Murmuration Studios

“What’s in a name…?”

Murmurations are this incredible natural phenomenon that are super complex and hard to fathom, but really beautiful to watch, and they happen all over the world. They’re the patterns in the sky that starlings make when they all fly together. No two murmurations are the same but they always have commonality.

In these shape-shifting flocks, as many as 750,000 birds join together in flight. The birds spread out and come together, split apart and fuse together again. Murmurations constantly change direction, flying up a few hundred meters, then zooming down to almost crash to the ground. A murmuration can move fast – starlings fly up to 50 miles per hour (80 kilometers per hour).

Birds in the middle can see through the flock on all sides to its edge and beyond. Somehow they keep track of how the flock is moving as a whole and adjust accordingly, following simple rules of movement in relation to each other. If one starling changes its flight direction or speed, the birds around it also change their flight direction or speed. This change spreads throughout the group and creates the pattern of the pulsating, swooping, living, harmonized whole.

Murmurations are actually self-organized, meaning that it's the individual's little behavioral rules that make it scale up to the large group, to the global scale.

Murmuration Studios are a primarily London-based company, but work throughout Europe and the US – recently producing two short films in Italy, collaborating on a Theatre Initiative in Lisbon and filming in London, Berlin and Bologna for another three short films in the Spring & Summer of 2024.

In London, we produced Mike Bartlett’s “An Intervention” at Riverside Studios, receiving 4 star reviews from Everything Theatre & London Theatre Reviews, and are in pre-development for a feature film. Our aim is, with the power of stories, to create bridges locally & globally that help us begin to see from the world’s point of view.

This year, we produced Christian O’Reilly’s “The Good Father” at The Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. In his feature in The Irish World London, Christian shares about the production, “I found I was sitting on the edge of my seat, wanting to know what happens next even though I wrote the play”.