Unknown Speaker 0:00 Thank you for joining us for this episode of JRN 306 Talk tapes. I'm Anna Maria will buy it at a mono Hussaini Toronto Metropolitan University Image Arts students are preparing to premiere their thesis films on the big screen at the Winter Garden Theatre on April 29. And Frida in the Sky is the only animated film that will be screening at this year's premiere. Frida is a little girl who's a prodigy in engineering and wants to build a plane with her grandmother. Dani Sadoon is the director behind this film. She is a fourth year image art student who grew up in Ecuador and moved to Toronto to study filmmaking. Dani says she wanted to make sure her characters are realistic. That is why the character of Frida is actually based on Danny herself. Unknown Speaker 0:44 When I approached you sign of Frida, I wanted to make her look a little bit like me. So she's very short and taking advantage that she's eight year old, eight years old, they made her extra small, she looks like a little bean and she's adorable. And she wears glasses that are way too big for her head. Inspired by actually Chicken Little which was one of my favorite animated characters, they are green. That's why. And she always dresses in overalls and a pink shirt. Almost like Charlie Brown having the same shirt every day. Unknown Speaker 1:20 Dani was determined to avoid stereotypes with all the characters, she wanted to create an accurate portrayal of a South American family. Unknown Speaker 1:28 I purposely made the characters to be Latino. So I reflected in the production design in their character designs as well. So they look like me, because it's sort of nice to see characters that look like me reflected in animation, which doesn't usually happen. When you're leading a project you're sort of have this responsibility to create opportunities for your own culture, if you don't see reflected enough in film. So I took the advantage of doing that. Unknown Speaker 1:55 Dani was inspired by one of her first year professors Valerie Kaelin, who is an award winning cinematographer. She agrees with Dani on the importance of character representation. Valerie says that it's important for other details in the film to also be accurate. That's why Dani took direction from Valerie and spent a lot of time making sure that the sets and props in the film were meticulously designed to reflect a family's culture and identity. Unknown Speaker 2:22 I feel like that's an aspect that Production Designers should be very careful about when designing the set or environment of a film. I think the your culture really affects the way that you dress your home or how your your living room looks like. So I made sure to really look into how my own kitchen back in Ecuador looked like or how my own living room looked like back home. To portray that in my own film and sort of stay true to my own identity. Unknown Speaker 2:57 Just like the set is reflective of Dani's home back in Ecuador. The main plot of the story is centered around Dani's real family. Dani explained that the character of Abuela and her relationships with her daughter and granddaughter are very much based on Dani's grandmother. Dani and her grandmother were very close. The character of Abuela even looks like Dani's grandmother. But sadly in 2021 Dani's grandmother passed away. Dani had a bit of a creative blog because it was just such a huge emotional loss for her. When Dani had an idea of a little girl named Frida building a plane, she knew that Frida would be building a plane for her grandmother. Unknown Speaker 3:40 I feel like Frida in the Sky is a film that without my grandmother just wouldn't exist at all. I feel like she is completely the heart behind the inspiration for this project. And my grandmother was not a pilot at all. I get the question a lot from people. They were like what's your what's your history with aviation? Why you're always making planes? My, my grandmother was not a pilot, she was simply a mother of eight kids, and which is already a tough job if you asked me, but she was the greatest and funniest woman that I know. I know a lot of my personality and especially my humor is based after her. So I explicitly wanted to make something about how I remember her legacy and everything that I like how I was always looking up to this woman and sort of portray that in the film. And that's when I decided that didn't want to really make a documentary about her or anything about that I wanted to make simply a story about a character that is looking up to her grandmother as her hero and carrying on her journey in that way. Unknown Speaker 4:47 To create a heroic character Dani chose to make her a pilot. She wanted to create one of the coolest grandmas to ever exist in the history of animation. Valerie was impressed by Dani's approach especially because she was portraying a female character from an older generation in a new, much more courageous light. Unknown Speaker 5:07 In addition to the Spinoza blunting, on cultures, the history of women has been obscured so she's bringing that to light on, on two levels, one are on cultural level, but then also women's history. So that's quite the achievement. Unknown Speaker 5:26 But when Dani initially came up with the idea of making Frida's grandmother a pilot, she got some discouraging feedback from some of her male professors. Unknown Speaker 5:35 Dani says the feedback suggested that it wasn't too realistic that the grandmother was a pilot given her age. Dani says the professor's told her most women wouldn't have been successful pilots in the early 20th century. This would be around the time Frida's grandmother was in her 20s or 30s. Dani says the professor's suggested that she should instead make the film about Frida pursuing a dream that her grandmother could never achieve. But Dani pushed back. Unknown Speaker 6:03 This is not the story that I would like to tell this. This is not the story. We've seen so many versions of the storyline goal down ages in film, it's like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna achieve what the women before me could never achieve. Unknown Speaker 6:19 Dani says she left a meeting with a better taste in her mouth. Unknown Speaker 6:23 When you're a student, and you have your professors suggesting you something, it can lead you to believe that that's the only answer. And because they know better than you, right? They're the professor, they have more experience, and I know that you like never meant any harm suggesting that.However, I would say that when making creative projects, such as a film, you have to be very determined on what your story is, and staying true to what your initial vision of that story was. So I had I had to be like a little bit bold. Unknown Speaker 6:55 I think this boldness is what makes Dani and her film really stand out. Dani told us she's known as the animation girl at the School of Image Arts. And that proves just how being bold helps you bring your own vision to life. Unknown Speaker 7:08 I think it's important to approach all culture with an open spirit, I will say., to understand if you are a sonographer or an animator as Dani is that the essence is authenticity, authenticity of investigation, authenticity of expression, generosity of spirit. Unknown Speaker 7:35 Dani did her research and learn some interesting information. The first woman from South America to get a pilot's license was actually also Ecuadorian. Dani learned about the pilot after she had already come up with the storyline and plot of her film. She was actually surprised by this information. So were we. The pilots name was Hermelinda Raveena. She was born in 1905 and got her aviation license at the age of 27. She flew to skies of New York in her white uniform, complete with a brown belt and aviator goggles. I love that. Something that makes this even more fascinating is that at the very end of her aviation career, Hermelanda with moved in with her daughter who lived in Toronto, exactly where the story of Frida has also set crazy how that works out perfectly. Dani told us that she also did a lot of research to learn how to make an animation on her own. Unknown Speaker 8:26 The biggest challenges I face I would say was myself, the initial idea and my initial skills about of drawing, illustrating or just designing characters were very, like, it was just, you know, it was just the things that I learned by doing myself over the years just by drawing a little bit I got better over the years. But I still felt like it was not good enough to make a film. So after I got the green light from the committee, I was like I really need to make this film look the best version of itself that it can be right. And I remember bringing my work and like any visual concept that I had for the film so far to my Visual Arts professor from first year, because I couldn't I just couldn't pinpoint on my own what was what was wrong with my drawings because I could feel like they were not working. But I couldn't tell why. Unknown Speaker 9:17 We are able to discuss a color palette that would maximize the image and still be true to the form. And afterwards when she came to my office again and showed it to me effectimant it just with sparkle, where before it did not sparkle right? Unknown Speaker 9:39 This project was emotionally challenging too. For Dani animating is also acting. She says an animator has to really get in touch with the feelings the want their characters to portray. She mentioned that this was especially important in the emotional arc of the film, where Frida's grandmother passes away. Unknown Speaker 9:57 That was the toughest bits of animation that I had to do. And I knew, I knew I wanted a lot of control on how those scenes would play out. I knew that this specific moment where Frida would find out about her grandmother and there is a funeral in this scene as well. I knew I want to control complete control over how those would play out. So I said, you know what, I'm gonna animate them myself. And once I was actually, you know, sitting on my on my, in my room looking down on my drawing tablet, and with these storyboards playing on my screen, and the sad music from the soundtrack that I got from the composer playing in the back, every time that I had to draw a single frame from all the frames that are involved in just one single shot, I had to really dig down to my own feelings and bring them out, which leads me to cry a lot while I was making those scenes. It was very tough, but I managed to get them done. And I think it was, I don't regret going through that experience. I think it really made me connect with my own emotions. I'm not the type of person that usually cries a lot. So I feel like it made me appreciate my own vulnerability a little bit more and just know that it's okay to simply cry it out a little bit. Unknown Speaker 11:20 Dani hasn't told her mom that she puts so much of her grandmother into this film. Dani's mom just knows the main character's name is Frida. That was the middle name of Dani's grandmother. But Dani is excited to finally share the film with her family and her mom, even if she's a little worried about her mom's reaction. Unknown Speaker 11:41 I think she's not gonna take it too well emotionally in the way that she will probably really break down in many, many tears. And especially my grandmother's passing was something that really I could, I couldn't really see that it really affected my own mother. And it made her way too sad. However, I think that this film is going to make her proud and sort of remember the good sides about my grandmother. And I feel like she's just gonna tremble and hug me a lot, and I'm gonna be there to hold her. Unknown Speaker 12:17 Dani says that she got closure through the process of making her animation, and she hopes that the film will do the same for her mom. And we hope so too. You can catch Dani's film Frida in the Sky at Winter Garden Theatre on April 29. I'm Anna Maria Moubayed and I'mMana Hosseini. Thank you for listening. Transcribed by https://otter.ai