Emerging Filmmaker Eleanor Rogers was one of An Táin Arts Centre’s Artists in Residence 2024. As part of our Culture Night activities in 2024 we screened her award winning short film ‘Breast Friends’. In this blog update she tells us about he goals for the residency, her work ethic and methods for achieving those goals:
My goal for this residency was to research, develop and write the first draft of my debut feature film a coming-of-age LGBTQ+ comedy/drama musical film that centres around a teenage fictional rock girl group set against the backdrop of Co.Louth, during the early 2000s. This script would be hugely inspired by own teenage years.
My emerging creative residency began on February 10th!. Since I work full-time in, I dedicated my Saturdays to spending time in Tain for the residency.
This was gonna be a massive undertaking, especially while balancing a full-time job. I knew I had to work efficiently. I decided to structure the year into phases: from February to May, I focused on research and development. From May to June, I would complete my beet sheet and from June to December would be my writing stage.
As my film is a period piece set in the early 2000s, I needed to immerse myself in the era. This meant understanding the cultural and social landscape—specifically, what teenagers were listening to, how they spent their time, where they hung out, and what they did for fun. Also to keep in mind what limitations I had as a filmmaker, in regards to the lack of internet on mobile phones which obviously plays a massive part in teen years today. To gather this information, I conducted interviews with women who were between the ages of 12 and 19 during that time. I chose this broad age range because the characters in my film start out naive and immature, so it was important to understand the experiences of younger tweens as well as older teens. I also interviewed girls who were from the countryside, small towns and also cities, to see if someone who grew up in a different area affected what they did, who they listened to, or their maturity level.
After completing the interviews, I compiled the findings into a document and identified common threads that tied these girls together. One thing that hugely surprised me about their interviews was how much people were doing a lot of similar things despite being from different sides of the country. Since music is a significant element of the film, I focused on understanding the types of bands the girls might have formed and the cultural significance of subcultures, which were still influential in the early 2000s. Exploring what each subculture represented to teenagers during that time helped me shape the identity of the characters and their world. Whether it was the “EMOs , Goths or Spicers (or Shams a word often used in Drogheda in the early 2000s) I also put together a visual mood board and playlists that I would always have on and in front of me while I was writing.
As part of my research, I reached out on Twitter to find people who still had old *Kiss* magazines—an Irish teen magazine that was hugely popular during my teenage years. This turned out to be incredibly helpful, as I managed to get in touch with the magazine’s former art director, who worked there from 2006 to 2008. He provided valuable insights into what teenage girls—particularly Irish girls—were interested in during that time. Capturing authentic teenage voices was crucial to me, as one of my biggest pet peeves in films is when teenagers sound and act like adults.
By the end of May, I had built a strong foundation for my research, so I shifted my focus to crafting a beatsheet. To begin, I used colored index cards, which I stuck on the mirror above my writing space in an Tain.. I used these to map out storylines A, B, and C, as well as key character traits their strengths their flaws etc. While this method was helpful at first, I quickly found it difficult to make changes when things weren’t working. It felt quite unsustainable.
In September, I transitioned to using Trello, a tool typically used for project management. I created a custom template for plotting, which allowed me to organize and rearrange my beatsheet much more easily. This approach was a game-changer for me, it made the early stages of plotting more flexible and efficient. Discovering this method was a fantastic breakthrough for me as a writer!
Once my beatsheet reached a point where I felt confident enough to start writing, I dove in. The first few weeks were challenging—I struggled with the number of characters in my story. I wanted to include so much, but with limited time and focus, the amount of characters diluted the narrative. I realised I wasn’t spending enough time developing the core characters, which caused the overall story to suffer.
With a personal deadline set for the end of December, it was difficult in June to maintain momentum, as the deadline still felt far away. To stay on track, I joined a writers’ group that met during the week. This helped me
stay accountable by ensuring I had something to be writing each Saturday, even if it wasn’t perfect. The process allowed me to improve my work while receiving valuable critiques from the group.
In June, I spent a full week at An Tain, where I had the opportunity to work closely with Mary Clare. Her feedback was incredibly insightful, especially given her experience on *Sing Street*, a film that is a period piece from the 80s that masterfully blends music with humour and heart. Her perspective gave me an understanding of how to incorporate music into my own film effectively. I also got to have great chats with filmmaker in residence at the time Jaro Waldeck, who I’d worked with as a stills photographer on a short she was shooting a few years previously. She offered me some great advice along with some great craic and great laughs during our coffee breaks
I once attended a writer’s talk where the speaker compared her writing process to a concertina: when you pull it out, the ends stretch long, but the center is compressed and tight. I see a lot of similarities in my own writing process. As a deadline looms, my writing inevitably amps up.
This was my first time writing anything beyond 30 pages, so when I hit 45 pages in October, I began to truly appreciate how crucial the beatsheet was. Making major changes to the draft at that point became increasingly difficult. For this project, I was using the three-act structure, and by the middle of the second act, I started to panic. I realized I didn’t have enough time to do everything I wanted. Storylines would have had to be condensed and sped up just to reach the end.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from this first draft was how essential the beatsheet is. When I revisited the beatsheet after completing the draft, I saw that I’d spent far too much time in the first act, which created pacing issues later on. Although I’m not sure I fully rectified this in my current draft, this year when I begin writing again, I’ll be completing a new beatsheet.
Looking ahead, one of my goals for this film is to co-write the original music. For now, though, I focused on making notes in this early draft about where music—either original or existing—would be needed. Developing this aspect of the project will be a key focus this year.
I never thought I’d be able to complete a draft of a feature film, it felt completely alien and out of reach back in February. For years, I’ve struggled with perfectionism, often feeling immense pressure to get everything exactly right from the start. But this residency has helped me overcome that fear. I’ve learned the value of simply getting words on the page and reworking and refining them. Even great works of art are rarely perfect.
I’m incredibly grateful to Mary Clare and Paul for their guidance and belief in my project. Their support, along with the time and space provided by An Tain, has given me the foundation I needed to build this story. Though the film is far from finished, I now have the structure and tools to keep moving forward. This residency has not only helped me grow as a writer but also given me the confidence to pursue my project and hopefully get financed and made in the future. – Eleanor Rogers