Morning Joy

The seed for Morning Joy was first planted in 2017, when Ethan Pakchar, my creative partner on the film, approached me with the idea of a human and bird musical relationship. Initially, we developed a feature-length story about a young Joni Mitchell-type songwriter and a runaway songbird navigating the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s. We had some interest from a few different production companies, but as things often go in Hollywood, the project never really went anywhere.

Flash forward to March 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. I was living in Los Angeles, Ethan was in New York, and the project was in the distant and nearly forgotten past. During one of our quarantine check-ins one morning, we both commented on waking up to the sounds of songbirds outside our windows. These creatures seemed so cheerful, oblivious to the depression and loneliness we were both feeling. This poetic disconnect, combined with our desire to create something we could see through to the end, inspired us to reinvent our earlier story into the short film you see today.