You thought this was a story about birds. It's really a story about the film-making process

I really enjoyed reading this.

Long and meandering read, but the excellent bird puns throughout make it worthwhile.

The 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.

This 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.

Wasn't this posted here a week or two ago?

Merlin 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!

I 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!