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Immersed in his restless nights of insomnia, a man and his cat listen to the song of a bird which is the
only thing that helps him fall asleep. Suddenly the singing stops. This will lead him to discover a terrifying event. A
warning about how human irresponsibility affects other species in urban environments.
This project is quite meaningful to me because it’s the very first scripted science project that I’ve directed and produced,
it’s also the first project created in conjunction with an interdisciplinary team coming from vastly different knowledge
areas such as biology, linguistics, and tech.
The film was created, produced, and edited during the SCIFILM IT Hackathon Bogota 2022, which is a three-day
science filmmaking event where researchers and artists combine their powers to create short science films in teams of
four. Experts in film, science, and communication gather from across the globe to create films about science. After the
event, the teams take their films to the cinema for evenings of science cinema in which the public engages with science,
scientists, and artists.
With the support of the mentors and the organizing team at Los Andes University and Cinemateca de Bogotá (Local
Cinematheque) SPECIES IN SILENCE was created with a clear vision in mind to engage with a very well-known
problem worldwide. The film seeks to create awareness for the public regarding the loss of animal biodiversity due to
free-roaming feral cats. This project opened my vision and showed me a whole new realm of possibilities at the
intersection of science and film, there are hundreds of thousands of research papers being published every month around
the world and most of them are only consumed and read by the scientific community, many of them don’t ever get to
the public if not intervened or marketed through articles or media. This hackathon showed me the great potential science
has in the making of films, not only it enriches them, but it also makes them more relevant as they tackle real problems
and serve a greater purpose of spreading knowledge while being educational and didactic.
The entire practice of translating a scientific paper into a film constitutes a challenge, as many of the concepts that
comprise a peer-reviewed paper are complex, detailed, and nuanced. However, with the help of my team of researchers
and colleagues, we were able to merge both and create a story that kept the essence of the articles that talk about the
tremendous diversity loss in Colombia alone due to irresponsible ownership of cats.