Trivia / Birdemic

• Corpsing: Whitney Moore, the actress playing Nathalie, can't keep a straight face.
  • She giggles when she talks to Dr. Jones, for whatever reason.
  • She also corpses when first getting the hangars in the infamous scene.
  • She is also laughing during the scene where she and Rod are dancing. One could guess that Rod was being funny if you ever saw his mouth move. Judging by her dancing, she clearly wasn't taking it seriously.
• No Budget: Ten thousand USD doesn't get you very far.
  • Nguyen did in-camera editing and didn't bother to capture room tone, meaning there was different background noise within a single scene depending on which way the camera was pointed; e.g. one scene had babbling water that would loudly be heard when the camera was on "Tree Hugger". The in-camera editing resulted in either Leave the Camera Running or having scenes beginning before the actors were ready, such as the "applause" scene.
  • Most of the interior scenes were clearly shot inside businesses that were closed for the night, and this is most apparent when Rod and Nathalie go out to a bar & grill after Rod meets Nathalie's mom. The only other people we see in the restaurant are the waiter and the singer!
  • Same with exterior shots near roads, where they couldn't get any temporary halt on traffic driving by. Yes, your apocalypse is quite believable seeing a steady flow of traffic driving the speed limit behind your characters. (In both directions.)
  • One example of Improvised Weapon. According to Whitney Moore, James Nguyen elected to have the actors use coat hangers as weapons rather than a shower curtain rod as scripted. Why? Because the Motel 6 they were filming at didn't have rods in their showers and apparently it would have broken the film's budget to go to a hardware store and spend $8-$16 to buy one.
  • The film has no music budget either, because most of the music is taken right from a catalogue of royalty-free production music and reused blatantly, give or take a few original compositions (and Hangin' Out). RiffTrax notices this right away:
    Bill: (as Nguyen) Hi, I'm making a film and I'd like to pay you for a full score... wow, that much, huh? Well, how about a one minute song and we pause it and loop it again? Deal!
    Mike: (as Nguyen) Hi, I'm making a film and I'd like to have it open on one of those long driving shots, you know, where you follow the car from above through a nice landscape... ooh, wow, that much, huh? How about if I just shoot from inside the car with a crappy home video camera? Deal!
  • During the "news" segments, viewers will notice that Nguyen couldn't even afford to have the Getty Images watermark removed from the stock footage.
  • They had to do one scene in a single take, because they didn't have the money to buy any more cartons of orange juice, the prop that stood in for the bird's acidic saliva.
  • The "crew" consisted only of Nguyen and a couple of assistants, meaning that the actors often had to double up and carry out other production roles, with Whitney Moore in particular handling handling the make-up duties after the original make-up artists quit when Nguyen refused to pay them. In an odd aversion of Copiously Credited Creator, Nguyen was only credited as writer, producer and director, and added in a mostly fictional or exaggerated list of credits — for instance, the credited cinematographer was apparently just a colleague whom Nguyen borrowed the camera equipment from — in order to make the production seem more professional.
• Parody Retcon: Defied! James Nguyen has repeatedly refused to make any face-saving claims of trying to be funny, insisting that his films are 100% serious and he's quite proud of their message.
• Production Posse: Patsy van Ettinger (Nat's mom) has appeared in every film by Nguyen.
• Promoted Fanboy: James Nguyen is a major Alfred Hitchcock fan (Vertigo is his favorite film).
• Troubled Production: James Nguyen turned out to be quite a horrible person, ignoring child labor laws, getting sued for sexual harassment, not paying actors, and being a Prima Donna Director, among other things. There have been some video clips of him screaming at someone (cast or crew, it's unknown), basically yelling "Do you know who I am? I'm better than you!"
• What Could Have Been: Originally, the infamous coat hanger scene was going to have shower rods instead, but the hotel used for the set didn't have any.
• Word of God: According to the audio commentary, Rick and his girlfriend are supposed to remind us of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and the music played in some of their scenes is intended to sound like Lennon's "Imagine." Of course, there's also awkward Product Placement for Yoko Ono's website www.imaginepeace.com, which is somehow in frame of two shots 90 degrees from each other.

  Kevin: (to the fake Imagine) Imagine all the eagles. Pecking out your eyes. Aaaaahhhh.

---