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Screenings
2009
'Team Spirit' shortlisted for the Human Rights Film School competition
2008
'Team Spirit' was previewed at the launch of 'The Memory Box - Film & Teaching Pack', at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.
Distribution
(forthcoming)
Supported by
Bord Scannán na hEireann (Irish Film Board)
Credits
Directed by: Siobhán Twomey
Produced by: Áine O’Brien and Alan Grossman
Written by: Liz Morris and Siobhán Twomey
Backgrounds and Designs by: Siobhán Twomey
Character Animation by: Ciara McClean
Cast:
Abbi: Oyin Animashaun
Lucy: Lauren Murphy
Lillian: Yemi Adenuga
Sadiq: Ngor Tong
Coach: Gabriel Peelo
Consultant, Voice Director and Dramaturge: Bisi Adigun
Sound Post Production by: Owen Tighe
Dubbing Mix: Killian Fitzgerald
‘Funky Stuff’ composed by Christopher Bangs published by Atmosphere Music Ltd.
Consultants: Jo Ahern, Wale Mogaji and Catherine Kenny at Refugee Information Service
Special Thanks to: Aodán O’ Coileain, Maeve Burke, Rashmi Sahwney, Barbara O’Toole, Niamh McGuirk, Ken McCue and Jacqueline Healy
The Making of Team Spirit
Production Overview:
Filmed over the course of a four-month period, this short film documents the collaborative process behind the making of Team Spirit, the second part of the Abbi’s Circle trilogy. It captures the team in action, as they come together to translate the impact of public policy on real-life circumstances and to breathe life into the drawings and characters that make up the animation.
The team began by working with case studies from the Refugee Information Services. The Family Reunification and Integration Officer at RIS, Wale Mogaji, worked closely with director of the animation, Siobhán Twomey, dramaturge, Bisi Adigun, and primary school teacher, Liz Morris, to create a sensitive and measured depiction of the often traumatic and highly stressful situation that people in the family reunification process face on a daily basis. Together the writing team crafted the script, which began to take shape through developing established characters and situations from the first film, The Memory Box.
Once again we meet Abbi, who has to deal in her own way with the tensions caused between her everyday lived experience and the vagaries of government policy regarding migrants. The characters of Abbi, Lucy, Sadiq and Lillian were brought to life by a group of talented voice actors, under the careful direction of Bisi Adigun who worked closely with each actor individually, instilling in them a real sense of what the characters were feeling and going through - thus giving the story it’s resonance and poignancy. Finally, Owen Tighe steered the production through postproduction sound to its conclusion, by polishing the music, voice tracks and sound effects.
Context and Mixed-Methodology:
Abbi’s Circle is a three-part animation film series addressing issues to do with ‘family reunification’ and the complexities of migrant family life in Ireland, involving writers, animators, young primary school children, NGO advocates, a dramaturge, a sound recordist and school teachers. The animation began in the context of a conversation with our NGO partners as they worked to translate and communicate the often arcane and legalistic language shaping their case files on ‘family reunification’ to a larger audience. Behind every case file is a human subject wishing to be reunited with a spouse, children or siblings, vulnerable to the intricacies and contradictions of immigration law in Ireland. How to get beyond the appropriate legalistic anonymity of the case file and render the issues real in the eyes of a diverse set of publics? This was our starting problematic.
The core of the project emanated from a serious discrepancy in the ‘Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill’, which does not guarantee family reunification for legally resident migrants to be joined by their family members in Ireland. In the light of the fact that ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ expressly recognises that ‘the family is the natural unit of society and is therefore entitled to protection from society and the state’ and that the ‘family’ is also defined and protected in the same manner within the Irish constitution, our NGO partners argue for a statutory right for family reunification, drawing on similar provisions applying to refugees. It is also the case that while refugees (that is, people who have been granted refugee status) are entitled to family reunification, the application process is lengthy and filled with bureaucratic roadblocks, resulting in real hardship and pain of separation for families, particularly children.
Narrative agency is firmly placed in the hands of a group – aged between 9-12 – and who were attending a non-denominational school in Dublin. The reach of this agency was extended further, however, since each story in the animation series is accompanied by a teaching resource, written by teachers for teachers, designed to move across the curriculum through subjects such as English, geography, history, arts, music, etc. The director of the animation series, Siobhan Twomey, coined the term ‘docu/mation’, hence blurring the genres of documentary and animation. This allowed us to work from the original case files, which while written in the third person were based on authentic accounts as told to NGO advocates. It was clear from the start of this project that any media intervention could not ‘reveal’ the identity of immigrant families, who for obvious reasons did not wish to jeopardize their application for family reunification.
The collaboration is thus tested through a constant re-versioning of an original case study taking it through a detailed process of translation: in the first instance, with the writing of the animation script, a back story is stylized and rendered quietly dramatic, marking out a textual space for a cast of characters. The move from the textual to the visual is mediated through detailed storyboarding – hand drawn and then digitised in the computer. Bisi Adigun who carefully choreographed the voices also conducted the casting for characters. It is here that the characters come alive activating a set of transnationalised spaces, reflecting what Roger Rouse calls the ‘transnational migrant circuit’ (spaces linked through familial, social and economic ties, comprising multiple yet interconnected networks).
Most challenging in this work has been the insertion of what Hamid Naficy, borrowing from Raymond Williams’ calls ‘accented structures of feeling’; in this case, the emergent accented voices of the young children performing the animated characters and who are part of a growing cast and network of co-producers illustrating the behind the scenes production team. The collaborative circle is widened further with the piloting of the project in primary schools across Ireland, in addition to the ongoing challenge of embedding the project in the national teacher-training curriculum.