Inspirations Behind The Bird Watcher

Since my partner Lucca and I are just now getting the final touches to our movie The Bird Watcher, I wanted to share a few of the inspirations that we had in the process of creating our movie.

The absolute first movie I have to mention is The Blair Witch Project. From the day the idea of creating a movie based off a bird watcher in the forest was created, Lucca and I had both talked about how our idea was greatly inspired from this movie alone. Its mention can even be seen as early as when I had created my mood board where I used the exact poster below to be apart of the mood board for my movie. 

The Blair Witch project revolutionized its time in the 90's. The idea of it being filmed from a group of kids and just giving that nauseating effect to viewers was incredible. Also the fact that such a great movie was created that had very low budget is inspiring. Now, we didn't apply the filming from someone's point of view to our film however the forest setting definitely was applied to our movie. We tried to generally give our movie the same vibes as The Blair Witch Project.

Another inspiration relates to our An Hour Later black screen in the middle of our movie. In our movie we wanted to signal an hour later to show it getting later in the night, hence why the screen gets darker after, and to bring Eric the bird watcher into a new scene. In the Shining, there is a similar "A Month Later" black screen which we used heavy inspiration from for this part. Especially the use of a similar font. This comparison can be seen below.

                                                 

A last inspiration I personally have as editor is one about sound choice. Since I was editor of the movie I got the choice of picking mostly all the sounds which we had all throughout the movie. The sound inspiration I had was from The Barbarian. This was actually a last minute change to the sound and it was near the end. Previously, I had kept a gradual chaos sound throughout the entire ending scene however I felt like the tension of the movie wasn't heightened enough. Recently after watching a great horror movie called The Barbarian I had thought they used great music to put tension on situations. One sound specifically in the movie led me to the sound I chose for the scene pictured below and after it.