Welcome!

Hello everyone. Welcome to my blog.

In case you’re wondering who I am…you know, maybe you got here by chance and haven’t yet perused the site…or taken note of the url… or noticed my name in caps on the top left of this page - every page actually - I’m Sonji Spencer. Who am I really? Well, it’d take a day, after all people are complex; but, for simplification purposes, especially since this site is career-centric, I’m, amongst other things, a Writer Producer and Filmmaker. I'm based in Antigua and Barbuda, and lets just say in this market its essential that anyone in the audiovisual industry be an auteur.

My journey began sixteen years ago when I first developed an interest in media. Two years later I was certain film was the media stream for me and it was off to film school. Four years after that I returned home, started my production company Irasha Productions Ltd, and lets just say the story got really interesting from there. It wasn’t the campy “Driving In My Car” Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme my three year old listens to “interesting” . No. This “interesting” was the bumpy kind. The ‘like whoa, I didn’t realize this road had so many pot holes. Wait, is that a boulder ahead? Hellooo…where’s the road? Ahm, when did I end up in a jungle?” kind of “interesting”. After five years of it, I actually stepped away from my company to steer my career in another media related direction. Though the decision was wise at the time, lets just say by making it, I stepped out of the jungle and into the Wild, Wild, West - bandits and all. Things rapidly moved from interesting to crazy and got crazier as another five years went by. I now have a plethora of “imagine that?” experiences. I’ll use them as a bedrock for good fiction.

Still, though that process was turbulent, it was also insightful. It exposed paradigms I didn’t even know I held, which allowed me to confront them and grow in a positive way. So, yes the process was pressing on all sides, but inwardly I was renewed day by day, and that’s far better than any of the nastiness in the environment.

At the end of of 2015 I was given the opportunity to exit and I took it. I had, since two years prior, been planning my return to Irasha, so the timing was perfect.

I officially re-activated the company on January 18th, and for the first quarter of the year I’ve been developing projects I plan on building out. The thing is, though I’m happy being back at IP, it hasn’t changed that the company is hypothetically still sitting in the middle of a jungle. The market in Antigua, where production is concerned, still has to be cleared if it is to accommodate industry standard production on a full time basis. To be honest, I’m not even sure it is possible for us to fully have what the industry defines as “the standard” here. Instead, we need to build our market to fit into our context, then trade from there.

While I’m quite at ease about being back at IP again, I acknowledge that ahead of me are many of the challenges I faced before Ieaving. The beautiful thing is, while the environment hasn’t changed much, I have. I’m far more equipped to weather what’s to come. So, I see more bumpy rides ahead in my professional future, walls I can scale. As I go through, I'll share the relevant information here. Hopefully it will be helpful to someone, or at the very least, insightful.

Thanks for visiting and see you again, soon.