Sophia Smith is in bloom

What does it mean to you to win a YDA?

The YDAs are such a phenomenal launchpad and platform to support young directors, with some really incredible people on the jury every year. This film I made was so run and gun, so micro, and for it to receive a Gold was wildly exciting. 

It feels like the time, money, effort and shared craft that went into making this film is being recognised, in a much bigger way than I anticipated. I’m really grateful to everyone who supported it on the jury.

How did you get into directing?

I’ve always been a writer and a storyteller, so the seed was planted long before I realised film and advertising was the medium I’d land in. I started directing while I was still in film school, in tandem with being an intern at OPC in Toronto. It was because of my EPs - Harland, Donovan, Isil and Emily, that I was able to really take myself seriously as a director when I graduated. They’re extremely skilled at building young directors, and when they saw something in me they really pushed me to elevate my craft and help me discover who I was as a director. 

I started directing while I was still in film school, in tandem with being an intern at OPC in Toronto.

Now I live on OPC’s roster of directors, where I move between advertising and narrative projects. I think both really feed one another. My narrative work impacts the depth in which I can build out my ad work; and my ad work has really helped me create immediately attention grabbing moments and problem solve quickly in narrative projects. 

What was the inspiration behind Between Late April and Early May?

The film is about the theatre and absurdity of human behaviour when natural phenomena becomes “instagrammable” specifically in my film it becomes a phone centric behavioural study of people during the cherry blossom bloom in High Park, Toronto (where I’m from). 

The film is about the theatre and absurdity of human behaviour when natural phenomena becomes “instagrammable”

I had the idea when I was walking through the park two years ago, and I saw a young mom teaching her three year old son how to take thirst traps of her, rendering him essentially to a tripod. I observed them for 15 minutes across the park until she eventually got her shot and left, never including her son in a picture. I thought it was equally as incredible as it was disturbing and hilarious, and immediately started planning the idea for the following year’s bloom. 

How long was the shoot?

We shot it over a weekend during the peak bloom. One day was dedicated exclusively to filming real people documentary style, and another day was a hybrid of half real people and half setting up the scenes and vignettes with the actors. 

What was the most challenging aspect of the project?

We shot with a single camera on 16mm film. A lot of people told me to shoot digitally because that would make the process easier, and they would have been correct about that, but I knew that the texture and depth of the film was going to make this project really special and visually beautiful. 

It was really challenging in the doc portion, because of course we couldn’t plan anything, and I was just really hopeful people around me would be idiosyncratic and hilarious and strange (spoiler alert, they were). I was hawk eyed with binoculars moving through the park with my skeleton crew, and I’d point at things that were happening in real time and my DP John would rush to capture it. He was incredible, so nimble and caught everything I saw. We didn’t have boat loads of film so we couldn’t afford to just roll forever like we could’ve with digital, but I think it made the process a lot more intentional. Moments were fleeting, so we had to work really hard to get them before they were gone. The film was born from me observing, so it was nice that the process felt in tandem with that. 

It was really challenging in the doc portion, because of course we couldn’t plan anything

But also, it was really nerve racking because the blossoms bloom when they wish to. It’s completely out of our control, and they were essential to the film’s backdrop. So we couldn’t really set shoot dates. Luckily everyone on the cast and crew was so flexible, because we only pulled the trigger for the shoot like two days before, after weeks of watching the bloom updates on the High Park website. 

Above: A selection of BTS photos on location.

What have you learned during the process of making this film?

Trust is the word I keep coming back to when I reflect on this film. That was the thread that really kept everything together. I had to have faith in the natural elements, the bloom, the weather, the real people. I had to trust myself when it came to making certain decisions, like shooting on film, that it would be the right call and wouldn’t complicate the process in vain. 

I had to trust my actors to carry out scenes that relied exclusively on improv. Then I had to trust myself and my editor Cam that we’d find a story through the doc approach I wanted for this film. I think everyone else had to trust that I had a solid foundation for this project too, because even with all the planning we did so much of it was built on the hope that things would work out. 

How important was the casting for this film?

It was the most important thing, but I feel that way on everything I do, because my work is always very people centric. Everything I do always comes back to our shared humanity, the nuances of dialogue, the layers and covert motivations of our behaviour. 

I cast this film myself, just pulling from people I knew were incredible performers or people who I felt in my gut could naturally embody a specific character. There also was no script for this film, I created characters that I deepened with my actors and then wrote out story beats, but everything was improv. So casting people who were sharp, quick thinkers was essential. 

Everything I do always comes back to our shared humanity, the nuances of dialogue, the layers and covert motivations of our behaviour. 

There is one major scene in this film with an ensemble of people, and we shot that scene like theatre. It was about a five minute scene that we redid three times. That one was really exciting for my actors and I. I wrote out story beats and had timed cues that they knew would propel them to the next part of the scene, but within that structure I built it was just trusting them to do what was right for the character and really play around with reacting to each other.