what he was doing was trying to figure out how best to tell the story. I had to remind myself of that as scenes got dropped, sequences were changed, and lines were re-written.
Ultimately, it’s probably the role I was meant to play. There’s few things as fulfilling as writing something, giving it to an actor and his director, watching them wrestle with it, and then them coming back and asking for a re-write. Trying to find that magical combination of words that makes the scene work is truly thrilling. It’s not something I could probably do if I was the director and having to make a thousand different decisions on top of that.
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.
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