Brendon Connelly is one of my dearest friends and a phenomenally, relentlessly talented writer, artist and puzzle designer. I talked to him about Rez High, his Neon Inkwell series, how to use school stories to tell post-apocalyptic stories and much more.
Could you talk a little about some of the show’s inspirations? I’m seeing Grange Hill obviously but I’m sure there’s a lot of other stuff under the hood
In the aftermath of The Hunger Games, there were plenty of reviews and essays comparing YA dystopias and high school anxieties. I especially remember Laura Miller’s Fresh Hell and Emma Cueto’s Dystopian YA: Is it about high school or the apocalypse? The initial spark for Rez High was the idea I might find something in flipping these things around to make a ‘normal school’ into a playground for apocalyptic anxieties. We are, you will have noticed, at a point in history where apocalyptic anxieties are quite natural and we don’t need them to be metaphors for anything at all. We’re in a time where Mant and Godzilla resonate at least as much as Divergent or Uglies.
But it’s been a while since I was in high school myself. The last thing I wanted to do was be nostalgic about it. It was a short hop from flinching at nostalgia to the idea for a character, and from there to a story. This line of thinking is why, from the moment we meet her, Jo-C believes the answers to her society’s problems are in the past (god only knows plenty of people run around fooling themselves with this). Remember the past, hell yeah. Try to recreate it? Oof.
Jo-C looks at a virtual interpretation of a 1979 comprehensive school as if it contains the way forward for her society. We can safely say I don’t share her point of view, exactly, but I was there in 1979 schools myself – meanwhile, she’s got to learn the hard way!
I remember William Gibson saying his early sci-fi was inspired by David Bowie and Lou Reed, and that notion went straight into the pot too. In my personal 1979, when I was in primary school, a bit too young to attend a school like Rez High, Bowie felt futuristic and exciting to me, but also very modern, of the moment. To this day All The Young Dudes sounds like a documentary about what I saw in my neighbourhood.
Bowie’s Drive-In Saturday is a sci-fi song born around the same time as me, set in a far distant future but fashioned in the style of something from his past, complete with deliberate 1950s-style musical tropes. That’s exactly what I was doing with Rez High. I invented a future from the basics of current thinking about climate apocalypse but then mixing in Mad Max, Diamond Dogs, even Zoids. River Mill is in an apocalyptic I’ve perceived through a kind of 1979 vantage point, at least as much as I could think myself back to there.
Bowie became a huge influence on the show and it’s absolutely full of references to his work – not just the most obvious, like the dome, sylvian fissure and Buddy from Drive-In Saturday.
You have a fantastic cast, and they clearly get the material completely. Did you have a role in the casting process?
I had a few ideas and suggestions. I knew Beth Eyre would be great as one of the two NPC voices, and I was thrilled that’s how it worked out in the end. I believe that real credit for the casting should be one of the many, many things we thank Lucy Wray, the director for. Lucy found Lozza, George, Beth Alsbury and others from auditions, and – if I recall correctly – knew Olivia Hirst already, and was therefore able to bring a perfect Jo-C to the party. Lucy also recruited Katie Norris for the later episodes and it’s impossible to say too much without spoiling one of the biggest casting surprises (present company excepted) but… well now. Olivia and Katie have some scenes together and they are just extraordinarily exciting.
And did you make changes ‘towards’ the actors once you had them?
Lucy and I talked after the casting was complete and there were nudges here and there, and a few lines were rewritten, but I think the fit between cast and characters was so good, and Lucy had made the matches so astutely, that it was really down to what they all did together during recording.
You are one of the biggest puzzle fans I know and I really enjoyed the puzzle in episode 3. How many did you come up with?
There just aren’t enough puzzles in our fiction! There’s so much untapped potential.
Several of the Rez High missions riff on early video games, especially Skool Daze, by David and Helen Reidy and Keith Warrington, and even more especially that game’s plot point of breaking into the head’s safe. Creating something for an audio drama that the listener can play along with immediately rules out plenty of approaches, but I knew I could do something based around combinations and give clues to the combination in a way the audience are able to join in with, if they want to.
I created a couple of different puzzles for Rez High. The one you mention had a bunch of iterations, but was always ostensibly the same puzzle. Different versions gave me different ‘bits and pieces’ to play with in the rest of the story, so I chose the one that worked best for callbacks and tie-ins. It also underwrites some of the thinking about the gap between our world and River Mill.
There’s another puzzle in the last episode. I needed this one to be much tougher and to also fit the story in certain ways – perhaps I can say it relates to the first puzzle or what happens around it without spoiling too much? I took a different process here. I created a few very different puzzles and tested them all, and the ones that nobody could solve were rejected as ‘unfair and unfun’. Hopefully I’ve got something tough but crackable – and you can get a little help with it from the story itself, certainly if you’re expecting me to do set ups and callbacks. Which I am. I can’t help myself.
You do an incredible job of painting a picture of the kids’ present without being overly expository. What were the challenges there? And what did you especially enjoy?
Most of the details are the ones I needed for storytelling reasons. The kids need somewhere private to go – where might that be? The threat needs to escalate as the story goes on – what helps with that? A discussion about, say, the food they eat happens over here, and that creates a reference point I knew I should then use again later.
This thinking gives these invented elements dimension and roots them in. We can look at Zootrons, for example. ‘Zootron’ is just a word at first, and then it’s more clear what that word refers to, and then that thing becomes a problem for the characters, and then we can build further from there. The process by which Zootrons became part of the story as I write started with the ‘problem’ part, where they were going to be something the characters had to deal with, but then I treated them as a real part of the world so they started popping up in conversation elsewhere, including way back in the first episode.
I suppose this exemplifies my approach to worldbuilding – there’s a story point that needs something concrete, so I work out what that needs to be. Then I know this newly created concrete thing will factor into the world in other ways, and I let it do so. I guess it’s a kind of ‘story up’ worldbuilding.
I love how familiar in game functions are slightly differently named (‘bank’ not ‘save’ especially) how much of Rez High as a game did you map out?
I plot everything with index cards, and when it’s something as extensive as Rez High – six episodes but the running time of eight, thanks to extended opening and closing episodes – those cards take up a lot of real estate. Two walls in my bedroom, in fact.
One ‘thread’ I charted on the cards was Reflex’s series of enhancements to the Rez High machine. Based on no experience with video games whatsoever, they are able to create a few basic QOL tools based entirely on how useful they would be. Reflex improves upon Rez High in many different ways as we go… and then we get to pay those improvements off, letting them mean something significant to the overall story, having the characters actually put them to use.
It amuses me to think the game probably already had pause and save functions, but because there’s no instruction manual, Reflex just went ahead and invented their own. It would be spoilery to say too much but I think I can tease that Reflex’s fixes go a bit deeper than even some real-life game developers are prepared to. This is not at all incidental to what the entire show ends up being about…
I made a quick list of possible mission types and tropes from school-based games right at the start of the process, in order to get a lot of them logged in my mind. Then I followed the story, and drew on my internalised list of ideas to grab the ones I needed. That’s when I fleshed them out accordingly.
The last mission briefing we hear is the last one I invented, and because of its place in the story it works a little differently to the others. That didn’t stop me sliding a couple of double meanings in there.
The mid season shift in focus with Kamet and Quartz becoming so vital and the focus suddenly shifting a little more to the present day of the story is GREAT I know you love the rhythm of fiction and I was curious how you mapped all that out?
One of the few promises I made to myself early on is that I would get the story going quickly. That’s why episode one gets a whole mission in before the end credits, as well as the tutorial, and lots of real-world River Mill story too. I didn’t want even a whiff of Surf Dracula to any of this, not even the delay of an inciting incident to the end of the first episode. I want my first episode to feel like an episode, not table setting or some kind of prologue.
I was very cognisant of there being different episodes when structuring the story, and thought about how to use the episode endings and beginnings. As well as giving the whole thing a shape, I wanted each episode to have a shape too. We might as well call it a three act structure – to each episode, and to the whole thing – that’s as good a label as anything else.
I’m a big believer in midpoints – that is to say, a meaningful pivot in the middle. This meant I wanted to end episode 3 out of 6 on something that changed the game for Jo-C, my protagonist. Here’s what I mean by this specifically, with some vague shapes of ambiguous spoilers: if Jo-C is right about the rules of the game, what she does in episode 3 should mean she wins the prize she has been chasing. She doesn’t win in the way she expects – and therefore she has to reconsider exactly what the rules of the game might be. This changes her approach in the second half of the story, leading to what she does in episode five especially. Rather than the first half of the story being the easy way and then the second being the hard way, I like to think of a midpoint as a turning point from the hard way to the even harder way.
Crucial to the structure is Jo-C putting more and more on the line in pursuit of her prize. First, she smuggles the Rez High unit into River Mill. It’s a transgression, but a minor one. Then she takes a couple of steps of escalating risks, connecting this old and malfunctioning piece of tech to people’s brains, even pressing ahead as some of the dangers become very apparent and more pronounced. She’s constantly taking steps further and further into risk, sometimes obviously and sometimes less so – and sometimes in ways we only understand closer to the end of the story – because that prize is so important to her. It’s world changing, in fact. This kind of ‘step escalation’ lends itself very well to a multi-episode structure.
But also, when the final episode comes around, and all of the pieces are in play for the final set of interlinked conflicts, I wanted them to have arrived in position by means of story – through the characters having little arcs of their own to get them to the end. It was all about finding stories that motivate the characters while informing the audience about them, and also letting those stories have their own shape, meaning, and relevance to the themes. That’s a really fussy way of saying everybody has their own arc, their own plot thread, and they all come together to make episode 6 what it is.
Hopefully this might also mean that a re-listen gives extra colour to the supporting characters’ early scenes.
Confession time: I picture the Zootrons as Zoids. Not a question but I felt I should share:)
And so do I!
My favourite beat in the entire story is the one you hide in plain sight concerning one of the other kids. Could you talk a little about the inspiration and thinking behind that?
I wanted the in-game story to be one and the same as the out-of-game story from the very beginning of writing, so I started by thinking about possible ways in which they might relate. There’s some real-world jeopardy later in the story that comes about through a combination of real-world and in-game choices, and that was the start of the thinking that led me to what you’re discussing here.
All sorts of choices were impacted by this. For example, the kind of names in the ‘present day’ River Mill story (Jo-C, Dogwood, Reflex) as compared to the names of fictional characters inside the Rez High game (Tricia, Benny, Robbie). I messed about with the boundary between these ‘name classes’, playing with names that might just be misheard (and are actually misheard in-fiction), nicknames like Mad Monk, or names that might well have been deliberate references made by Rez High’s creators, like Pixie Brown.
It also influenced the casting and voice acting in a way that is totally self-evident to most listeners, certainly those in the present day UK, but would mean nothing to the River Millers.
Each of the three leads from River Mill has their own arc, all related, but each informed by their different interests, outlooks, biases. Jo-C, for example, spends the story thinking the answers to her problems are in the past, that they just need to be dredged up from under the water; Reflex thinks about the moment, and keeping things running in the here and now; and Dogwood is always looking for something new, driving forward, hunting fresh experiences and progress. The choice you are talking about entwines with one of these arcs especially closely… and to say too much more would be a spoiler.
My other favourite constellation of beats are the way the show explores identity. Kamet starting out as a grumpy badass and confessing his eyesight is fading. Reflex’s wonderful conversation with their Mum and the awful, dystopian thing done to a wheelchair. How did you find using Rez High as a lens to focus in on and explore those issues?
Video games can be very plastic, allowing us to experience and experiment with change, and to model and express identity, and often in a very receptive culture, much better than some other arenas. This thinking is absolutely at the heart of Rez High for me. This is my story that asks who gets to make the world, and in what image they choose to make it – and then asks what the rest of us can do about it.
I did want to write about accessibility in video games, and I do think it’s crucially important, but accessibility in real life is a bigger issue to me personally, and presses on my mind much more. What I realised, though, is that the makers of video games often do better in tackling access issues than the makers of the real world. I created plot points to kick all of this thinking around.
One read of the ending could be somewhat open ended, but I viewed it more as the end of a chapter or process. Everyone ‘graduates’ Rez High in a very different place and I especially liked how so much it became a grounding exercise or so for the leads as they realised who they really were. The postmodern way you use a game about a high school to do that is really impressive and I’d love it if you’d chat a little about how you approached that side of the show and if there are plans for more.
The way Neon Inkwell works, I pitched this as a complete story from the very beginning. Having said that, I wouldn’t pitch any season of anything without giving the story a definite end that works as a final-final-goodbye. I see too many things cut off on a cliffhanger to dice with that.
I know how to bring Rez High back to tell another story, mind you. And if I did, it would end again, and that ending would feel like closure to the whole two-season story. Then I’d do the same for a third, and so on.
My audio drama Circles was also a complete story but when I first pitched that, the producer asked ‘And what would season two be? And season three?’ It’s a good way of looking at the potential for returning shows. Can you tell a complete story? If so, you’ve got a story. Can you then carry on and tell another complete story? Great, then you’ve got season two, or a sequel.
Katharine Seaton, who composed the fantastic music and did all of the post production, from on-point dialogue editing to exquisite and innovative sound design, was on a panel with me last year and we talked publicly then about the ending of the show. She compared it to a fairy tale, with its paradigm of characters leaving home, then returning home with new knowledge. That’s true, and so is your observation about graduating school – the ending of a story is usually a significant rite of passage, I think. Satisfying endings at least.
I thought a lot about the past being ‘under water’ and Jo-C going further and further to look for ‘history’. It starts in the cave with her going under the water and coming back with Rez High, and every time they come back out of the game they catch their breath like they were resurfacing. There’s also the small matter of going ‘under the surface’ of Rez High’s virtual world to look deeper there too, and I put some images to do with this thinking in the dialogue, here and there. Maybe the listener feels them. Maybe there’s a little nudge.
I did want all of the characters to have arcs that tied into the central theme but which are also true, in a sense of being ‘human’ and relatable. Jo-C is definitely our protagonist, but Dogwood and Reflex are, I guess you’d say, deuteragonists and I wanted to respect them and their stories, also to some extent Livia, Kamet, Quartz and Mrs Seven, despite the relatively small amount of ‘eartime’ they were able to take. I think writers have a responsibility to their audience to breathe life into their characters, and a responsibility to the theme to at least consider all of the characters through its lens.
What’s next for you?
My murder mystery about murder mystery cliches, Done to Death, will air on Radio 4 soon. I don’t think I’m allowed to say when. But soon. It stars Saffron Coomber as Asta Norris, ‘the Wednesday Addams of the Wickleford Whodunnit book club.’ Tamzin Merchant, Caleb Obediah, Liz Carr, Cerrie Burnell, Nina Wadia and Pete Gold are all in it too. Look at that cast. Bloody hell. Two dynamite casts in a row.
I love murder mysteries and Done to Death is my tribute to their power and potential. It’s not a pastiche or parody, it’s quite sincerely an ambitious mystery, with original ideas and no pulled punches. It’s also about a lot of other things I can’t even hint at because that might spoil the mystery. I hope detective drama lovers find Done to Death because this is their show. It’s a love letter straight from my heart to my fellow mystery buffs, and it’s absolutely crammed full of clues that reward close listening. If people hear it, and like it, and tell the BBC, then there could be more…
I’m bursting to do some comics and hope to find the right illustrators to get some short pieces done and out there, or some pitches for bigger things. And I’m always looking for more places to tell stories in audio. If you’re reading this and your podcast might need a writer or co-writer, then maybe I’m the right fit! Come and say hello.
Thanks so much to Brendon for talking to me!
Rez High is available now, and you can find more of Brendon‘s projects here.