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Around the 16th of June I was asked to find a Male Red Grouse otherwise known as a Lagopus Scoticus for a CGi job commissioned by AMV BBDO.
The request was to find a real bird for authenticity, but as soon as I started to make enquiries it came to light that the shooting season didn’t open in the UK until 12 August. This didn’t help!

I rung around some high end butchers who did store fresh grouse in their freezer’s ‘oven ready’ which literally means plucked and gutted ready for roasting, but I needed birds ‘on the feather’ as they call it so we could see them in their natural splendour not just the giblets.
So my next port of call was to ring round various Taxidermists to find out the possibility of hiring something stuffed.
After ringing around half a dozen companies it became clear that for a large fee we could hire for a week at a time one or two birds in a display box. This wasn’t as good as a real bird, but it would help us visually.
Still making enquiries to see if we could buy a Grouse from a Taxidermist, I came across a really helpful man by the name of David at Wild Art Taxidermy who had the time to talk to be about the pro’s and con’s of buying a bird, and happened to also have in his freezer ready to taxidermy a Red Grouse. He had bought the creature from a shoot so the bird was on the feather and ready to defrost. This solved all our problems! David and I settled on a price and the next day the bird was posted Royal mail special delivery to our studio.
By the time it reached us from Deal in Kent it had thawed out quite considerably so we quickly realized someone in the office who wasn’t faint hearted had to gut the bird fast before it started to decompose. We had an empty fridge we could keep the bird in, but not for long, so the job started to de feather the Grouse.
Paul Gibbons who hails from Norfolk (East Anglia) was the least squeamish of us city folk about the gruesome task in hand and happily dived in with 8 fingers and 2 thumbs a’working, removing the giblets and everything else in his way, leaving an empty sack of a bird on his desk.
As a backup we also opted to buy a single Red Grouse from an equally helpful Taxidermy Hire company which was mounted on a wooden base (this was cheaper than hiring it for six weeks) so we had the shape of a real bird not just the feathers to go by.

Each feather was then mounted on a board and numbered so we knew where bouts on the bird it had been plucked. We then had to shoot each feather and then hand place them digitally back into our CGi model, to create a photo realistic bird.

Amber Webster

Congratulations to Christine Ball (of Cartwrights Accountants), for raising over £500 on Saturday 16th May at the '2009 Playtex Moonwalk’ in London, raising money for the Breast Cancer awareness charity 'Walk the walk'.
At the stroke of Midnight (being led by TV presenter Paul O’Grady) Christine Ball, her daughter Katie, and fifteen thousand other late night walkers took to the Moonlit streets of Central London. Finishing the Half Marathon circuit (13 miles) in just 3hrs 40mins.
Well done Christine and Katie, from all of us here at Act2 Um.
www.walkthewalk.org