TEEN WEB SERIES SUPER-POWERFUL
Fierce Girls is the first Indigenous superhero series created for Indigenous girls. The transmedia project, which runs across YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms, aims to “spark change and empower young Indigenous women in Canada, New Zealand and around the world.”
A co-production of TangataWhenua.com — an independent Maori news and information portal in Aotearoa — and with the Canadian Media Fund and New Zealand On-Air funding, the series was created, executive produced and directed by Loretta Todd. The Metis Cree artist behind APTN’s Coyote’s Crazy Smart Science Show received a Vancouver Women in Film Artistic Innovation Award on June 19.
“Indigenous people creating superheroes is nothing new and, as far back as the early 1990s, I have been trying to get something in production,” said Todd. “If you go into some of the stories we tell, a lot of the characters have what we could call superpowers, although it comes from a very different place culturally. This idea of beings using special powers to help people, or to not help them, is pretty much everywhere.”
Todd has long felt that there wasn’t much media for Indigenous children in the eight-to-12 “impressionable age range” and has been producing special programming for that market since 2007. She also looked at what was being produced in terms of how it presented young girls, and didn’t like a lot of it.
“A lot of it was conflict heavy, with a lot of sarcasm and all the girls being very catty,” she said. “Even when they pulled together to solve a problem, there was still this element of competition and pettiness to it. I wanted something more aspirational, a pop-culture phenomenon for that age group that, at its core, said, ‘We’re all superheroes and can use our power to do good things.’”
Kisik (played by local actor/singer/YouTuber Jenine Yuksel) and Anika (played by Vancouver-based Maori actor Kaea Taurere) are two Indigenous teens with newly acquired, super-powered warrior spirits. Kisik is a Cree/Metis who lives with her single mother in east Vancouver. Anika lives with her single father in Rotorua, New Zealand. The two are best friends who partner up to help protect Mother Earth and their friends, family, community and more. Each adventure they undertake somehow contributes to the greater knowledge of what feats they’re capable of and spreads the positive
message to young Indigenous girls.
“It’s been a lot of fun and a challenge figuring out how to divide up the labour on the co-production,” said Todd. “We’ve been doing a lot of the live action, narrative building and the crew in New Zealand, which has this powerful digital Maori group that does a lot of the coding stuff for Maori youth, has taken on a lot of that dimension of the production. But the characters and the stories have to belong to both communities and we’ve done a balancing act with me and a cowriter.”
All the scenes with both actors were shot here, with local B-roll added. As anyone who has seen the film Pete’s Dragon knows, a lot of New Zealand and Pacific Northwestern landscapes are easily interchangeable. Todd says that it’s been great for budgets, roughly $200,000 from each country, and enabled them to make a quality production with limited means.
“My original vision was to be really big, but recognizing how many of our youth live on Instagram and YouTube, we knew we could do it online,” she said.
“There is live action, location shoots, animation and more, and I’m amazed at what we’ve been able to do. It’s been a really good learning curve scaling it back from my original version and learning about what you can do online exclusively.”
She adds that bringing people into the aspirational world of the show while reflecting the real world is embellished by modern social media. The characters maintain their own Instagram accounts, web pages and more to communicate with the show audience.
“The social-media scheduling and production is like a huge other section in itself, where we have been able to bring in Indigenous youth writers to use these mediums to give them the right flair,” she said. “And the photography is meant to have the same level of naturalism. Kaea’s brother is a really good photographer and has done a lot of background pictures. So there is another element of community building there too.”
In Fierce Girls, Anika and Kisik meet in Vancouver at an Indigenous youth games. They become friends after bonding over a mutual interest in writing comic books, and continue to develop their friendship online when Anika returns to New Zealand. After a powerful dream where Kisik sees her and Anika becoming superheroes in a comic book, the two begin to write one. As the characters experience real-life subjects ranging from daily teenage struggles, to enduring systemic racism, they solve the challenges in the comic book and bring it back to real life.
“So it’s kind of like a native Degrassi, and if we had the budget it would have been,” said Todd. “But then there is the comic book giving them more expression around the stories with the superhero idea. By the end of Season 1, they come to realize that they are actually gaining superpowers.”
Ultimately, Fierce Girls is a test. Todd hopes the show could be made into a TV series with bigger budgets and production levels. But she is really excited to see what kind of community develops around this innovative package.