Seedfeeder

About a week after a really tough breakup, I started noticing that, as the weather thawed into spring, birds started visiting my back porch more frequently. This was during the year that DePaul was operating entirely remotely, so I spent a lot of time sitting at my desk looking out the window at the birds. My first Amazon purchase after an ill-fated “please don’t dump me” gift was a birdfeeder and a bag of bird seed advertised to attract cardinals specifically – those were my great grandmother Delia’s favorite and seeing them always reminded me of her.

The birdfeeder worked almost too well. Suffice it to say, my porch quickly became a popular social destination for birds of all kinds. Fascinated by their behavior, I set up my camera on a tripod and started recording hours and hours of footage of the birds coming and going throughout a week. I mostly used a vintage 135mm Minolta SLR lens with an ISCO projector lens clamped to the end so I could shoot 2x anamorphic in-camera. I also shot a few hours of bird footage through a car dash camera shoved inside the feeder itself to get an extreme-close angle – this footage was later used toward the end of the film as playback on the television.

Eventually I flew a bit too close to the sun with the birdfeeder. After a week of experimenting with various locations around the porch, I took it down on account of my downstairs’ neighbors porches constantly getting covered in seed and bird excrement. That was a year ago, and by now, most of those birds that I captured on camera are probably dead, which sort of stinks. At least they’re memorialized here. Thank you for your consideration!