Birdman

The story of actor Riggan Thomson, famous for the role of the cult movie superhero of the late 1980s Birdman, who is struggling to play in the Broadway play written by his childhood idol Raymond Carver , where he combines the role of the director with the main role in the play. There are several days before the premiere, and the performance has constant problems with the actors, financing (the hero has laid the house to pay for expenses), at the same time the hero is struggling with his ego, trying to restore his career, family and himself. At the same time, an inner voice is constantly heard in Riggan's head, he is the alterago - Birdman, a superhero from his past who is trying to make the hero leave the theater and return to the cinema to shoot blockbusters with explosions for the mass audience. The success of the performance requires the attention of the press, critics and spectators. A combination of circumstances helps the hero arouse incredible interest in his production.

The film’s budget of $ 18 million did not allow the scenery of the central part of New York to be built , as was done in the film “The New Spider-Man. High voltage ” ^[13] . Therefore, the filming, which began in March 2013, took place on the real streets of New York ^{[14] [15]} . Part of the shooting took place in the scenery of the theater, and the facade of the theater, the stage and the auditorium were shot in kind at the Saint-James Theater on West 44th Street ^[16] . Michael Keaton's walk in shorts in Times Square was also filmed in kind with one take. The film uses the modern style of continuous shooting with a moving camera installed on the Steadicam system . However, despite the apparent absence of mounting glues, there are at least 100 in the film. The desired effect was achieved by the precise organization of the mounting frames and digital image processing that masked the gluing ^[13] . One of the features of the film is the digital “sweeping” of random traces of members of the film crew : there is even no reflection of the operator and camera in the mirrors. To shoot the flight scenes of the protagonist, the same technology was used as in the film " Gravity " ^[13] . The entire film was shot with Arri Alexa digital cinema cameras , data from which were transferred via Wi-Fi to an external drive, and were immediately available for viewing and editing layout. Thanks to this and preliminary organizational work, the shooting took place in less than a month, and the installation took two weeks.

The film was awarded extremely high marks by the world film press and was widely recognized as one of the most powerful film projects of 2014.

• Buster Lloyd. Man-bird: the film "Birdman" (Russian) // "MediaVision": magazine. - 2015. - No. 2/52 . - S. 35-38 .