Flies like a bird

The bird was the first puppet I cast for this film.  I'd never done a bird before and I honestly can't remember whether the story spread from my desire to fly a bird or whether it was purely coincidental.

I've shot a couple of slates with the bird this week and I have to admit there's a certain freedom in  anthropomorphising a flying animal.  I've spent so much of the last year idly watching birds in preparation for the role.  It's quite a complex and beautiful act, flying.  You can see why the ancient artists and inventors were so desperate to get themselves wings made of feathers.

An aeroplane is a lovely instrument and perhaps living ten years next to a busy airport has left me complacent about the spectacle of those giant metal creatures taking to the air but the majestic grace of a large bird flying is something much more inspirational.  Even the humble pigeon is a more sophisticated flier than the cleverest airbus. Watch that one dart across the square hardly moving  a wing then gently alighting in the space between those two metal spikes by the CCTV camera.

Richard Bach wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull to express the idea of intellectual and spiritual freedom.   A Seagull was the perfect bird to describe this, if you've ever watched them ducking and wheeling across the sky,  the speed of their diving for morsels describes a great skill underlying their airborne squabbles for old chips.  You can see in it the single minded ambition of a scavenger bird.    Our contemporary urban existence is, in fact, not dissimilar to the lives lived by pigeons, gulls and other municipal nuisances.

Runners gather at the telephone post

Pigeons, for example, live huddled together in communities near transport links and food outlets, ignoring hierarchy when they choose.  They indulge in and are the victims of petty crime and muggings.  Their youngsters can be particularly antisocial.

Pigeons fly around the park

I saw a gang of adolescent pigeons on Staines High Street last year deliberately buzzing passers by, forcing them to dive out of the way.  The pigeons gained nothing from it and they totally seemed to be doing it for a laugh. A kind of Avian Happy-Slapping.

Pigeons gather in groups on the shed roof at the end of the park and on the signal of a leader they all set off as a single body on a circular flight around the park to land on the same roof. I've seen joggers and rollerbladers doing much the same thing.  It's sport.  We've achieved Michelangelo's dream of living the lives of birds.

Where was I going with this?

Wind Reel and Print

That's what I said.  It's a WRAP.  And after only a year, that's got to be a record!  Actually you can relax, you're nowhere closer to seeing the finished product, this is the end of block ONE and that just means that all the human activity and dialogue is shot.  It is also, as the title suggests; processed, printed, synched and chucked into AVID for a rough cut.

I've been answering a lot of questions about the film recently, I'm even negotiating a first screening date, I feel like a proper little producer this month! It's possible the film's title will change to better reflect the direction which will totally mess up this blog.

So I'm getting used to the ideas behind the film again: what it is that I'm trying to say.  I imagine I'll have to find ways to describe it to people.  It's a very simple story.  After all, it's three minutes long and there's only so much that you can say in that time.

Firebird basically describes the moment of turnaround between spiraling despair and hope.  It's coming up on the year since I started working on this and that is not lost on me. Of course it's been a terrible season (In case you came in late, I'll again mention that winter is not for me) but I've got through it by ignoring and hoping it will go away - that seems to be working.  See? It's February already! In any case I now have the advantage of lucidity and precious distance to critically view my own behavior and decisions in that other time when things were at their worst.  I needn't bore you with the details but while it would be unfair to say that those situations were not bad, my instinctive reactions to them did not help me and they certainly hurt others.
 

Bad Hair Day

That's the state the central character is in, absorbed in fighting for her own sense of existence, she has ignored how important that existence is to the other people in her life.  The Firebird forces her to look outside of herself.

Block TWO, meanwhile, is well underway.  All the stuff that the bird actually does. It's about six shots and it plays the counterpoint narrative. No dialogue does make it shoot faster.  I have to say, latex and wire are not the most dextrous of materials for lip movement, but they have a tenacity and have given me some pleasant surprises.

It's down to the rigging of the face, right?  I've learned some valuable - and expensive - lessons about puppet fabrication.  Latex skin is surprisingly tough and takes a lot of pushing to get the wire supporting it to move. When it does move, the most interesting things happen.  Unlike clay which lets you move bits independently, stick bits on and shave bits off, latex just tugs frantically at other areas of the face - eye lids, nostrils etc, really anywhere that there is space to give. The resulting expressions are more diverse and imaginative than I could ever control.  These little characters really do take on a life of their own and that's why they've taken quite as long to animate as they have. 

Animating hair is a story all it's own.