Dear Bird Watcher is Daire Villa's entry for the 2024 Rathmullan Film Festival's What's the Story? competition. Daire reflects on the project:
When the watcher becomes the watched can it change our perspective? A film made from a collection of archival clips, we take a birds eye view to see what can we learn about human nature.
Working with archival material is such a privilege and is arguably one of the most exciting ways to make film whether you are a beginner or experienced filmmaker. This project was so fun from start to finish from the group zoom workshops to delving into the clips and producing our final films.
As the clips were pre-chosen for us it posed a new and interesting challenge, to find our voice or our story within a completely unfamiliar world. It allowed me to unlock a multitude of stories that wouldn't necessarily have come to me otherwise which was extremely exciting and has really opened my mind to delving into stories that are more unfamiliar to me or that I wouldn't necessarily expect myself to be interested in.
I went back and forth on a few ideas, finally settling on an idea which originally came from a throwaway joke 'Who is this Mr Jack Daw', which I made after reading the title of one of the clips, and I simply ran with it.