Introduction
Hot Mess aims to shed light on ADHD, which is still widely misunderstood, focussing on the grief that comes with a late diagnosis and visualising the most common struggles of the disorder in a compact and creative way. The film was produced at Aardman last year, in only six months, at their in-house Academy.
Inspiration
Inspired directly from my own experience, Hot Mess is a true and real representation of lived experience with undiagnosed ADHD. I developed the idea by gathering the experiences of multiple other sufferers and pooled those symptom observations together to create a more comprehensive and creative visual narrative.
The dog, Willow, based on my own dog of the same name features heavily because it was through getting her that my life management truly went off the rails. I’d always struggled, but having to keep Willow alive and prioritise her needs made everything heaps harder… especially when also working from home. I still have her though, couldn’t live without her, she’s almost three now and an absolute angel.
The Process
I’m one of those Swiss army knife filmmakers, able to switch roles on a film pretty seamlessly. I bop around from edit to sound, prop-making to animation and back again. To an outsider it might look like a creative car crash but to me it works and is my ultimate happy place.
For anyone that doesn’t know stop motion films are notoriously time-heavy to create, with only seconds of film produced each day. Production on this film therefore was especially frantic due to only having six months. Puppet fabrication and set building alone are vast portions of work and when you are the sole creator it is wild to think how much was managed to be built and created in just a few short weeks.
To compound an already challenging production, I also had to contend with the mess that is my brain – a sticky, tangled spaghetti of thoughts at the best of times. Planning is my least favourite par,t and storyboards/animatics do not align well with me. The biggest thing I learned through this discomfort was to do things my own way. I prefer to take a rather unconventional approach for animation, treating it a little more like a live-action film. My best ideas and solutions arrive when I have the camera on set and so I launch myself straight into animation as early as I can and the story evolves outwards from there.
What It Means to Be a Finalist
Being a finalist at Worcester Film Festival is such an honour, especially with the BIFA accreditation, making it have that little bit more impact in the eyes of funders and future collaborators. The festival lineup looks sensational with invaluable networking and panel strands to help filmmakers to make connections and potentially take a step up on their filmmaking journey.
I am very sad to not be able to attend this year… my festival run has massively exceeded all expectation with 94 selections currently, attending them all is now financially and logistically impossible.
Where to Watch / Follow
Come ‘On Tor’ with me as I document the final leg of my film festival journey with Hot Mess. We’re talking filmmaker insights, top tips, work-life honesty and authentic representation of navigating this field as a neurodivergent person too. Follow along for (almost weekly) vlogs covering all aspects of filmmaker life from pitching and creation, to attending film festivals, doing talks and getting sent cool things through the mail YouTube.com/@animatortor
There are also regular updates from me on Hot Mess and my wider filmmaking life on Instagram @animatortor or my website www.animatortor.com
