We covered season one of Caledonia on #WebSeriesWednesday previously. The main take away from the last go around was that the show is based off of a series of books based upon Scottish folklore written by creator Amy Hoff but ultimately that production was marred by a long series of technical issues.
Now fast forward about a year later and season two has now been filmed with the help of Tachy Studios, a small production company who saw the same promise and trouble with season one.
Meanwhile, the first book in Hoff’s “Caledonia” series has been published by Crooked Cat Books, and is due for a release in 2015.
A lot can happen in a year, so could “Caledonia” take a great leap forward? I think the answer to that is rather complex, but put simply, “pretty much yes.”
The premiere shows tons of improvement in the visuals. The lighting and camera work in the premiere is solid if unspectacular. There is also a sort of music video up on the youtube channel that highlights assorted clips from this season. From the looks of it the production design has made a big jump as well. For this season not only is the show filmed in Glasgow, but there are scene filmed in Seoul Korea where Amy makes her part time residence.
The show is not completely cleansed of all of the issues that plagued season one, but my current crop of complaints can certainly be debated, and with just one new episode under their belt I would not be surprised if I found these issues to not be issues after all by the end of season two. Of course I still have to mention them!
First, and this one I think is just going to continue to be an issue throughout the series, there is a bit of a learning curve for the story. Season one had me confused until I read up more on the folklore the show is based upon on the Caledonia website. That background information is a must, and beyond that I can’t imagine just jumping right into season two without first experiencing season one. The viewer has to put in a little effort.
My other nit picks might be hotly contested because I formed most of them following one scene at the beginning that just didn’t work for me. I found it to be too long, visually uninteresting, slowly edited and awkwardly silent. The group in the chat during the viewing seemed to respond emphatically with “that’s the point of the scene!”
Ultimately that scene makes up a good bulk of the first episode, and left me concerned about a lack of sound design and proper editing going forward. That said, I can’t really point to any other areas in the rest of the episode that gave off this impression.
All in all though it’s great to see creators I’ve covered on here in the past growing in their talents and their careers. Hopefully we all keep heading in that direction.
New episodes of Caledonia are released on Mondays, with 9 more to go, and they can be found at http://caledoniaseries.co.uk