The Pigeon Whisperer

The Drill Hall's unplugged film night, barely eight hours away, and us, a team of six people with the job of creating a five minute piece to be shown there, a task that at that point seemed impossible. Luckily for us we had help from the amazing people from the artsark, who gave us access to all their equipment and expertise for the day, thanks to them in barely eight hours we achieved a piece of film worthy of the other masterpieces that were shown later that day, a film we could all be proud of, this is a brief guide to the process behind creating our five minute wonder.

When choosing our idea we originally looked at a documentary type film, however deciding that would be a little bit drab we decided to take a more humorous approach to our film, eventually deciding on a mockumentry, a spoof documentary that would look at fake events in a serious tone, in this case it was about a boy who believed he had the power to communicate with pigeons.

The next step in the process of creating our five minute short was to draw up some storyboards, have lunch and then film the shots we required. The filming was spilt into two easy parts, location filming, and studio shots. The location shots included some short films of our protagonist interacting with the pigeons as well as some library shots of him and the pigeons. There was also an on location interview which we filmed just outside the drill hall. The studio shots were a larger interview with the pigeon whisperer plus some short interviews with two experts.

After all the filming had been wrapped up we retired to the arts ark to begin the editing, we spilt into two groups, one to compose a sound track for the movie and one to edit the clips together into the correct order and add effects. For the latter we used a piece of editing software called I-movie, part of the I-life software available for macs. The library footage we had filmed came in very useful here for padding out the interviews and for stopping the film simply being one long conversation. The music was created using garage band, another part of I-life. We also had to add a voice over to several clips which we recorded in the artsark. The audio and visuals were then merged and adjusted until perfection had been achieved, now all that was left was the long and tiring process of converting everything to the right formats for its unveiling at the unplugged film night later that day.
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