Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1475854
AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT A chance meeting between Bob and Sam, the unluckiest girl in the world, sets off a transformational journey. Sam has just aged out of foster care and struggles with her bad luck, an emotional feeling that luck has prevented her from finding her forever family. The story team wanted to be as authentic as possible when telling the story of this character, so they spoke with many people who had experienced the foster system. "We had the honor of interviewing these amazing young people who had grown up in a very similar situation to Sam. They grew up in foster care without families, and they were the most positive and generous people you could possibly talk to," says Holmes. She adds that when faced with the challenges of foster care, many young people experience a moment where they begin to feel like they did something to deserve their bad luck. "No matter how many times people told them, 'This is not about you, you've had bad luck. It's circumstance, it's things outside of your control,' somewhere deep inside, they believe it's them—that there's something wrong with them," says Holmes. "At some point in their lives, they are ready to hear that it's not them in a way that they finally believe...it really was just bad luck." Acknowledging the randomness of these kinds of experiences allows you to gain a new, more positive perspective. And it's this emotional journey that is at the core of the film. As the story evolves, Sam is able to look at bad luck in a different way. She doesn't erase it, but "she's able to evaluate certain instances of her bad luck and say, 'You know what? That bad luck actually led me to the luckiest thing in the world, which is love,'" says Holmes. LESS IS MORE Focusing on the emotional core of a story can be a subtractive process. Holmes likens this journey of discovery as putting stakes in the ground and then building a story around them. Sometimes you find that you have too many stakes and it's time to remove a few and leave only the most powerful ones in place. "But you only discover that through the iteration of putting the reels up," says Holmes. "You're just constantly digesting and honing in on that emotional story. Slowly but surely, as the story strengthens and supports those emotional stakes, you're able to take some out. You really need to be open-minded." One example of this is the catalyst of Sam's journey into the Land of Luck. Sam wants to make sure that her 5-year- old friend Hazel doesn't end up like her without a forever family at the age of 18. Sam decides that she just needs to secure a lucky penny for Hazel, but doing so would break the rules of the Land of Luck. "We had more check-ins in act two with Hazel where we felt like maybe Sam and Hazel needed to talk to each other on the phone," says Holmes. "When we started taking those [scenes] out, the story became more and more emotional, because it was almost like Sam didn't have control over what was going to happen to Hazel, and Sam had to wrestle with, 'Can I come through for her?'" In essence, in asking such questions, Sam wrestles with her own relationship with luck, and, whether good or bad, learning from those challenging experiences and focusing on a path forward can lead to a wonderful future. F E AT U R E Photos courtesy of Apple 36 KEYFRAME