30 Dec Filming A Bird’s Nest Short Film by Director of Photography Alex Walker

Director of Photography, Alex Walker talks about filming A Bird’s Nest

They say film crews are the ultimate problem solvers. Shortly after Katrina hit NOLA back in 04 I was working on a production when the Key Grip remarked that filmmakers should have been sent instead of FEMA. After the experiences we had shooting A Bird’s Nest, I tend to agree.

The script paints a picture of a troubled child who turns to the macabre for his outlet in life. The challenge was to create a sense of understanding between the audience and the anti-hero of the story without betraying the turn coming at the end of the film. Christine and I felt that this could be best accomplished by showing the beauty of the natural world the child would escape to and contrast it with more moody interior lighting. The home our anti-hero was growing up in was a broken one, and the style contrast was meant to heighten that feeling. Ultimately we settled on a mixture of mostly handheld, free flowing footage when the anti-hero was in an environment he felt comfortable. The broken-home was mostly shot either on sticks or with slow calculating moves via dolly and Kessler crane and lit using large indirect sources to enhance the natural light aesthetic.

As usually happens in the world of independent cinema, there’s always something that comes up unexpectedly and stands between you and accomplishing your goal. In this case, it took the form of clouds. Either too many or not enough. And some of them brought rain. Lots of rain. First up on day one we had a scene that began under even cloud cover, but by the time we were ready to flip our set up and get the opposite coverage the clouds had parted giving way to sunny skies. This meant an on the spot decision to reorder the entire schedule which we later discovered would never fully materialize due to the constantly changing weather. On the final evening of shooting, we found ourselves caught in the middle of the woods during a thunderstorm with our equipment all-terrain vehicle out of commission due to a flat. Of course, we anticipated these problems and came equipped with rain gear and some ground adaptors to prevent any electrocutions. Thankfully we were rolling raw on the RED Scarlet, which allowed us to relight and even out contrast in post. As always we were getting the most on the day, but post can hide a lot sins if done subtlety. I think the film festival results are a testament to the power of what a film crew can due when presented with a challenge.

-Alex Walker
alexwalker.co