Press for Mad City Chickens DVD Release

With the release of the Mad City Chickens documentary on DVD, chicken enthusiasts and the media are taking notice. Read the DVD review by Jane Burns in the publication, 77 Square. Also catch the Urbanchickens.net blog by Thomas Kriese.

Associated Press picks up on Mad City Chickens again

“Madison Alder Marcia Rummel, hopes to change Madison’s 4-year-old chicken ordinance to allow people living in multi-family dwellings to keep chickens. Currently, the law enables only people living in single-family residences to have the fowl.”

The reason given:

“Backyard chickens have become popular in Madison, boosted this year by a documentary on the phenomenon, Mad City Chickens, which debuted at the Madison Film Festival in March.”



The piece was authored by reporter Lynn Welch of the Capital Times, then picked up nationwide by the Associated Press.

Mad City Chickens PREMIERES at 2008 Wisconsin Film Festival! Read the Reviews

We were blown away by the turnout for the premiere of Mad City Chickens! It was an absolute pleasure to interact with the crowd before the show as our crew handed out MCC buttons, chocolate eggs, and boxes of peeps. The line of people included many of the chicken owners featured in the film as well as Madison’s own Mayor Dave Cieslewicz.

Read the reviews by Kristian Knutsen of the Isthmus Daily Page and those of Jane Burns & Katie Dean in the Capital Times.

MCC’s Film Fest Acceptance gets noticed by Cap Times

Rob Thomas, pop culture reporter for The Capital Times, did a short write-up about Mad City Chickens and its recent acceptance into the Wisconsin Film Festival.

the Typical Tarazod Day (of late)

The submission deadline is December 31st…the first film festival submission for Mad City Chickens. The film is not done, but it doesn’t yet have to be. All that’s required is to make it finished enough to be accepted into the festival. Consequently, the last two months have been an intensity of gathering b-roll, shooting pick-ups, recording ADR (Additional Dialogue Recording) and editing. Lots of editing.

Yesterday was a typical day: The morning started by going over the first 30 minutes of the film, making notes and corrections to what must absolutely be changed or improved upon before submission. Took short breaks to email and phone several people in the film, setting up times for ADR or in some cases, initial interviews (there’s still a few short segments yet to be filmed). This went well into the afternoon before having to change gears.

By 4:00 pm we were loading up the van with the lights and camera equipment. Our first stop was back to Nutzy Mutz and Crazy Catz where Liz Perry would do a few lines of ADR for us.

While there, we ran into the Lynch family, the folks who adopted our two hens. (We really liked our chickens, but with the film now consuming ALL of our waking moments, we found ourselves in the unusual predicament of having to locate a home that would have the time to care for them.)



It’s 8:00 pm as we pulled into the snow-covered drive of Susan Troller, a reporter for the Capital Times Newspaper. Susan would speak with us on camera about the article (Page 1, Page 2) she wrote on Liz Perry and Consuela, the factory farm hen that was found deposited at a local landfill.



10:00 pm. It’s dark, 14 degrees Fahrenheit, and snowing. We take a wrong turn and get lost out on the back roads of rural Wisconsin. It’s difficult to keep our eyes open as the adrenaline subsides and exhaustion returns.

11:00 pm finds us back in the editing bay capturing the footage we just shot today. Disaster! The camera was making some unusual noises during filming at Susan Troller’s. We thought it might be just the coming-in-from-the-cold, but now it appears there may be something wrong with it. The images we shot are all jittery and jumpy. (Not a good thing, especially since we still have three more shoots scheduled before the end of January…one all the way down to Austin, TX.)

We spend the next several hours taking the Susan footage into Adobe After Effects to correct the issue. Disaster is averted, but it’s now 3:00 am! We call it a night, but not before taking a peek into one of Tashai’s pet snake cages. Saffron the captive-bred ball python has finally shed her skin and is READY to eat. We sit in strung-out silence as Saffron has her meal.

A few hours sleep and today’s another day!

Capital Times Reporter shares Chicken Experiences

Yes, it’s true…we keep saying that we’re deep into the post-production edit of this Mad City Chickens film. Yet,  what do we do? Head out again to shoot even more new footage!

Katie Dean, writer for the Capital Times, allowed us to haul our camera and lights into the newspaper’s Madison headquarters so we could ask a few questions about the April 2007 front page article she wrote on Backyard Chickens. See also the sidebar she wrote on the Mad City Chickens film when we still had plans to include a polka band.

The thing that seemed to intrigue Katie the most in her research was the fact that some chicken owners thought of their hens as pets. Much more than just egg producers…chickens were members of the family.

Cap Times talks Chickens

Check out the Capital Times article on urban poultry, factory farms, and a rescued chicken. Tashai even gets quoted by writer Susan Troller.

Cap Time article Page 1, Page 2

Press for Mad City Post-Production

We are currently working on our feature film Mad City Chickens and it got a mention in Madison's Capital Times.


Right now it’s mostly in post-production, and the “to do” list is seven pages long! A little daunting at 1:00 am, when you realize you’ve just worked all day and weren’t able to cross a single item off of that list. Then there are those times when everything falls into place and opportunities open up that weren’t there before. I love those times. In the words of the late great Joseph Campbell, Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.