‘Sophie’s Story’ Animated short film by Shroomstudio
Sophie’s Story started with an idea, a few ideas. We wanted to make a film about addiction to help demystify the ‘emotive’ nature of the concept.
Addiction is a commonly used term to describe habit forming behaviours and includes a wide range of substances and activities from food to gambling, sex, even work, whose addicts are called workaholics for their inability to switch off from the office.
While it’s true that anything taken to extremes can negatively affect your life, the effects of narcotics addiction or alcohol can be the most stark for the user. While it’s also true that gambling addicts can lose everything they own and workaholics can often lose sight of their lives outside of the office, addiction to hard drugs is a dangerous physical addiction which can result in death from overdose, serious health problems and in extreme cases, cause death from sudden abstinence.
We felt as filmmakers that addiction is often misunderstood and most of what the media says about addiction either trivialises or sensationalises it, couching it in absolute terms of poverty, bad choices and lack of education.
Discourse on addiction is most often portrayed in fiction where stereotypes can be used thoughtlessly for the purpose of a story’s motivation. In other non fiction media, we often hear from the judiciary, policy makers and health professionals, whose objective observations can be clinical and statistics heavy.
We wanted to make a film from a user perspective. We wanted to find out the answer to 3 key questions.
- What are the background factors leading to addiction ?
- What is life really like as an addict ?
- What is the catalyst for change in a user’s life; leading to rehabilitation ?
So we got in touch with a local charity and they put us in touch with Sophie, who had recently been through a residential rehabilitation programme and was beginning a new chapter in her life, without drugs. Sophie agreed to tell us her story. She was keen to help by sharing her experiences, knowing that it might inspire others and also as a way to thank the people who had helped her along her incredible journey.
I arranged to meet Sophie and we discussed the project. (I explained what I have just written above) and we chatted, got to know each other a bit more. I couldn’t quite believe this was a woman who had spent most of her adult life addicted to crack cocaine. She looked strong, healthy, happy and with a big generous smile. It immediately gave me a sense of wonder about how she had managed to survive her ordeals, seemingly intact !
I gave her a list of questions to think about and we agreed to meet two weeks later. By this time, Sophie had written extensive notes about her many experiences. We sat down and I pressed record on the digital audio recorder, adjusted my headphones..
Sophie asked where I wanted to start and I thought it best to start at the the beginning. Her recall of her entire life story was fascinating and as we talked about her experiences, there was a a certain clarity about how Sophie had remembered and analysed her own Story. It is often said, the most important part of our well being comes from the stories we tell ourselves and Sophie’s honesty was refreshing and insightful.
She seemed keenly aware about how her early life had contributed to her direction in life and was neither bitter or cynical about how circumstances had led her down certain paths. She was also honest about how she had at times enjoyed her life for it’s freedom and the intense ‘buzz’ of being high, but also aware of how her use of drugs had been a way to switch off her emotions and the pain of her past and present life.
As we talked through the questions list, I sat, listened and recorded, knowing that certain things Sophie was saying would most likely make it into the edit.
It’s an odd sensation when interviewing a participant, that what they say often directly answers the question in your mind and you kind of log it there and then. When you begin to cut the tapes, those parts immediately stick out as significant.
Her story began to sound increasingly startling and I knew I couldn’t tell the whole story in a short film. I would have to start making difficult editorial choices about what was important to the story and what could be left out. This led to some long hours in the headphones while I made sense of the story without leaving out key moments.
Some fantastic and insightful anecdotes didn’t make it into the 6 minute cut, there were also moments where I felt a particular episode may be entertaining but didn’t lend itself well to the overall arch of the story and I somehow felt there was probably a much longer story to be told, but not in this short film. (Truth is indeed stranger than fiction).. I wasn’t banking on the fact that Sophie’s Story read like a screenplay for a gripping ‘true drama’.
Yes, I had set out to find a single protagonist story, one with a heroic arch and a true story belonging to a strong woman. It felt like Sophie’s Story had found me. Her answers amply furnished my questions with nuanced and detailed reason. I knew the film would be able to at least, achieve what we set out to do.
When I got back to the studio, I played the tapes to the animation team and they began to get a feel for the mood and tone. I spent about 5–6 weeks editing the 4 hour tapes down to 20 minutes, then 10, then 6.
It was a difficult process knowing that material on the cutting room floor, so to speak would make the film a better story. As animation is a long process and the funding for this film was almost nothing, we had to make hard choices.
Once the 6 minute cut was locked, we sat down and had a 2 day production meeting where we discussed in fine detail how to design and build each shot.
It was a very creative couple of days and I recently found the original document we made. It stayed quite true to what we had decided.
The film took a long time to make, in between a raft of commercial projects.
We worked on scenes and sections, put the project in the box, ( the backup hard drives) then got it out again when we had a quiet week and then back in the box, and so on..
When there were only a few holes left in the edit, I eventually sat down and created a natural sound bed, which is fitting for a true story and a personal preference of mine for animation. I had recorded some street sounds around East London with Alexis Bamforth and they formed the main background sound. For animation, the sound really is the 4th wall and the ceiling too. I also have an extensive archive of SFX and so dipped into them, recording the custom sounds, where required.
We eventually put the finishing touches to the film, Alex who art directed the film and animated large sections of it, stitched together the final sequence, adding in the different animators sections in addition to his own sequences and then we added final credits at the end of February with completion date as 1st March 2016.
We prepared a DCP and high-res version of the film for film festival submission, which is a job in itself. Filling in endless forms helps when you have the synopsis, stills, directors biography, press release and trailer already to hand !
Although we were disappointed to hear back from the East End Film Festival as it’s very first notification; a rejection.. (we were after all East End Film makers), we were pleased when we heard selection news from quite a few other festivals including Raindance 2016, Linoleum, London International Animation Festival, Full Bloom among others. Sophie’s Story won Best Animation at it’s first showing at San Francisco Film Festival and we’re hoping to develop a series of films or a longer form film about addiction.
here’s the link to the film on Vimeo
Christos :)
