Crowing with delight
> The director of Chicken Beauty Pageant shares the experience of making the documentary for new Discovery series Jumpcut Asia
LAST August, Discovery Channel Asia Pacific announced a brandnew digital initiative called Jumpcut Asia, which is intended to showcase high-quality content by up-and-coming Southeast Asian filmmakers.
Eight filmmaking teams made it to the final cut to be mentored by Academy Award-winning documentary film producer Nicholas Reed.
The eight teams’ efforts, with a primary focus on lesser-known aspects of various communities in Southeast Asia, will be broadcast over eight episodes on Discovery (Astro channel 551).
The first episode, Spandex Dreams about Singapore’s first and only pro wrestling team, will premiere this Sunday at 10pm, along with a simultaneous livestream on Discovery SEA’s Facebook page.
The following episode on May 7, Chicken Beauty Pageant, is the work of Amrit Kaur Jastol (writer and director), Jessica Novia Sutrisno (producer and production manager), Nurul Amirah Haris (sound editor), and Eunice Tan Hui En (postproduction director).
The team from Singapore met with the many hopefuls in Malaysia and Indonesia who have devoted time and money to grooming champion, prizemoney-winning chickens, as well as the chicken beauticians and musicians who’ve built their niche writing music for chicken pageants.
During a tele-conference interview, Amrit said that the idea for Chicken Beauty Pageant began as the team’s final-year project while studying communications at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
“We went online to search for weird things around Southeast Asia,” she said. “We chanced upon this topic that was about chicken beauty pageants in Malaysia.
“So we contacted some people in Malaysia and found the Serama Association of Kelantan. From them, we got the contacts of organisers in Jakarta, Indonesia.”
It took Amrit and her team half a year to shoot the footage they needed for their university project last year.
Then, they came across calls asking for filmmakers to pitch their ideas for Jumpcut Asia, and they sent in their pitch last December.
Amrit said: “Discovery was interested in our story and saw its potential. There are already pageants for cats and dogs, so why not chickens?”
They started shooting additional footage in February, and completed post-production in March.
“The film [we shot] for Discovery is different from the one we shot [for our project],” Amrit said, although both were around 11 to 12 minutes long.
Both films do share one scene, however – that of a chicken undergoing surgery to repair its injured comb. However, the rest of the short consists of original footage.
In case you were wondering, the team got an A for their final project, which was also named best documentary.
While it would have been easy to turn Chicken Beauty Pageant into a comedy, Amrit said she and her team preferred not to.
She explained that they chose not to treat those taking part in the pageant lightly, as these participants are actually serious about their work and their chickens.
After all, a lot of effort has been made to train and groom these birds.
Amrit believes that the audience for Jumpcut Asia will appreciate Chicken Beauty Pageant.
“It is short, punchy and exciting,” she said. “[It’s] a thing that [many people] don’t really know about, or are not really aware of.”