Today we’d like to introduce you to Valerie Gill.
Valerie, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Growing up, they always asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up, and I always spat out about a million answers because I wanted to be everything from; a singer to an artist or writer. Eventually, what I realized is that I wanted to tell stories and it didn’t matter what medium I had to do it in. Over time I have found a way to blend my writing with my music, and all of that ties into my art today.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Life always throws hurdles at you, more often than not though I have found that you can simply “fake it, till you make it” I am a firm believer in this concept. A lot of struggles I faced growing up had to do with my home and family life, so at some point I just pretended to have a normal family, and eventually I started finding other people with similar family dynamics to mine that it did end up becoming normalized. It seems now more than ever more people come from fractured home lives and suffer from feeling displaced, what I try to do is incorporate those feelings and dynamics into my own storytelling so that I can work through my own issues and in turn hopefully help others with theirs.
Curly Sauce – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
With Curly Sauce, I try to do my best to tell stories that focus on the complex relationships we have with the people in our lives. I aim to try and produce more content that can be digested by anyone whether it be the moviegoers or the bookworms, I feel that every story needs to be told but maybe not in the same way. I think what sets my work apart from others is that I try to blend the magical parts of storytelling with the harsh realities we face in every day lives, and I’m not afraid to push the lines between the two. I think it’s important to create content that tries to equalize its audience, because it’s often hard to say what we should filter out of content, especially in what I do. My content does appeal to a younger audience, how are we to say that they don’t understand some of the harshness this world has to offer? Who are we to deprive them of storytelling that could in fact help them understand the challenges they are dealing with.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Curly Sauce is still a young type of production house, it’s been a brand that I have been trying to put together over the past few years while I’ve done my schooling. It started as a way for me to heal in a time when I was still doing a bit of growing up. I’ve been proud of a lot of the shorts I have made overtime, as they allowed me to challenge the skills I was learning. My proudest moment was probably this last year in fact it’s a moment that is still in the making, I am currently working a fully animated short, that has been a passion project of mine for the past two years and it has been thrilling to finally see it take shape and get up off the ground, for me the biggest moment so far has to be the trailer I made for the short. It was the first time I really got to feel like I could be a professional storyteller, that I should in fact be taken seriously in the industry, I believe in my projects enough that I will do what I have to, in order to get them done, even if that means doing all of the work myself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://curlysauce7.wixsite.com/curlysauce
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/curly_sauce/
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