BIRD DRONE won the Best Romance award in our LCF’s First Edition.
IInterview with director Radheya Jegatheva.
What got you into filmmaking in the first place?
I’d always loved watching films, but my passion for filmmaking really came through when I was around 10-12 years old and would start trying to make little films of my own. Often I wouldn’t have any actors so I would set up my available camera (my iPod touch or dad’s MacBook Air) and film myself in the different shots I needed, use crappy green screen effects and mash it up together in Windows Movie Maker and iMovie. Before this, my brother and I would also spend hours in this animation software where you essentially are animating stick figures, and we’d create these elaborate action scenes where they’d be jumping around and fighting each other (similar to what my brother and I did in real life anyway). I was enthralled by VFX and would also explore that side of things, which led to me learning how to use animation software, and my love of storytelling led me to use those programs to create short films.
How did you get this scenario & come to direct BIRD DRONE? When was it?
Our writer Clare Toonen came up with the concept of a seagull falling in love with a drone several years back, when she was observing a drone being flown at a Western Australian beach. Years later in late 2019, our producer Hannah Ngo reached out to me with the film at a very early stage. I fell in love with it and came on board to direct, and then to also animate and edit. I had worked on animation before, but only very independently, so this was my first funded experience working with a crew on an animated film.
What can you tell us about the different stages of making an animated short-film, and how much time did they take for this one?
First there was Clare’s script, which underwent a script development stage before we were happy to move on to the next step. From the script I created a storyboard, which I then turned into an animatic, which is essentially a black-and-white storyboard version of the film with temp music and sound. I would go back-and-forth with our amazing character designer Kate Moon with notes and we landed on our final designs for the seagull and the drone. I worked on several iterations of the animatic, discussing with my producer Hannah as we navigated the film. Typically you would finish the animatic and lock it off before moving onto the actual animation production, but it took us much longer to get to that stage, so I started working on the animation simultaneously. We settled on the right ‘iteration’ of the film quite late into the journey. Closer to the end we also transitioned to post-production where our sound designer and composer came on board and worked their magic. In terms of my involvement, it took me nearly three years to direct and animate the film.
On a classic live-action film, you may shoot pictures that’ll finally not make the cut. Is it the same thing for animation? Are there scenes of BIRD DRONE that failed at being included?
Animation is edited a bit differently to live-action because you typically edit the film first using the animatic. I ended up making countless animatics with different scenes and ending variations over the course of production, and there were plenty of scenes that got cut and changed along the way. Thankfully this was before I animated them properly, using the animatic to determine what was working and what wasn’t. There were some early scenes that involved our seagull acting and moving in a way that felt too anthropomorphic for the direction I was wanting to take the film in, as an example of some of the scenes that didn’t make it. I think my first animatic for the film was around 14 minutes long, which of course was cut down and whittled away over the years.
How did you work on this film’s soundtrack, for instance with the sound-designer and the composer?
I had the privilege of working with a couple of incredible people for the soundtrack - our sound-designer Keith Thomas and our composer Wil Hughes are based on the other side of Australia, so it involved us having zoom meetings and communicating over email, and also a live session with one of their studios. It worked great and they understood the film really well, which helped so much with the emotion and what needed to be brought to it. They put so much effort into it and I’m so lucky to have had them on board! Wil’s friend Evan McHugh did the score mix as well for the film, which was so generous of him and I’m very grateful. The experience definitely made me so much more comfortable with collaborating with composers/sound designers, which I’m continuing to do on my current project and it’s a great feeling. One of my favourite little moments was finding out that there’s a ‘seagull’ technique on the cello which we used in the film, in one scene we transition from real seagull squawks to only cello sounds for the gulls!
Where can people watch BIRD DRONE? (And if it’s not available yet: do you know how it might be soon?)
BIRD DRONE is still on the film festival circuit and so it might not be available to watch for a while - but we certainly will be releasing it online eventually. In the meantime, hopefully it will be showing at a theatre near you!
Another project, before or after this one, past or future, that you would like to share?
I’m currently working on my next short film, titled TRADING CARDS: a dark fantasy animated short about a witch living in an unusual house who travels back in time to escape the anxieties of adulthood by meeting his younger self. I would describe it as an abstract, poetic exploration of mental health, living with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and navigating identity through the lens of adulthood and childhood.
I’m also writing and directing an animated feature film with my same producer for BIRD DRONE, tentatively titled ZOIC. Hannah and I really enjoyed working together and I’m glad that we’ll get to advance to a long-form film for our next project.
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