THE LOOK

Little Bird is full of mystery and wonder and dread. We see everything from a child’s perspective - the adult world seems cold and sinister and there’s always something hidden, something unfathomable going on underneath the surface that Maggie can’t quite grasp.

And anything is possible. Especially in the dark.

The fantasy isn’t quite storybook fantasy, it’s more the fantasy of a bad dream. Something that happens between sleep and waking that can’t be fully discounted or fully believed.

Little Bird is set in the 1980s, but I want to keep any period elements very low key. The films set in Scotland during this period are usually shot in a sort of “sunny” social realist tradition (Restless Natives, Gregory’s Girl), but I’d like to shoot Maggie’s neighbourhood more like the suburban noir of “Halloween” or “Blue Velvet” - with a slightly stark, stylised melancholy. The colour palette will be dark and moody and the camera will be fluid and immersive - dynamic in a subtle unobtrusive narrative-driven way.

There are many scenes at night or at dusk and I will use a lot of blue and mist - again keeping with a 1980s look, but in an understated way. I also want to use the haar - the thick fog that rolls off the sea in coastal areas like Edinburgh - as a mystical device that swirls in at key moments to add an air of unreality and occlusion.

The darkness will also help to conceal and suggest the creatures that inhabit it - at first the imps and the devil himself (who will be barely more than a silhouette with an evil glint in his eye for much of the film) - and then Maggie, as her neighbours struggle with the fallibility of their own perceptions as they witness Maggie overhead in the night.

There’s also a vein of dark humour running through.The unexpectedly vengeful sentiments of a little girl and the fantastically unlikely and eerie spectacle of Maggie flying over her suburban neighbourhood.

THE LOCATION

The unnamed suburb in the script is based on Edinburgh (around Braid Hill) but there are numerous Scottish suburbs that back out onto hillsides and similar locations in the North East annd we anre exploring our options.