The Cult

The Cult is the second episode of the first season of the American-Canadian series High Schooled.

Summary
Derek and Ryan must face the Hunters, a video game cult led by the evil Frederick of which Sean is a member of. Derek, at the request of Sean, let them into his home, and he and Ryan must outsmart the Hunters to reclaim his house.

Cast

 * Derek de Jong as Derek Lipton
 * Nicholas Merchant as Ryan Brahmer
 * Paul Ingersoll as Sean Riley
 * Ariadne Merchant as Amanda Lipton
 * Rhys Lewis as Frederick
 * Lee Friedman as Carl Lieberman

Story
Episode 2 of High Schooled was initially planned as the introduction of Lauren, the show's planned fourth main character, as a regular part of the ensemble. In the spring of 2016, a script was written by Jeff Henderson for episode 2 based off an outline by Nicholas Merchant that was itself based on a story idea thought of by Michael Buford. The basic story was about Derek, Ryan, and Lauren skipping school for a day. However, this script was written before the pilot was released, and Merchant felt the characters' depictions were very different from what they were supposed to be. This led to his decision to rewrite the entire script, without using elements from Henderson's script.

Merchant created a detailed outline and wrote the majority of the episode, but as it was being worked on, he was worried that, even though the story itself was vastly different from the pilot, the general structure and plot beats were too similar to that of the pilot's. In addition, as the rest of the season was being planned out, it became clear the Lauren character wasn't fitting in as well as it was initially planned. This, coupled with poor test screenings for Lauren's scenes from the pilot, led to Lauren being removed from the show entirely. Her scenes in the pilot (which had already been shot and edited) were cut, and both Henderson and Merchant's drafts for episode 2 were scrapped.

The removal of Lauren led to the episode falling massively behind schedule. Although there was an attempt to simply swap out Lauren for Sean in Merchant's draft, the characters' roles were very different and the episode would have required another full rewrite to be successful. It was instead decided to throw out not only the scripts but also the story idea and instead create a new story for the episode that worked more towards Sean's strengths. This story idea took over two months to conceptualize and have a scene by scene outline written, which was eventually completed in early June 2016.

Script
Already behind schedule by over two months, and with no script having been started yet, another issue arose on June 8th, 2016: Paul Ingersoll, who played Sean, would have to permanently leave production of the show by the end of the month. With the removal of Lauren, Sean was supposed to become the third main character and the episode's plot, centered around a video game cult that Sean was a member of, was largely selected to showcase Sean's strengths as a character. In order to include Sean, the production schedule would have to be greatly rushed, as the normal 3-5 months it takes to write and shoot an episode would have to be accomplished in less than four weeks.

In order for this to be accomplished, Nicholas Merchant decided to skip a dedicated writing phase and go directly to shooting the episode. Merchant would stay up until 4 AM writing the scene that was supposed to be filmed that day, and would then begin filming 11 AM the same day. This schedule, although it sped up production substantially, meant there wasn't a complete draft of the script until the final day of filming. Merchant considers this script the weakest of the series, as the scenes had been written out of order, in the middle of the night, without any time for revision or the ability to read the complete work.

Filming
Although the production period was greatly compressed, it was still impossible to film all the planned scenes. By the end of the month, an important scene in the middle of episode, involving all the characters, was not filmed. It would have been normal procedure to schedule another shoot, but since this was not possible, the middle of the episode had to be entirely rewritten, removing Sean and Carl from it. This led to the kitchen, initiation, and lock out scene, which all relied heavily on Frederick, and were not in the original outline.

In addition, there was no margin for error during shoots, and if something had not been shot by the end of the shoot at 5 PM, there was little opportunity to make it up. This proved especially disastrous for the climactic confrontation scene, as the cast had only ten minutes to film it with Paul Ingersoll and Lee Friedman. They shot their lines of dialogue seperately and then left. At another shoot, the same problem was run into again, and Rhys Lewis had only around 5 minutes to complete the scene, so his lines of dialogue were given to him individually, and he would recite them one by one, since there was no time for him to memorize and perform the entire scene at once. Finally, Merchant and de Jong filmed their portions of the scene. The final scene was a mashup of these three shoots, and outtakes were used to give the illusion of Sean and Carl's presence during portions they did not have time to film.

Additionally, de Jong was sick with the flu during the major shoot with Rhys Lewis; the day the kitchen, outdoor, break in, and final confrontation scenes were intended to be filmed. Since it was the final day Lewis would be available to film, de Jong came and filmed his portions, but would have to lay down between takes. Eventually, de Jong did not feel well enough to stay awake, and so only Lewis's portions of the scenes were shot, with de Jong's lines filmed during a later shoot.

Editing
Once filming had been complete, it became clear the episode ran greatly over the intended length of 12 minutes. It was decided to split the episode into two parts in order for each part to be of normal length. The extended runtime can largely be blamed on the script writing process: with no time for revisions, superfluous dialogue and plot detours that would have normally been corrected during writing remained in the episode. Part 1 met its planned release date of August 25, 2016, but part 2, which was supposed to be released two weeks later, was delayed by three months to December 15, 2016. Although Merchant had little confidence in in the climactic scene, given its rushed writing and fractured shooting process (each actor only had about five minutes on different days, and filmed their lines seperately), he was ultimately pleased with the quality of the final product.