Her Story is a tale of love, life and the struggle against prejudice within a community said to be rooted in inclusivity.
Written by Jen Richards and Laura Zak, the 6-part series follows Violet; a trans woman and Allie; an LGBTQI reporter who reaches out for an interview. As their relationship moves from professional to romantic both Violet and Allie are confronted by scenes that series producer Katherine Fisher says mirror the real world.
Lisa is quite a polarising character in the series; did the inspiration for that character come from an interpretation of real comments from within the LGBTQI community?
It’s funny when some people see Lisa they simply don’t believe that someone like her exists, and to an extent I understand that in that the people in my circle and community would never prescribe to her line of thinking. However, all you have to do is look at social media around issues of trans women’s rights and it becomes sadly very apparent that there is a very real and vocal collective of self identified lesbians who share Lisa’s viewpoints.
What message do you want viewers to take away from Her Story?
Ultimately Her Story is a love story. We want people can walk away from the series simply having rooted for love, and for their sexuality and gender and identity to be secondary to that desire to see these two couples embrace love.
What (and/or who) inspired you to create Her Story?
Her Story was written by Jen Richards and Laura Zak and was inspired by their own friendship as well as their relationships and the personalities that they were seeing in their own lives. We came together to create this series with the goal of making an authentic and nuanced portrayal of our community, and to that end we employed over 75% LGBTQI and female identified media professionals, which is something that we had not seen done before.
What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome making this series?
It’s always challenging to get your work out there and make sure that the people who need to see it know about it and have access to it. We went into this with the goal of ensuring that Her Story would be free and available to anyone with an internet connection. We didn’t want to put it behind a pay wall, we wanted anyone regardless of age, income, and location to be able to see themselves represented on screen in an accurate and beautiful way. By doing that however we limited our options for funding, so finding both the finances to create this project at the level that we wanted to create it, and finding a way to ensure that the public was even aware of it were extremely challenging. However it’s those comments and emails from people who have seen it, who’s lives it has touched that make it so rewarding.
Is your series an ongoing project? If so can you give us some clues about what comes next?
We’re currently in talks to develop Her Story into a 10 episode, 30 minute per episode series. I can’t really give away what comes next but I can say it’s exciting, we introduce new characters, there’s more love, there’s more loss, there’s some redemption…it’s good.
What was your favourite part of the making of Her Story?
My favourite part was the collaboration we had with all of our incredibly talented team. Having women and LGBTQI representation in every phase of development not only created an incredible work environment but directly lead to the authenticity that we see on screen.
Are there any web series, other than your own that inspire you?
There are so many incredible series’ out there right now, New Deep South is amazing, The Skinny and that whole crew are doing great work, every other series in our category at Melbourne Web Fest is unique and inspired in so many ways and we’re so excited to be listed alongside of them.
What’s your background as a content creator? And how did you approach this project differently to previous projects?
I worked for V-Day, the worldwide movement to end violence against women and girls (founded by Eve Ensler) for over ten years where I was the Director of Special Events. So my background is largely in theatre and live event production. Despite the medium changing slightly I approached this project in much the same way as I approached previous projects, which was working with key creatives, coming up with a overall strategy and goals for the project, putting together the right team that had the same work ethic, ethos and shared our goals, and creating an environment where people felt seen and heard in order to realize those goals. For me the way in which art is created is just as important as the art itself. It takes some doing to find the right people for each project and it doesn’t always work, but it’s immensely rewarding when it does.
From start to finish, how long did it take to complete the project?
It took about a year and a half in the end, from idea conception to releasing the series online.
How many people worked on Her Story?
Many people have been involved in making Her Story a reality. Obviously we had an incredible core team with Director Sydney Freeland, DP Bérénice Eveno, our Editor Bryan Darling, writers/stars Laura and Jen, star Angelica Ross, the rest of incredible cast, our production and post production crew of about 25, and then the over 600 people who donated to the series in order to get it finished.
Her Story on the web:
Her Story’s Website
Her Story on Facebook
Her Story on Twitter
Her Story on Instagram