Flight of imagination to save bird

No matter how tired Tao Yang is at the end of a day, her mood always brightens when the subject of conversation is the green peafowl, a species found in Southeast Asia.

The 45-year-old Shanghai resident seems to like everything about the bird, especially the distinctive feature of the males－colorful long feathers. Tao keeps herself updated about the birds' major habitats and their numbers.

Born in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, Tao earlier worked for an investment bank in Shanghai, but she always had a tender spot for nature. She plans to donate all her things for animal protection after she is gone. "I mean why not? I don't plan to get married and have a child."

In 2009, green peafowls caught her attention.

"It felt strange that a kind of peafowl is under first-grade national protection when we see the bird in zoos," Tao says.

The green peafowl was once widely found in China. In recent decades, however, the bird's numbers in the country fell. As a result, the bird is a protected animal. The blue peafowl was introduced to China from India.

In 2009, the green peafowl was also listed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's red list.

In 2017, the birds were put under the critically endangered category by authorities in Yunnan province, Southwest China. Habitat loss is a main reason behind their disappearance in modern times.

Tao says she was shocked to learn online that there are fewer than 600 such birds in China today. Asking around her friends, she realized none of them had any knowledge of the bird's existence.

"My immediate reaction was that I should do my part to have more people know about them," she says.

When the pandemic broke, Tao was working on an investment project with an Australia company, but the work came to a halt. That gave her time to do what she had meant to do for the green peafowl. She started to write a story based on her study of the bird, with an aim of attracting public attention. With experience of developing and publishing a novel about stray cats and dogs in 2018, Tao finished the Green Peafowl Empire earlier last year. She didn't stop there and considered adapting the novel into a script.

"I planned to make a reality show, where everyone would wear a costume," Tao says.

However, when Tao's friends agreed to the idea and she had the costumes ready, she found it was difficult to coordinate their schedules.

"The plot was long, and my friends had their jobs and families to take care of. They were not always available," Tao says.

She then thought of a shadow play. However, it "didn't offer a good visual for what I had in mind", she says.

Finally, Tao settled for clay figurines after studying various approaches that would be viable for her limited resources while meeting her expectations. The idea was to make the figurines on her own and have them featured in a stop-motion animation, a technique to simulate motion of things in photos. The beginning was tough. When she got down to making the figurines, she found that they were not easy. It took her nearly four months and many attempts to pull off the first episode.

"I often broke them into pieces during the drying process at the beginning," Tao says, adding that it usually took her two days to finish a figurine after several steps, including modeling, drying and coloring.

By trial and error, Tao managed to fashion vivid green peafowl figurines out of the clay. She took more than 90,000 photos for some 20 episodes of the first season, while she took time to learn filming, editing, audio-recording and synthesis. Her friends have given her support and actively participated in the dubbing of the animation. They sent Tao their dubbed audios, which she then processed and put in the film.

Sheng Weijuan has helped with dubbing for Tao since the beginning. "I feel fortunate to dub for a role in the animation and be part of a very meaningful production."

Sheng got to know Tao when they both fed stray cats and the two have been friends for more than a decade.

Tao often chooses nights to record her own voice in her wardrobe. "I can avoid interference by external noises and echoes that can happen in a bigger environment of the living room."

Tao often has to pull all-nighters two nights in a row before the release of an episode. Although it has been a lot of work, Tao has enjoyed the process. She says she spent about 12 months exploring ways to shape clay, shoot for the animation and only went out once for dinner with friends.

The first episode was released on her social media accounts in July 2020 and has attracted more than 10,000 viewers. "Although it had some rough edges, it was something beyond my expectation."

To date, Tao has made more than 20 episodes and she's getting better at it. Some 20 days are now spent on making an episode. Her animation was recommended by friends to be played at a Spring Festival gala for overseas Chinese in North America earlier this year.

Tao says she is working on a documentary that she expects to release on social media by the end of the year. "I'd like to show people the real circumstances in which green peafowls are living, so it might appeal to a wider audience."

Moving forward, she would like to introduce more lesser-known endangered animals to the public via entertainment programs.

"I hope human beings and animals live in harmony."