Alphabet Soup
Chicago, Illinois | Film Feature
Drama
Lola and Ruby have built a world entirely around each other. When Lola begins moving toward a life with her boyfriend, their all-consuming intimacy gives way to resentment, possessiveness, and the unsettling feeling that the world they've built together may no longer fit them both.
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$3,400
Goal: $15,000 for development
Lola and Ruby have built a world entirely around each other. When Lola begins moving toward a life with her boyfriend, their all-consuming intimacy gives way to resentment, possessiveness, and the unsettling feeling that the world they've built together may no longer fit them both.
About The Project
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
Lola and Ruby have built a world entirely around each other. Lola begins drifting toward a polished, adult future with her boyfriend, while Ruby’s sense of self remains deeply entangled with Lola’s. An ambitious and sensitive artist, Ruby yearns for creative recognition while Lola begins exploring a world beyond their friendship. As their lives pull in different directions, affection hardens into resentment and intimacy turns possessive. Lola feels suffocated by Ruby’s devotion; Ruby feels diminished by Lola’s judgment. As small betrayals and tensions accumulate, the friendship they’ve built their lives around begins to strain under the weight of who they are becoming.
In 2023, I lost my best friend, Claire. She didn’t die. She broke up with me. I never would have broken up with her.
Shortly after our falling out, I wrote Alphabet Soup, a short film inspired by our friendship. It became both a love letter and an autopsy. I was determined not to villainize either girl: Both are loving. Both are cruel. Both are responsible. The film explores a truth I am still trying to accept: We can deeply love someone, they can shape the course of our lives, and yet the relationship may still come to an end.
Claire and I were closest between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one—a period of life that feels uniquely intense, formative, delicate, infinite, and impossible to recreate. Alphabet Soup inhabits that tender fault line between girlhood and adulthood, where intimacy begins to suffocate and autonomy feels like betrayal. It asks a question I am still living inside: Who are we when the person who reflected us back disappears?
Visually, I want the film to feel immersed in the private ecosystem the girls have built together. The girls' world is vibrant, chaotic, intimate, and all-consuming. The camera remains close to them, lingering on the textures of their bedrooms, the clothing and objects they collect, and the messes they leave behind. I am interested in an emotional visual language that captures the intensity of girlhood and female friendship while exploring the sensation of losing someone who once felt inseparable from yourself.
Expanding Alphabet Soup into a feature feels essential because it is not simply about the end of a friendship. It is about the death of a shared identity. It is about the violence of becoming your own person. I want to make this film because losing Claire changed the architecture of who I am. Friendship breakups are rarely afforded the same cultural language as romantic heartbreak, yet they can alter the course of a life just as, if not more so, profoundly. Alphabet Soup is my attempt to give that loss a shape.
RUBY
23, eclectic artist, like a thrift-store collage that somehow works. She rejects anything that feels ordinary, but In her search for the extraordinary, she can be impulsive, insecure, and a little too dependent on Lola. The world that they’ve built together feels sacred to her, and the thought of Lola outgrowing it feels less like change and more like abandonment.
Played by Anna Wren Fry
LOLA
23, polished, and socially fluent. The kind of girl who can walk into any room and instinctively know where she belongs. Lola cares about beauty, taste, and the shape a life can take, and she’s always quietly curating her own. Still, a part of her quietly envies Ruby’s originality and strangeness. Lola has spent years orbiting that world, but lately she’s beginning to imagine a life beyond it.
Played by Chloe Skoczen
The majority of Alphabet Soup takes place within the bedrooms of its two protagonists. More than settings, these rooms function as emotional landscapes; living archives of who Lola and Ruby are, who they were, and who they hope to become. Cluttered with photos, half-finished projects, vintage clothing, and traces of evolving identities, the bedrooms embody the intensely personal -- and intertwined -- worlds the girls have built for themselves. By remaining largely within these intimate spaces, the film captures a defining texture of girlhood: the way bedrooms become the backdrop for self-invention, obsession, intimacy, and revolution.These rooms become sanctuaries, stages, confessionals, and battlefields, reflecting the shifting dynamics of a friendship on the verge of explosion.
RUBY'S BEDROOM
Ruby's bedroom is a living collage. Overflowing with artwork, photographs, clothing, trinkets, and half-forgotten obsessions, the space reflects a young woman in the constant process of inventing herself. Nothing is minimal or carefully curated; every wall and surface is layered with evidence of her interests, ambitions, insecurities, and aspirations. The room feels colorful, expressive, and slightly chaotic—a place where creativity and self-mythology flourish. More than a bedroom, it functions as an externalization of Ruby's inner world: romantic, performative, sentimental, and desperate to be seen.
LOLA'S BEDROOM
Lola's room is an exercise in curation. Filled with vintage textures, sentimental objects, and a distinctly feminine aesthetic, the space feels thoughtfully composed rather than accumulated. Every photograph, trinket, and decorative detail appears deliberately placed, reflecting Lola's desire to create beauty, meaning, and order around herself. The room serves as a physical manifestation of her inner life: romantic, image-conscious, and deeply invested in the stories she tells herself about who she is. Where Ruby's room reveals a person who embraces the unpredictable, Lola's reveals someone striving to impose order on the uncertainty of young adulthood
Alphabet Soup centers a generation and a relationship dynamic that have largely been overlooked in contemporary cinema: Gen Z young women navigating the complicated, defining, and deeply intimate experience of friendship.
By treating female friendship as the emotional centerpiece rather than a subplot, the film occupies a space that remains surprisingly unexplored.
OUR FIRST $15,000
We’re raising $15,000 to cover the urgent upfront costs that will get Alphabet Soup into production. These expenses are the first pieces of our larger production budget — securing our cast and crew, equipment, production design, insurance, and the essential pre-production work that brings us to set.
This first $15,000 is what helps us move from planning to making the movie. Every contribution gets us one step closer to production.
HELP US SPREAD THE WORD!
Sharing our campaign is one of the easiest and most impactful ways you can help Alphabet Soup get made. Copy and paste one of the examples below, make it your own, and share it with your friends, family, and community. And please tag @annawrenfry, @chloeskoczen, @fivetwoonefilms, and @seedandspark so we can re-share your support! Thank you!
Friendship breakups can hurt just as much as romantic ones, so why don’t we see more movies about them? ALPHABET SOUP is a new feature film from @annawrenfry and @chloeskoczen about two best friends, the world they’ve built together, and what happens when growing up means growing apart. Support them on @seedandspark: https://seedandspark.com/fund/alphabet-soup-1
I’m so excited to see ALPHABET SOUP, a new Chicago feature film from @annawrenfry and @chloeskoczen about best friends Lola and Ruby as their intensely bonded friendship begins to fracture. Help this local indie film get made @seedandspark: https://seedandspark.com/fund/alphabet-soup-1
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Cast & Crew Deposits
Costs $5,000
We need to secure our cast and crew now so we can lock our team and move toward production.
Equipment Rentals
Costs $3,000
Your generous contribution will allow us to obtain better camera, lighting, and sound equipment as we bring this story to life.
Production Designer & Costume Designer
Costs $2,500
Your contribution allows us to hire a dedicated Production Designer and Costume Designer - two of the most important roles on this movie.
Legal Counsel, Insurance & Permits
Costs $2,000
We need to secure contracts, insurance, and permits now so we can get our production safely and legally underway.
Wardrobe & Props
Costs $1,500
Wardrobe and props are critical to the storytelling and help define the identities of our leads. Help us make this movie visually stunning!
Contingency
Costs $1,000
A little cushion now helps us handle miscellaneous startup costs (meals, transpo, fees, etc.) without slowing down our path to production.
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
Brittani Ward - Producer
Brittani Ward is an entrepreneurial filmmaker based in Chicago. She began her career as a Casting Director, collaborating for more than a decade with world-renowned talent. Full filmography, including the countless stars she has hired, available on imdb.
Her feature directorial debut, Single Car Crashes—which she also wrote, produced, and cast—won the Best New Vision Award at its world premiere at Cinequest, earned Best Lead Actor at the Midwest Film Festival, and screened at the St. Louis International Film Festival before being released by Freestyle on VOD in North America.
Brittani produced Desire Lines - which won the NEXT Special Jury Award at Sundance 2024 and was highlighted by The New York Times chief film critic Manohla Dargis - and the comedic proof-of-concept Debaters, starring J. Smith-Cameron and Kenneth Lonergan, which premiered at Sundance 2025 and is currently touring festivals. She also co-produced and cast Adult Children, which made the esteemed 2026 Popcorn List after it won 'Best Ensemble' at Bentonville, won 'Best International Film' at Galway, and screened at Newport, CIFF, Woodstock, Heartland, and more.
Brittani has been recognized as one of the Leaders of Chicago Culture in Newcity’s "Film 50," and is a proud honoree of Crain’s Chicago Business “40 Under 40” Class of 2025.
Anna Wren Fry - Writer/Director/Producer/Actress (Ruby)
Anna Wren Fry is a Chicago-based filmmaker and actress. Her films explores the tender, turbulent realities of girlhood, with a particular interest in female friendship and the intimate spaces young women create for themselves as they navigate identity, belonging, and change.
Deeply driven by aesthetic, Anna incorporates fashion, design, and dreamlike atmospheres into her work, using visual detail to reflect her characters’ inner lives. She draws inspiration from her own experiences, the lives of her friends, and the textures of the world around her.
Having grown up on professional sets as an actor with work across Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, NBC, etc., she brings a nuanced understanding of performance to directing; Anna values creating an environment rooted in playfulness, care, and collaboration, where actors feel comfortable accessing vulnerability and complexity.
Chloe Skoczen - Producer/Actress (Lola)
Chloe Skoczen is a Chicago-based actress, producer, and cinephile driven by a lifelong fascination with storytelling. Her work across feature films, television, and national advertising campaigns has appeared on NBC, HBO Max, and Hulu. Recent screen credits include Things Will Be Different, which premiered at SXSW in 2024, and Before Anyone Else, for which she received a Best Actress nomination at the Midwest Film Festival.
Drawn to emotionally resonant, character-driven stories, Chloe approaches each role with curiosity, rigor, and a deep commitment to creating meaningful art. Increasingly drawn to shaping stories from development through production, Chloe is eager to continue growing her work as a producer. She is most excited by projects that challenge her, inspire connection, and allow her to collaborate with the people she loves most.
Current Team
Incentives
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
Lola and Ruby have built a world entirely around each other. Lola begins drifting toward a polished, adult future with her boyfriend, while Ruby’s sense of self remains deeply entangled with Lola’s. An ambitious and sensitive artist, Ruby yearns for creative recognition while Lola begins exploring a world beyond their friendship. As their lives pull in different directions, affection hardens into resentment and intimacy turns possessive. Lola feels suffocated by Ruby’s devotion; Ruby feels diminished by Lola’s judgment. As small betrayals and tensions accumulate, the friendship they’ve built their lives around begins to strain under the weight of who they are becoming.
In 2023, I lost my best friend, Claire. She didn’t die. She broke up with me. I never would have broken up with her.
Shortly after our falling out, I wrote Alphabet Soup, a short film inspired by our friendship. It became both a love letter and an autopsy. I was determined not to villainize either girl: Both are loving. Both are cruel. Both are responsible. The film explores a truth I am still trying to accept: We can deeply love someone, they can shape the course of our lives, and yet the relationship may still come to an end.
Claire and I were closest between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one—a period of life that feels uniquely intense, formative, delicate, infinite, and impossible to recreate. Alphabet Soup inhabits that tender fault line between girlhood and adulthood, where intimacy begins to suffocate and autonomy feels like betrayal. It asks a question I am still living inside: Who are we when the person who reflected us back disappears?
Visually, I want the film to feel immersed in the private ecosystem the girls have built together. The girls' world is vibrant, chaotic, intimate, and all-consuming. The camera remains close to them, lingering on the textures of their bedrooms, the clothing and objects they collect, and the messes they leave behind. I am interested in an emotional visual language that captures the intensity of girlhood and female friendship while exploring the sensation of losing someone who once felt inseparable from yourself.
Expanding Alphabet Soup into a feature feels essential because it is not simply about the end of a friendship. It is about the death of a shared identity. It is about the violence of becoming your own person. I want to make this film because losing Claire changed the architecture of who I am. Friendship breakups are rarely afforded the same cultural language as romantic heartbreak, yet they can alter the course of a life just as, if not more so, profoundly. Alphabet Soup is my attempt to give that loss a shape.
RUBY
23, eclectic artist, like a thrift-store collage that somehow works. She rejects anything that feels ordinary, but In her search for the extraordinary, she can be impulsive, insecure, and a little too dependent on Lola. The world that they’ve built together feels sacred to her, and the thought of Lola outgrowing it feels less like change and more like abandonment.
Played by Anna Wren Fry
LOLA
23, polished, and socially fluent. The kind of girl who can walk into any room and instinctively know where she belongs. Lola cares about beauty, taste, and the shape a life can take, and she’s always quietly curating her own. Still, a part of her quietly envies Ruby’s originality and strangeness. Lola has spent years orbiting that world, but lately she’s beginning to imagine a life beyond it.
Played by Chloe Skoczen
The majority of Alphabet Soup takes place within the bedrooms of its two protagonists. More than settings, these rooms function as emotional landscapes; living archives of who Lola and Ruby are, who they were, and who they hope to become. Cluttered with photos, half-finished projects, vintage clothing, and traces of evolving identities, the bedrooms embody the intensely personal -- and intertwined -- worlds the girls have built for themselves. By remaining largely within these intimate spaces, the film captures a defining texture of girlhood: the way bedrooms become the backdrop for self-invention, obsession, intimacy, and revolution.These rooms become sanctuaries, stages, confessionals, and battlefields, reflecting the shifting dynamics of a friendship on the verge of explosion.
RUBY'S BEDROOM
Ruby's bedroom is a living collage. Overflowing with artwork, photographs, clothing, trinkets, and half-forgotten obsessions, the space reflects a young woman in the constant process of inventing herself. Nothing is minimal or carefully curated; every wall and surface is layered with evidence of her interests, ambitions, insecurities, and aspirations. The room feels colorful, expressive, and slightly chaotic—a place where creativity and self-mythology flourish. More than a bedroom, it functions as an externalization of Ruby's inner world: romantic, performative, sentimental, and desperate to be seen.
LOLA'S BEDROOM
Lola's room is an exercise in curation. Filled with vintage textures, sentimental objects, and a distinctly feminine aesthetic, the space feels thoughtfully composed rather than accumulated. Every photograph, trinket, and decorative detail appears deliberately placed, reflecting Lola's desire to create beauty, meaning, and order around herself. The room serves as a physical manifestation of her inner life: romantic, image-conscious, and deeply invested in the stories she tells herself about who she is. Where Ruby's room reveals a person who embraces the unpredictable, Lola's reveals someone striving to impose order on the uncertainty of young adulthood
Alphabet Soup centers a generation and a relationship dynamic that have largely been overlooked in contemporary cinema: Gen Z young women navigating the complicated, defining, and deeply intimate experience of friendship.
By treating female friendship as the emotional centerpiece rather than a subplot, the film occupies a space that remains surprisingly unexplored.
OUR FIRST $15,000
We’re raising $15,000 to cover the urgent upfront costs that will get Alphabet Soup into production. These expenses are the first pieces of our larger production budget — securing our cast and crew, equipment, production design, insurance, and the essential pre-production work that brings us to set.
This first $15,000 is what helps us move from planning to making the movie. Every contribution gets us one step closer to production.
HELP US SPREAD THE WORD!
Sharing our campaign is one of the easiest and most impactful ways you can help Alphabet Soup get made. Copy and paste one of the examples below, make it your own, and share it with your friends, family, and community. And please tag @annawrenfry, @chloeskoczen, @fivetwoonefilms, and @seedandspark so we can re-share your support! Thank you!
Friendship breakups can hurt just as much as romantic ones, so why don’t we see more movies about them? ALPHABET SOUP is a new feature film from @annawrenfry and @chloeskoczen about two best friends, the world they’ve built together, and what happens when growing up means growing apart. Support them on @seedandspark: https://seedandspark.com/fund/alphabet-soup-1
I’m so excited to see ALPHABET SOUP, a new Chicago feature film from @annawrenfry and @chloeskoczen about best friends Lola and Ruby as their intensely bonded friendship begins to fracture. Help this local indie film get made @seedandspark: https://seedandspark.com/fund/alphabet-soup-1
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Cast & Crew Deposits
Costs $5,000
We need to secure our cast and crew now so we can lock our team and move toward production.
Equipment Rentals
Costs $3,000
Your generous contribution will allow us to obtain better camera, lighting, and sound equipment as we bring this story to life.
Production Designer & Costume Designer
Costs $2,500
Your contribution allows us to hire a dedicated Production Designer and Costume Designer - two of the most important roles on this movie.
Legal Counsel, Insurance & Permits
Costs $2,000
We need to secure contracts, insurance, and permits now so we can get our production safely and legally underway.
Wardrobe & Props
Costs $1,500
Wardrobe and props are critical to the storytelling and help define the identities of our leads. Help us make this movie visually stunning!
Contingency
Costs $1,000
A little cushion now helps us handle miscellaneous startup costs (meals, transpo, fees, etc.) without slowing down our path to production.
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
Brittani Ward - Producer
Brittani Ward is an entrepreneurial filmmaker based in Chicago. She began her career as a Casting Director, collaborating for more than a decade with world-renowned talent. Full filmography, including the countless stars she has hired, available on imdb.
Her feature directorial debut, Single Car Crashes—which she also wrote, produced, and cast—won the Best New Vision Award at its world premiere at Cinequest, earned Best Lead Actor at the Midwest Film Festival, and screened at the St. Louis International Film Festival before being released by Freestyle on VOD in North America.
Brittani produced Desire Lines - which won the NEXT Special Jury Award at Sundance 2024 and was highlighted by The New York Times chief film critic Manohla Dargis - and the comedic proof-of-concept Debaters, starring J. Smith-Cameron and Kenneth Lonergan, which premiered at Sundance 2025 and is currently touring festivals. She also co-produced and cast Adult Children, which made the esteemed 2026 Popcorn List after it won 'Best Ensemble' at Bentonville, won 'Best International Film' at Galway, and screened at Newport, CIFF, Woodstock, Heartland, and more.
Brittani has been recognized as one of the Leaders of Chicago Culture in Newcity’s "Film 50," and is a proud honoree of Crain’s Chicago Business “40 Under 40” Class of 2025.
Anna Wren Fry - Writer/Director/Producer/Actress (Ruby)
Anna Wren Fry is a Chicago-based filmmaker and actress. Her films explores the tender, turbulent realities of girlhood, with a particular interest in female friendship and the intimate spaces young women create for themselves as they navigate identity, belonging, and change.
Deeply driven by aesthetic, Anna incorporates fashion, design, and dreamlike atmospheres into her work, using visual detail to reflect her characters’ inner lives. She draws inspiration from her own experiences, the lives of her friends, and the textures of the world around her.
Having grown up on professional sets as an actor with work across Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, NBC, etc., she brings a nuanced understanding of performance to directing; Anna values creating an environment rooted in playfulness, care, and collaboration, where actors feel comfortable accessing vulnerability and complexity.
Chloe Skoczen - Producer/Actress (Lola)
Chloe Skoczen is a Chicago-based actress, producer, and cinephile driven by a lifelong fascination with storytelling. Her work across feature films, television, and national advertising campaigns has appeared on NBC, HBO Max, and Hulu. Recent screen credits include Things Will Be Different, which premiered at SXSW in 2024, and Before Anyone Else, for which she received a Best Actress nomination at the Midwest Film Festival.
Drawn to emotionally resonant, character-driven stories, Chloe approaches each role with curiosity, rigor, and a deep commitment to creating meaningful art. Increasingly drawn to shaping stories from development through production, Chloe is eager to continue growing her work as a producer. She is most excited by projects that challenge her, inspire connection, and allow her to collaborate with the people she loves most.