Another Planning Blog…

Saw this new spot on Creativity – which is a beautiful, balletic, majestic, dog-loving extravaganza.

This is the write up on creativity:

Playing catch the Phantom Camera way.

Director Bob Purman used a Phantom camera at 1,000 fps to capture these expressive canines in action.

The director was initially charged with shooting two spots, a “Catch” and a “Jump” execution. The director says: “The ‘Catch’ spot was to be a series of shots of dogs looking with anticipation as a piece of dog food is flying through the air towards them. We shot close-ups of the dogs at 1000 fps. The result was really wonderfully anthropomorphic. The super slow motion really captured this intense sense of desire in the dogs’ eyes. To me it was equal parts awe inspiring and hilarious to see so rich a palate of personality in a dog’s facial expressions. A few days after the shoot I started to get emails from Mark, Steph and the editor Chris Parkins with the different iterations of the spots cut to different music selections, all of them interesting for different reasons. But then they put footage from the two spots together to form this new greater whole that really exploits the dynamics of the dogs’ athleticism and their emotive personality in slowed time.”

So I searched YouTube to see if I could find it there – and found the two “Catch” and “Jump” executions, which come with very different music and a voiceover to boot… Have a watch and decide for yourself what you think might be more effective, but I’m touched by the long format piece without the VO and I’m left feeling like I’m watching something far less memorable, far less extraordinary, far less motivating when I watch the two shorter, VO’d ones.

It’s rare that we see that sort of comparison outside of a personal project, so it’s rare to be able to view them without having an innate bias. But, for me, this is a lovely craft skills comparison – we often kid ourselves that the “message won’t get in the way” and that creatives are being “arty rather than commercial” but all these little differences in music, in timing, in purity all add up.

Meanwhile, in a different country (since the above’s all going on in Canada), Pedigree are doing more great work to help Shelter dogs… If you’re not in the US, you can see it by going to the cached page on Google…