My original screenplay Flightless Birds features the reunion of three childhood friends (Emu, Magpie, and Kiwi) at the end of their senior year of college. When the three meet in the forest to visit their imaginary fantasy world one last time, they realize that Emu has never been able to see the fictional world, which leads old tensions to bubble to the surface. I designed the female main characters, Emu and Kiwi, as antitheses, demonstrating an inability to balance adulthood and childhood. While Emu has a job lined up for the future but can’t use her imagination, Kiwi is too paralyzed by her fear of alienation from imaginative play to think about the working world beyond the woods. Contrastingly, I decided that the only male character, Magpie, would not be “flightless” like his friends and has found a balance between the professional and the creative worlds. Flightless Birds combines the psychological thriller and coming-of-age genres to embody how the characters struggle between engaging with the whimsy of their child-like imaginations and prepping to take on adult responsibilities.

Purple Valley Productions (PVP), the Williams student filmmaking organization, recently selected Flightless Birds as their spring semester production. The full film will be uploaded to YouTube in May.