Looking back on The Bird Nerd

Liam Rushton as Alan Argus in the official thumbnail for The Bird Nerd

Last week was a busy week for me - the week for shooting individual productions for the first year of my university course. In crews of four, we filmed four films over four days, which is one each. And on Friday, as we were on the last of these four days, The Bird Nerd came up in conversation, something it hasn't done in a while. You see, we needed a poster to decorate a plain wall, and it just so happens that I have a very large Bird Nerd poster. And the return of The Bird Nerd to the forefront of my thoughts got me thinking about the shoot, and just how much fun it was.

And so I thought I'd post a little bit of a retrospective about the film, my involvement in it, and the overall experience.

With each new character, a new idea follows

When I finished the third draft of my first novel in December (the first draft to be completed with the story as it is) I wanted to start immediately with the sequel, and I took steps to do so. I worked out which of my characters were still alive and able to be active, what I wanted to happen, created all the folders on my hard drive...

And then I didn't get anywhere. I use the free software yWriter 6 for my writing, though at the time I used the previous version, and it allows me to easily visualise just how much I've got written. And therein lay my problem. I started with an idea in February 2013 and wrote loads of quite terrible stuff before I actually started to consider where my story might go. There was a lot of salvageable material there which I used. And with every subsequent revision, I've effectively copied the previous version of a given scene, improving it wherever it needs improving, changing details wherever details need changing, and adding new chapters as necessary. But though I was still doing new stuff, the project was never empty, it was always fairly full.

Getting started in film

"The Cost of Regeneration" (2008/2010)

Hallo again! I keep promising to post on here regularly, and I never do, and I'm very ashamed of that fact. But procrastination and laziness and the fabled "other things" keep on coming up (often the first two, though the latter does creep in every now and then) and I end up not bothering. So now I want to change that. Of course, if I'm going to make a blogpost that's worth the while, I probably need to have some form of decent subject matter, so I thought I'd write a bit today about how I got into making films. And to do that, I'm going to transport you back in time about seven years, to early 2008.

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The 2007/2008 academic year was my last at primary school, and when I made my first 'film' (if it can be described as such). I'd just started getting very much into Lego at the time, and - after getting my first laptop in Christmas 2007 - I was spending time getting used to using the various pieces of software available to me. Don't get me wrong, my horizons at this stage were confined within the Windows Movie Maker box, but there's nothing to be ashamed of there.