BIRDHOUSE - The Short Film

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The largest children’s film festival in Japan, KINEKO (Tw @tokyokinderfilm, Ig @kineko_filmfes) was an incredible experience -even from afar. We struggled to stay awake until 11:30pm for a live Q&A with the audience. To our surprise, when the film showed, it was live dubbed by incredible voice actors! We were so impressed! My daughter at some point in the film turned to me with big eyes and said, “I don’t understand anything.”“Yup, I know, me either” I responded. When the film ended and the lights dimmed up, we were patched in through a video conference directly onto the big screen as families, toddlers, some teens and adults asked us questions with kind smiles.

We would love to attend in person and who knows, maybe bring another film?

This tiny film has been shown in over 10 cities around the world and it keeps going! We are so thrilled about this -we can hardly believe it. What started as a fun family project, has now turned into a film seen by thousands of people on the big screen and across the web. What!

It’s a story of a young girl who has outgrown fairy tales. She spends her days drawing and studying birds. Although she doesn’t boast it, she considers herself to be a “scientist of birds.” Of course, as a “girl of science,” she doesn’t believe in magic anymore. But in order not to hurt her younger sister, she must find a way to convince her that magic exists in this ordinary world. And in doing so, she discovers the extraordinary was waiting for her all along.

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This film was shot while the 2020 quarantine lockdown was in place; a moment where all the magic of life seemed to be disappearing.

There is something extremely challenging as well as extremely satisfying about not having a crew, a strict schedule, a budget, a lot of equipment, etc. This freed me up from some constraints and challenges I might have otherwise had. Of course, it created some fun ones too. My daughters had never been on camera acting before this short, so the situation demanded extra “resourcefulness.” Insane amounts of chocolate and ice cream may or may not have been a part of this shoot, amounting to the only actual expense we had. Directing and operating the camera, retouching the set dressing, was errm… difficult. Enter the superhero wife. The poor thing not only had to listen to my crazy ideas and put up with them, she then all of the sudden had to “help out.” It most likely didn’t matter too much until she had to carry sandbags.

For me this was an opportunity to test my storytelling chops by crafting and shooting a tiny little story, while spending quality time with my family.

Because I had no way to capture good live audio, which would have simplified post so much, I had to commit to ADR’ing; poor man’s ADR that is, see below, but somehow it worked. It was fun to see how my daughter understood that movies fake so much stuff, including the sound of the voices we hear.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it!