Today we’d like to introduce you to Carlee Soeder.
Hi Carlee, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Atlanta has been the majority of the story for me, so far.
When it comes to acting, I can track my love for acting back to when I watched Jennifer Lawrence in Hunger Games for the first time when I was in middle school. Or Emma Stone in Easy A! Now I have a much more diversified range of heroes from film and television that inspire me constantly! But truthfully, those were the ladies that made me picture myself up there on the silver screen. It wasn’t until I got really close to leaving high school that I decided I wanted to act for a living! I scraped the biotechnology track I was on, and I went to college for acting at FSU and my passion for it grew even more!
And as time went on, I realized I really wanted to be a filmmaker as well. So many of my heroes were not only actors but directors and writers and producers too! I just wanted to tell stories. When it comes to film training, I got my start while working and learning from those that I interned and worked for at WFSU (a PBS-affiliated station) back when I was in college. They taught me a whole lot about writing, editing, and capturing stories for the ecology channel. It was a blast and that was the beginning of my DIY film school training!
Just before I left Tallahassee, FL I was interning at a film distribution house for marketing. My boss there was a professor at FSU and I had asked him about grad school there. In his own funny way, he pretty much said, “I don’t ever want to see you here. Go get paid on a set to learn about filmmaking.” Challenge accepted.
Well, I got to Atlanta and the pandemic started almost immediately. I lost my job and the industry I came here for was out of commission for who knows how long. To save us all from the torture of rehashing how awful the pandemic was for all of us, I’ll skip to the good part. A year later, when I knew things were back up and running, out of desperation I hit up a friend and asked if she had anything I could possibly do to get on a set. “I got something for you, but it’s the worst,” she said. I didn’t care, I just needed a way in. The door opened and I sprinted through it. Didn’t even know what the job was or for what show. Said I would be wherever she needed me the next week. I didn’t know I was walking onto the set of Stranger Things until I was quite literally on the set and thought, “This isn’t the name of the show they told me. I’m in the wrong place. No way.” I was so green, I didn’t know that code names were used for pretty much every big show.
I made the absolute best of it. I made a lot of really great friends, learned from those on set that would take a few minutes out of their time to teach me a bit about their craft, and watched so many at the top of their profession doing their finest work. It was the best film school I could have picked for myself. I used those grounds as a way into props and kept learning from there on all kinds of tv shows. The great friends I made along the way were also eager to create their own films just as I was, so we did. I’ve always made it a mission of mine to put into practice what I was learning. Test it for myself. See if I could take the mistakes that I witnessed and make my own mistakes trying to find a way to correct those. And see if I could recreate those happy accidents.
It led me to make my first short film, Check-Six. I love that film. Of course, there are bits of it where I’m cringing because I wish I knew how to make that moment better when we were filming it. But it was so rewarding and worth it. I just finished up a post on my second short film, Winter’s Year, an experimental short based on poems I wrote years ago, and I know I improved SO much on it.
Now, I’m heavy into pre-production on my next short, Score Pending…, of which I launched a crowdfunding campaign to gain support from the community to help us cover the costs for our locations, equipment rentals, etc. [You can learn more and help us out at: seedandspark.com/fund/score-pending ]
I’m ecstatic to start making my way toward making a feature film in the future. It’ll be a long road and I’m excited I’ll be making Score Pending… before I launch myself into the next step of my future. It may sound like it, but in no way has any of this been easy. It’s incredibly challenging, disheartening at times, occasionally lonely, and daunting, but it’s also rewarding, fulfilling, fun, and loving.
Alright, 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?
Recently, I’ve discovered that most of my obstacles stem from imbalances in my life. I think most of it comes from my own determination to keep up with the so-called ‘hustle’ culture of the creative fields or any industry at that. The constant thoughts of, “Am I networking enough, am I working enough, am I making enough creative projects, am I making enough money to make those projects, am I taking enough acting classes, am I auditioning at my best each time, am I going to enough casting director workshops, am I getting my films into festivals, etc, etc, etc.
Maybe it’s a symptom of growing up with social media too. Where we’re all capable of seeing how the other is doing and wanting to do just as good as them, if not better. I’m not saying being competitive is a bad thing, I actually think it’s good motivation to get us off our butts sometimes and to act on our dreams. I think social media sort of warped our perception more than we think and give credit to. At least for me, it pushed me to go, go, go, go so fast and hard at my ‘dreams’ that I lost my balance in really large ways. I look around and I see people my age or younger far further in life than I am, and it’s discouraging because obviously, you want it to be you. And maybe they feel that way about me. But truthfully, they probably feel the exact same way, they feel behind in life, they feel burnt out, and they feel like it’s too late. They missed the mark.
I had an acting coach tell me something a couple of years ago and I don’t think it quite sank in, even now I’m not sure it’s totally sunk into my thick skull. They said, “Maybe your 20s aren’t your season, maybe it’s your 30s, or your 40s, or 50s.” They didn’t say it to discourage me from acting, they said it to encourage me. I think what I’m starting to absorb from that and from what I’ve been experiencing lately, is that my life is right now, it’s right here. It’s where my feet are planted today. I don’t need to compare myself to celebrities that made it at 19 or 24. There are plenty of people who made it at 55.
Recently, I also started looking at the rest of my life differently. We mark out our lives with these big events like weddings, movie premieres, graduations, promotions, births, funerals, etc. And those days are important and hold lots of meaning, but life is every day in between as well. Coming into 2023, I’ve been reflecting on that a lot and it scared me in a way. Being honest with yourself isn’t easy. I still lie to myself all the time, but I decided to stop lying about how imbalanced I felt.
I want to make movies of my own, and I want to act in movies and tv shows, but I also want to have a full life filled with laughter, good friends, family, and great love. I don’t think that they can’t coexist altogether. I think they all flourish together, but the way I was tackling it before prohibited that. So long story short, I’m looking at balance in a whole new way and figuring out how to find it for me.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Right now, I’m in pre-production on my next short film, Score Pending… ! I’ll be acting in this one and directing, which is a huge feat in and of itself. So many people have done it before me and I know I can definitely do it as well. I accomplished holding both of those roles on my second short, Winter’s Year. We recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to help alleviate the costs of locations and renting equipment, among so many other costs. I want to encourage those of you reading to please learn more about the project and ways you can help contribute to the making of the movie at: seedandspark.com/fund/score-pending
I’m acting in The Stranger Things Experience as a certain someone with powers that fights demogorgons. Which has been the most incredible experience these last few months. We’ll be wrapping up in mid-February. And of course, I’m auditioning like crazy thanks to my wonderful agency.
Taking on my goals of acting, writing, and directing are incredibly challenging. But I can’t express how rewarding it feels at the end of the day to be doing just those. I’m obsessed and in love with living in my creative spaces. I recently created the hat to put all my films under, Creekside Studios ATL (@creekside_studios_atl). I’m really happy to start building up my body of work and celebrating my victories and my failures throughout this whole lifetime. It’s a beautiful thing to do.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
There are so many, I can go on for days! Podcasts that I listen to for acting and filmmaking are One Broke Actress and Off Camera with Sam Jones. I love Archetypes and National Park After Dark as well for more of my entertainment podcasts that are also fairly informational as well. I’m reading SO many books. I’m never without access to a book somehow whether it’s physical or on my kindle app. I’ve really gotten into autobiographies as of late and have started “Finding Me” by Viola Davis. I’m reading “How Not To Give A F*ck” which has really just helped me not care what other people think of me anymore, my perception of myself is the most important thing. And of course, I have a couple of fiction series that I’m deep into like Harry Potter (I actually never read the series as a kid, I’m on book 5) and Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein series.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://carleesoeder.wixsite.com/mysite
- Instagram: @carlzoeder
- Other: @creekside_studios_atl
