Therese talked a little bit about casting last week, but she wasn’t able to talk about one particularly talented performer that we shot earlier this week. Meet Hoppi – the star of the dvi group’s new online spot for Purina:
Working with animals is definitely a challenge, so we went straight to our certified dog trainer Susie Aga who has done great work with us in the past. We presented Purina with a variety of pups to choose from, and they felt Hoppi was the corgi for the job.
On set, even the best trained animal can be unpredictable, so we built our schedule with flexibility in mind and plenty of buffer time to get all the shots we needed. Hoppi did a great job giving us a good performance – maybe too good of a job… for the first few takes we could hardly keep her out of the client’s food. Soon though we ran into a bit of a snag.
Hoppi is a little dog, and we needed her to eat a lot! We needed a couple of good takes from three or four set ups, and despite limiting how much we gave her on each take, she filled up fast. Poor Hoppi couldn’t eat another bite!
Thanks to our flexible scheduling, we were able to give her a little break while we worked on some of the shots that didn’t require canine talent, but after a few hours, she still didn’t have much of an appetite. We had enough footage to work with in post-production, but we wanted to make it better. We needed just one more angle of Hoppi going at her lunch in order to really sell the spot.
We tried to attract her with toys and a stinky little tube Susie called a lick stick, but after eating 2 heaping bowls of food that morning, our little doggy just didn’t have much of an appetite. Matthew and I talked it over for a minute and decided that we had enough footage to move ahead with the project if push came to shove. We would give it one last try, then call a wrap on the day.
The camera started rolling, and the excitement in the room was palpable when this happened.
With the help of Hoppi and Susie, the dvi group pulled off another great production day. Look for the finished video in the coming weeks!