Shawn Christensen, the writer, director and actor behind Oscar-winning short film Curfew, will release “Sophia So Far,” a full-length version of the film’s central song, on April 23. Christensen will release the track, which appears in the short film’s pivotal scene, digitally via +1 Records and under the name Goodnight Radio. The filmmaker has also confirmed that Curfew, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2012 and won Best Live Action Short at the Oscars in February, will be made into a feature film this summer.
Christensen, the former frontman of New York rock band stellastarr*, wrote, directed and starred in Curfew, a 19-minute film about a drug addict’s relationship with his nine-year-old niece (played by Fatima Ptacek). The musician and filmmaker penned the focal track by default, forced to compose something when the song he hoped to use fell through.
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“The band whose song I wanted bailed on me two days before we shot and I had already lineup about 60 extras and my actors to dance in rhythm to their track,” Christensen tells The Hollywood Reporter. “They left me in a very bad spot so I had no choice but to play their song for the filming and then later I had to write a song in that exact same tempo. I had footage of everyone dancing to that tempo so I had to stick to it. I hadn’t written a song in a couple years so it was tough.”
Christensen expanded and recorded “Sophia So Far,” initially a short clip used in the scene, in early February with producer Kevin Seaton in Los Angeles. The musician’s former stellastarr* bandmates, Amanda Tannen and Michael Jurin, provided backup vocals for the final track. The solo project will live under the Goodnight Radio name, which Christensen notes was a potential title for stellastarr*’s second album Harmonies For The Haunted, which was released in 2005 via RCA. “Sophia So Far” is being released as a one-off single, however the musician plans to record an album’s worth of songs in the coming months.
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“I have more material that I’m working out now,” Christensen says. “I’ve had music for a while, almost exactly the same way the music was in the short film, half done and half sang. I’m going to finish those songs over the next few months. I feel like everything I’m doing right now is organic. I feel like I should be writing music right now so I’m starting to complete those songs, but I don’t know when they’ll be released. I’m going to be finishing off ten or twelve songs.”
“Sophia So Far” will also appear in the upcoming feature-length version of Curfew. Christensen has completed the script and is in the process of securing funding for the film, which will go into production this summer. Christensen is also writing two adapted screenplays, a version of Korean film The Man From Nowhere for the Weinstein Company and an adaptation of the graphic novel The Stuff of Legends for Disney. He will appear in two upcoming short films, Grandma’s Not A Toaster, which will premiere at Tribeca this month, and The Bicycle.
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