Thanks, and we hope you enjoy!

Remnants: Season 1 – Complete from COGfilm on Vimeo.

About the Series:

REMNANTS is a post-apocalyptic thriller that focuses on the lives of a single family amidst the horror of a nuclear holocaust on American soil.

We’re having a party and you’re invited!

As a way of celebrating the completion of Season 1 (and the soon commencement of Season 2), we’re going to have a wee shindig.

Held at Planet Altered, it’s going to be a casual gathering of friends, cast, crew, and anyone who would like to see Remnants projected on a bigger screen than their computer.  The entire season will be edited into a single feature which will run about an hour (a little under, actually).  There will be showings at 8pm, 9pm, and 10pm.  So if you can’t make one, come to another.  And don’t feel like you have to stick around the entire night.  Come for a show, tell us how amazing we are, then head off into the Chattanooga night to get into what mischief you can find.

There may be a Q & A between the showings.  I’m not against it but I’m not going to force it on anyone.

If you’re not sure where Planet Altered is located, click here.  It should give you some pretty decent directions.

If you have nothing better to do, come on down and support some Chattanooga artists who have a story to tell.

The Road to Damascus: A REMNANTS Interlude from Scott Fogg on Vimeo.

15 days after the bombings and 7 days after the events that took place at the Fisher house . . . the Internet has been restored. People are allowed to travel once again. Phone lines have been reopened. But the safest way to communicate remains delivering messages by hand.

All I can say to those questions is, I know the answers but I’m not telling you.

Yet.

We’re pushing forward with this story.  On Friday, August 13th, we’re going to shoot the next chapter.  It’ll be a single episode story arc involving some new faces as well as one familiar, returning face.  It’ll bridge a bit of the gap between Season 1 and Season 2, setting up multiple story arcs that we’ll be exploring with the next 10 episodes.  And all that can be said about those 10 episodes is that they’ll be bigger, longer, and feature many more characters.  Because ultimately, Season 1′s relationship to the overall story is the same relationship your little toe has with the rest of your body.

So here’s to the future.  Hopefully it’ll be a bit brighter than the one we’re exploring in Remnants.

Remnants: Episode 9 from COGfilm on Vimeo.

Part 2 of the Season 1 finale.

About the Series:

REMNANTS is a post-apocalyptic thriller that focuses on the lives of a single family amidst the horror of a nuclear holocaust on American soil.

Remnants: Episode 8 from COGfilm on Vimeo.

Frank and his posse head into action. Part 1 of the season finale.

About the Series:

REMNANTS is a post-apocalyptic thriller that focuses on the lives of a single family amidst the horror of a nuclear holocaust on American soil.

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.

On that note, what does it take to successfully produce a project?  What does the role demand, and how does the process change once the actors and director have their hands on it?

My approach to producing is to make sure that everyone has what they need — or in the other words, to make sure that everyone was able to focus exclusively on the task at hand. I didn’t want the director to have to worry about the location. I didn’t want the actors worrying about the props. I didn’t want anybody but myself losing sleep over scheduling the shoot. To do that, I had to sit down and outline what needed to be done to make Remnants a reality and then outline the responsibilities of every crew member and actor. Whatever things didn’t fall naturally to one person to do, became my responsibility.

Those responsibilities evolved over time. Certain responsibilities, for example, are only needed during pre-production and don’t carry over into production. Same thing goes for post-production. There are specific concerns and needs for every stage of production, and I feel it’s my job to always make sure everyone is not only doing their job, but has everything they need to do their job to their utmost.

That was my approach. It took a lot of energy and robbed me of a lot of sleep, but it was also one of the more satisfying jobs I’ve ever had.

Lets talk about writing some more.  Where did the story for Remnants come from, what was the writing process like, and what surprised you about the writing process?

Remnants came from my desire to tell a big story on the smallest budget possible. I began working on the script that would become Remnants three years ago. Originally it was going to be a feature film. At that time, it had been two years since I had graduated from film school and I was getting restless. I wanted to work on a film and I wanted to do it as soon as humanly possible. The problem was (and continues to be) that I had no money to spend on a feature film. So I asked myself, “what’s the biggest idea you can think of that could be told on the smallest conceivable scale possible?” Naturally the answer was the end of society as we know it.

The first draft was about 137 pages long and the fall of the American republic was seen from the lowest of the low, a dropout named Derek Fisher. The exciting thing about it was being to able to explore exactly how it would look from the ground level. So many times in history books, the fall of the Roman Empire is glossed over by “Caesar was replaced by a group of warring generals who never got along but then things got better.” That’s a great way to sum it up on in a sentence, but what would that power struggle look like on the ground level? Take away the scope, take away the political visions and ideas, what are the ramifications of a sudden political power mean to the common man? So while the point-of-view of the story was dictated by our lack of budget, it became a really fascinating and thought-provoking thing to me.  Most movies and TV shows don’t really focus on people completely removed from the situation. I think the closest thing I can think of that has ever done something akin to that is Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, where we got to see how drugs and drug trafficking effected multiple people on various levels and from different walks of life (though, now that I think about it, I suppose that was Kim Bauer’s entire purpose during the early seasons of 24 as well). But we were never going to see the White House. We were never going to spend time with the men and women who were making the decisions that were affecting the common man. We were going to stay with the common man and see it through his eyes.

I drafted the script down to 117 pages, which was a much more manageable length. But we still lacked a budget. So we got a few of our friends together one Sunday and shot the opening sequence. The idea was we would shoot the opening sequence, edit it, and then present it to investors, basically saying, “we need your money to tell the rest of the story.” But we never got that far. After we had the opening sequence (what became episode 1) edited into something presentable, something clicked. I’m not sure who thought of it or who said it first, but Loren and I realized just how quickly and easily we had been able to produce a five-minute short film — and we had done it for free. “What if,” one of us said, “we did something like this instead of a feature film? What if we take this story and turn it into a web series? We shoot it episodically and release it on a weekly basis?”

We loved it so I scrapped my 117 page script and re-wrote the entire thing, this time with five-minute episodes in mind. It’s the same story it’s ever been, but telling a story in five minute episodes is a far different thing than asking someone to sit down for two hours and go on a journey with you. I basically took the script and chopped it into two. The first part, which made up the script’s first fifteen pages, would be expanded into ten five-minute episodes. The second part, the other 100 pages, would become Season 2. At first glance that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but when looking at the structure of the story, and the locations involved and the cast that would be needed, that was the best stopping (and then starting) point.

What was fun about that was certain characters suddenly became more relevant and more interesting. Originally, for example, we were never going to see Derek and Annabelle’s mom. She was just going to be a voice on the phone. But given this opportunity, we were able to expand her role and make something really compelling. It’s through her we’re able to catch a glimpse of the world outside of the Fisher home. It’s also by spending time with Robin that we can see what kind of home Derek and Annabelle are coming from and what kind of morals and standards they’ve been imbued with. That was perhaps some of the most exciting and surprising stuff to come out of the new format. Seeing characters who were once just background voices or plot devices become living, breathing people who were important in their own right.

The original idea was to have ten episodes, but after outlining the events of the first season, we realized Episode 8 served no purpose, so it was dropped. Season 1 now only has nine episodes, but Season 2 will have ten. I’ve already been working that out and every episode is necessary and is packed with all sorts of goodness.

How is writing a web series different than a feature script?

It’s the same difference television shows and movies have. Movies are about finding answers. Within the first ten to fifteen minutes you present a problem and the rest of the movie is dedicated to solving that problem. Television, on the other hand, is a long series of questions. As soon as you provide a definitive answer, the show is over. So while certain answers might be provided, there has always got to be another question being raised.

The most obvious example of this is, of course, LOST. But every show operates under this, really. It’s just on a smaller scale:  Will Ross and Rachel ever hook up? Will Mal ever admit his feelings for Inara?

So it took a slight restructuring of the story to make it fit this mold. We couldn’t provide just a straight narrative, that wouldn’t be interesting. We needed to compel people to come back the following week, so I made sure to sprinkle questions throughout the episodes — and usually ending each episode with a giant question mark. Finding a way to do that, and make it feel natural, was a bit of a trick, but since we’re facing nuclear holocaust within the first three minutes of the show, there are a lot of questions that very naturally spring to mind.

As you move towards other writing projects, what have you learned about writing a web series that you didn’t know before you started?  How will your next series be different?

I think we misjudged our audience.

We didn’t think that people would be interested in sitting at their computer for ten to fifteen minutes to watch the show, so we followed the Guild model and made our episodes average a length of five minutes. The problem with that is that The Guild is a comedy show, and so each episode is presented as a sketch. A five minute episode is all you need to get in, get a laugh, and get out. For something more dramatic, the episode needs to be longer. We need to spend a little more time with our characters, so we can connect with them. We need to spend a little more time in this world so we can feel the weight of the situation. Getting in and out in five minutes just isn’t enough time.

So for future series, I’ll be more conscious of the relationship between the length and the genre. If we do something comedic, I’ll keep it tight and fast. If we do something more dramatic, I’ll let the scripts breathe a little bit more. I think the ideal length for a Remnants episode would be closer to 10 to 15 minutes.

Scott Fogg is a writer living in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  He, as his wife puts it, supports his writing career by serving as the video game director at McKay Used Books & CD’s.

Remnants: Episode 7 from COGfilm on Vimeo.

With his neighbors acting so suspiciously, Frank is forced into action.

About the Series:

REMNANTS is a post-apocalyptic thriller that focuses on the lives of a single family amidst the horror of a nuclear holocaust on American soil.

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:

1. Lack of technical skill.
2. 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:
3. 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.
4. 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