Kate Madison

• 1. Introduction

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  Kate Madison grew up in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, and by the age of four she was already performing on stage, pulled into her local amateur dramatic group by her mother. Few people who watched that small child act could have predicted she would one day direct a film seen by millions worldwide, on no formal film school training whatsoever. Madison went on to study zoology at Aberystwyth University, earning her degree, then looked at the path ahead and decided it was not hers. What drew her instead was a camera, a circle of collaborators in Cambridge, and an obsession with a few paragraphs buried in the notes of J. R. R. Tolkien. How does a zoology graduate with borrowed cameras and no budget produce a 71-minute fantasy epic that rivals the production values of professional releases? And what happens when that film earns millions of views and an audience hungry for whatever she makes next?

• 2. An Unlikely Education

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  The Netherhall School and Long Road Sixth Form College, both in Cambridge, gave Madison a conventional education, but the city itself gave her something more useful. After her zoology degree led to a dead end professionally, she discovered the Cambridge Filmmakers Network, known as CFN. Joining that network was the decision that reshaped her life. Through the CFN she became involved in her first two film projects, and through those projects she found the collaborators who would follow her for years.

  The first of those projects arrived in 2005 under the working title Into the Darkness. Madison co-wrote the screenplay for a story in which a young woman named Abigail, played by Jennie Fox, uncovers an ancient book coveted by Lucifer. Guardian angels circle to protect her. Filming had barely begun when the director was forced to return to the United States, specifically Tampa, Florida, and handed the entire operation to Madison. She told interviewer Jennie Kermode of Eye for Film that the experience was "very nerve-racking" and that she was "really in at the deep end." She also said it turned out to be a crash course in filmmaking. Two names she picked up in that crash course were Christopher Dane and Ollie Goodchild, both of whom would later appear in Born of Hope.

  Madison also established her company, Actors at Work Productions, in 2003. That infrastructure gave her the professional network she needed when a far more ambitious project began to take shape.

• 3. The Horsemen Detour

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  Between the chaos of Into the Darkness and the years-long production ahead, Madison and Christopher Dane made something lighter. They collaborated on a ten-minute short comedy built around the four horsemen of the Apocalypse sharing a pub. Dane played all four horsemen, Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death, each with a different costume and makeup look. Madison herself played the bewildered waitress who has no idea what to make of her customers. Carl Homer composed the music; Dane served as both producer and screenwriter. The film was whimsical by design and improbable by premise, and it cemented a working relationship between Madison and Dane that would prove central to everything that followed.

• 4. Building Born of Hope

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  Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films were Madison's gateway to Tolkien. She read Tolkien's own notes on his characters and found herself drawn to the sparse, tantalizing background of Aragorn. In an interview she recalled the moment of discovery: "When I was looking for a story to do I found those few paragraphs and the idea of a film about Aragorn's parents and where he came from seemed a great idea. Aragorn is such an important character in The Lord of the Rings but we know hardly anything about him until he turns up in The Prancing Pony in The Fellowship of the Ring."

  In 2003 a Tolkien fan film competition gave her the prompt she needed. She began recruiting from within Actors at Work Productions and through their referrals reached film professionals across England and beyond. A screenwriter was brought in to develop the storyline, though the script continued evolving and some scenes were rewritten during shooting itself. Location scouting took her to the West Stow Anglo-Saxon village, to Epping Forest where most scenes were ultimately filmed, and to the Welsh hills, a landscape she already knew from her college years at Aberystwyth.

  Money was the persistent problem. Madison used the bulk of her own savings to get the project off the ground and then called on donations to fund the rest. Every actor and every crew member worked without pay. By 2006 she had produced a trailer, which she screened at a Tolkien conference in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The trailer served simultaneously as a fundraising vehicle and a proof of concept. Principal photography did not begin until 2008. She told an interviewer in 2010 that camera operators mostly brought their own equipment, and she borrowed additional cameras from friends. From around the world, professionals volunteered special effects, film scoring, props, costumes, and cash to keep production alive.

• 5. Debut and Global Reach

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  Born of Hope runs 71 minutes and made its public debut at RingCon 2009 in Germany. Madison played Elgarain, a friend of Arathorn who, as she put it, "carries a torch" for him, a role that demanded serious acting commitment on top of every other responsibility she carried as director. She released the film via the internet, streaming first on Dailymotion and later on YouTube, as well as on the film's own dedicated website. Millions of views followed. That audience turned out to be more than a measure of curiosity; it became the foundation for what came next.

  Madison had played a character whose background was almost entirely unwritten by Tolkien, and in doing so she had written the character herself as co-creator of the entire production. The global response convinced her that the internet was not merely a distribution channel but the right home for the kind of storytelling she wanted to do.

• 6. Ren and the Crowdfunding Pivot

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  The success of Born of Hope led Madison to establish a second production company, Mythica Entertainment, specifically to produce online projects. Her first venture under that banner was Ren: The Girl with the Mark, a fantasy web series following a young girl whose face is marked by a spirit. The mark is neither clearly good nor evil, and Ren must find its meaning while dealing with the prejudice it brings. Having spent years scraping together funding for Born of Hope, Madison this time turned to Kickstarter. On the 20th of July 2013 she launched a campaign with a minimum goal of 35,000 pounds. By the 19th of August the goal had been surpassed, with 36,184 pounds raised.

  Season One comprises five ten-minute episodes. The production team spent the first half of 2014 on story development, location scouting, costume work, and assembling contributors. Filming for the season began in the second half of 2014 and wrapped by mid-November. The first episode reached Mythica Entertainment's YouTube channel in 2016. Madison told the Cambridge News that the web model suited her vision precisely: "It's a great way for an independent film-maker to do something relatively low budget and get it out there, and get people watching it. I like the fact that with the web anyone can watch what you make, and that's how it should be for me."

  The principal cast of Ren includes Sophie Skelton in the title role, Nick Cornwall as Dagron (Ren's father), James Malpas as Baynon (Ren's brother), Christopher Dane as Karn, Duran Fulton Brown as Hunter, Grace Parry as Dalia, Alan Hay as Tor Berry, Dita Tan Tang as Lyanna, and Richard Zeman as the Kah'Nath Commander. All five episodes are also available on DVD.