A little more planning

When dogs are the main character they are shot like any human main character, with wide shots and closeups and everything in between. Some movies have animation so the dogs move their mouths and talk, but there's no way I'll be doing that, so it's important to communicates the characters through their actors' body language. Consequently, I did some research on how dogs train for movies and the like. It's actually a pretty extensive process, according to this article from NPR: (https://www.npr.org/2015/07/29/427210264/a-hollywood-animal-trainers-secrets-for-getting-dogs-to-act-on-cue). Thankfully, as I said in the last post, I'm confident in the possiblity of building a story using footage of my little furry actors' regular day-to-day activities. Should the need arise, though, they can alredy perform a few tricks and being young they can definitely still learn some new things, but since I'm only gonna be doing the opening of the film it shouldn't be too much.

Anyway, back to the cinematography, I believe everything, or at least the majority of the shots, should be shot down low to match the dogs' point of view. While other dog movies also feature the humans' side of the story, I'm going for a more comical route, something akin to the famous Peanuts franchise, wherein the kids and animals are prominent while the adults are shown only as towering legs with garbled voices from above. With something like that I could keep focus on what happens on the ground and the dogs' actions while the humans are kept from stealing the spotlight. 

I've considered the storyline to start off showcasing the dogs being all playful at home, only to escape outside one day and get chased by their owners. That's about as far as I've gotten but it's just the intro so I guess that's about enough. The big title could pop up after the dogs run past the camera, obscuring the running humans, which goes with the what I said befor about keeping the humans out of focus, I suppose. For outdoors scenes there's lots of leash-free dog parks they like going to so it wouldn't be hard to get a vidoe of them running around like that. Anyway, that's it for now, but I'll get doing storyboards and all that next time. Enjoy those pictures of my dogs.

Initial Planning

It's time to make up my mind on what the project's gonna be. I've been thinking of a few possibilities such as a mockumentary or a parody or something along those lines, but after learning some more about this project and having seen some examples of what other people in the past have done, I think I should divide up my time with more editing and less filming. To facilitate filming I've ultimately decided to do a charming little adventure movie featuring my two dogs kinda like Homeward Bound or 101 Dalmatians.

That's them. They appear to be adequately cute, at least to me, and they always love running around so I feel like I won’t have much trouble taking some good videos of them to put together after I’ve come up with a storyline and everything. For now, I’ve been thinking about some dog movies that I've seen before. There's no one genre for movies that center on dogs, but they tend to be adventure or drama.

Typically from what I've seen, dramas with dogs focus on the animals meeting and their living with their bipedal companions, as in Old Yeller, Marley & Me, and Hachi, where families take in and learn to live with the beloved pet. They can end in tearjerking deaths of the pet in question, as in the aformentioned examples, or happily end in the family staying with the dog, as in Air Bud, Beethoven, and believe it or not, All Dogs Go To Heaven.

However, I'd rather not work on a drama. The other type of dog movies is adventure, usually having the dog and its family being separated, leading the dog to go on an adventure to return home. This is the sort of format I was thinking of doing, something along those lines without being depressing but raather comedic or endearing or something. Some examples of adventure movies with dogs are Homeward Bound, Bolt, and 101 Dalmatians, all of which follow that sort of format with their plot.