A Glasgow-based film maker has revealed his career success has been built on the back of the sex life of pigeons.

Paul Fegan is the director behind current movie success Where You Are Meant To Be, a documentary-travelogue which explores the world of Scottish folk music via a road trip with indie band musician Aidan Moffat.

However, Mr Fegan admits it was a fascination with the dating habits of Glasgow’s doos which has helped lifted him skyward.

“I made a short film a few years back called Pouters, inspired by a newspaper feature about the love life of pigeons in Scotland,” he says, rewinding.

“I was really intrigued by all the dookits you can see in the housing schemes across Glasgow and figured they housed racing pigeons but that’s not the case.

“This is the semi-secret world of ‘doo fleeing’, which is really it’s about sending pigeons up into the sky to attract a mate who will then come back to their dookit.”

The short film won a clutch of awards. And the former music promoter, who once worked at the Arches music club venue and as a music promoter in Barcelona was inspired to make a feature-length film.

The idea for Where You Are Meant To Be came about while Oban-born Mr Fegan was working with indie band Arab Strap.

One night “over a couple of pints” he and the band’s frontman Aidan Moffat came up with an idea for tour and a film of the tour.

“We would go into small communities in Scotland which still had an informal celidh/do-a-turn events.

“The idea was that Aidan would re-write the traditional folk songs, and then perform them at these folk events. But it was just an idea that lay there until Pouters came out.”

Meantime, Paul Fegan worked on music videos for bands such as Belle and Sebastian and taught himself film editing.

The director has certainly brought a vast range of life experience to his film work.

“I’ve always had a good work ethic,” he says, reflecting of early life growing up a barber’s son in Oban.

“I had a lot of jobs when I left school. I had an ice cream van, I worked on farms in hotels, I did lots of jobs.”

Fegan’s energy and a creative mind was at one point a little too creative.

“The reason I ended up in Glasgow (in 1992) was because I ended up spending a year in a Young Offender’s Institution. I was being very silly at the time.”

His ‘silliness’ involved the trade of recreational pharmaceuticals. Fegan is reluctant to go into too much detail, not because of any residual shame but in fact because he doesn’t wish to be seen to be trading on any perceived notoriety.

“I don’t look back on regret, other than what I put people through. Yet, I certainly don’t want the experience to sound like a boast. All I would say is I was with the wrong people at the time, and drugs are viewed differently twenty five years on.”

Paul Fegan is using his marketing skills to push Where You Are Meant To Be, which garnered a four star review in the Herald last week, onto the international film festival stage.

But he’s not planning to rest on his laurels. The director is again looking in on a slice of Scottish life for his next film, which will be transmitted by STV in August .

“It’s a documentary set in the Fairfield Club in Govan and the world of tea- dances, where the opposite sex go to meet and dance.”

He adds; “Like the new feature film it’s an example of a world you think you know a bit about until you go out and discover the reality.”

*Where You’re Meant To Be, the Glasgow Film Theatre and the Grosvenor. See venues for times.