Wolf. ©Suzy Allman
Last year, the furthest thing from my mind was adopting a second dog. I had a good thing going with my first aging shepherd, and I couldn't imagine that another dog wouldn't upset the routine. And then I met Jill at the dog park. Jill was a volunteer at the Elmsford Animal Shelter in Westchester County. She casually told me about a nine-year-old dog named "Blackie": friendly, gentle, but a "lifer" because of his size and age.
Blackie's story wasn't that complicated -- he was found tied up in the backyard after his owner had died -- but then, perhaps because he was big and scary-looking, older than six months and black, he languished in the pound for five years. This big, innocent, floppy-eared animal.
It's funny how powerful a simple story can be. Five years. I couldn't get it out of my mind. Sure, animal shelters are filled with dogs that have been there for years, some even longer than Blackie, but for some reason, it was Blackie's plight that had me. I knew his story, and he needed me. The night after I talked with Jill, I couldn't sleep, because every night I didn't go get him was another night of his life spent in jail.
Two days later, Blackie came home, shed the generic shelter name of "Blackie" and became, true to his heart and appearance, "Wolf". King of the Westchester Wilderness.
Fast forward a year. On Tuesday we start shooting the first of what I hope will be many, many weekly four-minute mini-movies that tell the story -- two minutes each -- of one dog and one cat at Pets Alive Westchester (formerly Elmsford Animal Shelter) for distribution on the county-wide public access stations and maybe, eventually, Channel 12.
We're calling them movie "shorts", although they're commercials, or public-service announcements. But with the new Canon Mark IV HD digital SLRs, the look is as film-looking as digital gets. And because the only director I have to answer to is myself, I can re-think the approach to "Pet of the Week", ubiquitous in local papers. The aim is for something more emotionally engaging and artistic, with compelling narration and photography, and the warm look of film, as opposed to video. The aim is to tell the story that gets them home.
The ukelele/guitar music --
-- has been generously recorded and donated by Pete Kennedy and is wonderfully optimistic, intended to keep things happy so you don't turn away from the television. The crew? We're working on it. I need an audio person. I have two voice-over artists. I could use someone to pull-focus and an assistant.
But these things have a way of coming together if you keep it simple, and simple we intend to be. Two animals, two stories. Once a week. Let's get those guys out of there! Let's roll!
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