Making of · September 2026
Pay attention: making WATCHER
An osprey, a river in Prince George’s County, and a written set of rules.
By Anfon Ha and Bryan Daniels
WATCHER began with a simple idea: pay attention. Set in Prince George’s County, Maryland, the film follows an osprey watching the river below while the environment around it continues to change. It is a film about consequences close to home and our responsibility to notice them.
Everything is seen from above
A bird’s eye view, held at altitude, long lens, slow and steady. Humans appear only from overhead at middle distance, and no face appears in the film. The camera watches rather than participates.
The county is real and the footage is not. Locations across Prince George’s County were gathered as reference and used throughout production to build the environments.
A human voice
The voice is human and it is local. Michael Taliaferro, a narrator out of Baltimore, gave the film the authenticity the story needed. A film about this part of Maryland had to sound like it. Every word of the narration is a human performance.
Rules first
Nine narrative beats were written, then reduced across successive passes from 5:31 to 3:34. The cut removed every line that explained a line already spoken. Before any image was generated, a written grammar was set: fixed altitude ranges, a defined look, and six light states covering late afternoon through first light. The osprey was checked against the anatomy of the Chesapeake Bay population before any shot was built.
Forty-one finished shots, generated neutral, so every finishing decision stayed open for the edit, the grade, the sound design and the mix. All of that was done by hand.