CORVALLIS — “Thousands of people say that fairies aren’t real, thousands, hundreds … ,” says an incredulous Lydia Ghozeil at the start of a short film she and her grandfather put together last year. “I decided to find out myself about that, and I found some evidence.”

When Corvallis filmmaker Robert Neary and his granddaughter, Lydia, 7 — now a second-grader at Hoover Elementary — created the short film “The Fairy Scientist” for The Project Reason Video Contest last winter, they had no idea where the project would lead them.

Their short film ended up one of nine finalists in the contest, was viewed a couple thousand times on YouTube and briefly was featured on MSN’s front page in the “Top Ten Videos of the Week.”

But, like most one-hit wonders on YouTube, the attention seemed to fizzle just as quickly as it had gained momentum.

Then came the phone call. Staff at Disney’s Girl Studios had seen their film and remarked on how Lydia resembled the fictitious little girl in the upcoming film, “Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue.”

DigiSynd, a subsidiary of Disney that takes care of social media for the giant media company, wanted to hire Neary’s independent film company, Skeptical Media, to make a new short film for use in promoting the Disney movie.

“It was a lengthy contract negotiation process, because Disney does not often contract with outside producers,” Neary said.

While negotiations were ongoing, Neary and Lydia filmed throughout the summer. When at last the deal came through, they were ready to deliver the second film in time to promote “Tinkerbell and the Great Fairy Rescue,” which was released to DVD on Sept. 21.

According to Lydia, “A scientist is someone who looks very carefully and tries to discover new things and stuff.”

In the new “Tinkerbell” film, a character named Lizzy keeps a journal of her investigations of fairies.

“It all dovetailed very well,” Neary said.

Searching for clues

In both films, Lydia works off this hypothesis: “I bet that fairies are real, but I have no idea yet.”

Lydia makes several discoveries in her research. In the first film, she notes that “fairies get their energy from pastel things,” and the best fairy habitat is “sunny patches of flowers, marshes, leaves and raspberry bogs and stuff.”

In the second video, she shares her view that fairies like big old trees with lots of holes “to stay out of the rain” and provide “hiding places from predators.” Also: “Flowers are really important to fairies because for one thing they can hide their fairy dust in closed up flowers, for another thing the petals when they fall off can cover secret doors to houses and stuff.”

She also notes some cold hard facts about the search for fairies. The first is that boys tend to not believe in them. The second: “I have to find, like, the real thing, or a dead body or something to know if it is really real.”

“Lydia’s always been interested in fairies and wanted to know more about them,” Neary said.

According to Neary, Lydia’s scientific curiosity runs in the family, which has at least three generations of scientists. Great- grandfather Melvin Westwood is a well-published retired professor of agriculture at Oregon State University. Grandfather John Butler is an oceanographer at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, Calif. And her father, Adam Ghozeil, is an engineer at Hewlett-Packard in Corvallis.