"I wasn't going to make movies any more. I figured it was just too hard. My family. My job. Everything like that." This is moviemaker Cecelia Condit speaking as she recalls her grousing days. "But then I started taking pictures of birds. Out of my backyard. They looked like they were in the wild. And I found that I had gotten beautiful shots. So I started to build on that idea."
Confident this successful moviemaker, instructor on UWM's Film Department faculty, wife, mother and, not the least of it, environmentalist, would succeed, Milwaukee County bestowed its Individual Artist Award on her. Condit assumed, "If I did a piece on birds it would be really delightful," and so she completed the assignment. "It wasn't delightful. It was heavy. How can you do a heavy piece on delightful creatures like birds?" Back to Frame One in pursuit of the blue bird of happiness. Or weightlessness. {INSERT_RELATED}
First she contacted musician Paul Amitai, a graduate student at UWM. "He produced 11 compositions using bird calls and their drumming. He synthesized the crow calls making them sound somewhat like violins. And all in three weeks!" Condit reports. Now she had sound.
"I didn't want to cast yet and I didn't want to work from a script right away," she said of her new approach. "So I started shooting these weird night scenes with floodlights on University beach, and later in the Downer woods, making it as beautiful as I could with all those gloriously-colored feathers and just making it charming." Then she cast Theresa Columbus as the lead female bird; followed by Didier Leplae as her mate.
"It's a very simple story because birds are very simple. They basically find a mate (and a lot of them mate for life) and then they lay an egg, protect the nest and then they finally figure out how to kind of negotiate around human beings." Caution became a watchword because "they're really very boring, you know. They get their egg, they protect it, they get as many young out as they can and that's it." Condit had to keep her story from becoming a bore. She continued to shoot.
"I actually put Paul's music out of my mind until I started to edit -- just trusting that it would be as good as I thought it had been (upon first hearing it) and broad enough to handle the range of my piece," Condit said.
The result, "Why Not a Sparrow," premieres on Sun., April 14 at 3 p.m. in the Lubar Auditorium of the Milwaukee Art Museum's new Calatrava extension (looking like a bird in flight when its "wings" are open). A question & answer period follows with Condit and her Bird Co. Admission is free.
