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The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch
- ta1243 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mtlynch 1y ago[flagged]
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- yen223 1y agoYou thought this was a story about birds. It's really a story about the film-making process I really enjoyed reading this.
- thombat 1y agoAnd it starts with the all-too-familiar "Chesterton's Fence" arrogance of the domain expert who sees something done wrong and presumes that this is due to the ignorance or laziness of the doers, only to learn that there are sensible decisions made by sensible people behind it.
- cobbzilla 1y agoLong and meandering read, but the excellent bird puns throughout make it worthwhile.
- neogodless 1y agoYes they really do fit the bill!
- kayge 1y agoSome of them were a bit hard to swallow
- onionisafruit 1y agoWe’re still raven about how good they were
- jerf 1y agoThe first few paragraphs pattern match on "I'm going to use some excuse to meander on endlessly about myself, tying back into the nominal title just at the end so it doesn't look like I'm all about me", but it does turn out to just be a framing device and worth continuing past for an interesting story.
- Aurornis 1y agoThis was a fun read. I appreciate a journalist willing to dive into something obscure and reveal a lot of interesting process details and anecdotes as they go. Before I knew anything about the film and TV industry I would have assumed the process was rather straightforward from concept to script to filming and then editing, almost waterfall style. But no, it typically evolves and lives and changes through the process. Dialog and storylines are tweaked at every stage as the end product is incrementally manifested. Not unlike software development.
- yen223 1y agoWhen they talked about how the first draft had the correct bird from the correct place making the correct sound, but what made it into production was the wrong bird from the wrong place making the wrong sound, I felt that in my software engineering soul. The reasons were relatable too - real-world constraints got in the way, and ultimately this bug was way too minor to be fixed, in the face of all the big problems the movie faced.
- smackay 1y ago> you are always birding Amen, Brother. I think a large part of the blame for this state of affairs belongs to people like the BBC's Natural History Unit who licence their material to film and TV companies far and wide. So, for example, in many a scene you can thrill to the song of Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilis) or Eurasian Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs), which would be knee-deep in twitchers if the birds were actually there.
- aqme28 1y agoWasn't this posted here a week or two ago?
- neogodless 1y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Curious%20Case%20of%20the%20Pygmy%20Nuthatch&type=story&dateRange=all&sort=byDate&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Curious%20Case%20of%20th... 9 days ago. So spot on. But it didn't gain any traction then.
- dougdonohoe 1y agoMerlin is a great app for identifying birds (via sound and photo). We've used it in Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand. The library of sounds is most thorough in North America. Fun story!
- TheGRS 1y agoI read enough to trust that the writer dug very very deep on this. I was thinking early on "oh yea, probably just an error of the script getting to production and then a producer making a call as they switched locations", indeed it was something like that, but the writer here got down to the exact timeline of events, rewrites and script reads involved, etc. Even for someone like myself who is obsessed with BOTH birds and filmmaking, this is getting a little too deep, but I appreciate the effort!