Faked Migration

Alma had Winged Migration from Netflix and we watched the end of it today. Then she put on the "Making of" featurette. And it ruined the entire movie. Seriously. Among the things that were upsetting:

* The filmmakers didn't just "put cameras near the eggs so the birds would be used to the sounds," as I had read. In many cases, they raised the birds from hatching in France, and then flew them out to the various settings to shoot them. So there really was barely any - if any at all - actual migration footage in the film. It's just the birds flying around in the various places they would be migrating if they had been raised in the wild! What??

* Not only that, but they didn't turn the birds loose and then shoot. Instead, they wrote a script and staged scene after scene after scene. There were freaking storyboards! In one shot in Monument Valley, there is a broken-down truck that some geese run past; turns out they drove the truck out there themselves and even took one of the tires off on the spot to make it look more run down.

* Here's a rough quote of what the guy just said while shooting in New York: "A flock of wild geese fly up the East River. Our birds see them and join them. For a while, we fear we've lost them. But after 15 minutes, they turn around and come back to us. They weren't ready for such a long trip." Umm... that's terrible, isn't it? "We've ruined these geese for life, but we got our shot."

* The guy keeps whining about "how are we going to get this shot?" Dude, you're keeping the birds in boxes before the shot starts, and then when they come out, you have to yell at them, "Allez!" Sheesh. You don't have enough control over this? "Migration-like Film Product!"

* Oh, and the guy pronounced "Adirondacks" wrong multiple times. As I assume everyone reading this knows, it's pronounced Ad-ih-RON-dacks. But he kept saying "Ad-EYE-urn-dacks." Gah.

As Alma just said, "It's still a cool movie, it's just disappointing." Agreed. But it's one of those things I could probably have gotten along without knowing. Oh well.