“Cat I’m a Kitty Cat, and I dance dance dance and I dance dance dance…” The cat song you will NEVER get out of your head runs under the cat video you’ll laugh at over, and over, and again after you’ve shared it.
And it doesn’t feature any cats (ok, there’s one talking cat at the end).
Hilarious, Mangan (a German creative agency with an apparent flair for viral advertising).
It’s for VW Leasing and the whole idea was to appropriate internet cat video love. (It’s all explained at the end – sort of.)
In the spot you’ll see Maru the Japanese cat that jumps and slides into boxes (she’s a person), the Roomba vacuum riding cat (a person too), and of course the arsehole cat (person) who knocks over a vase – because he can.
Director, Curtis Wehrfritz, described his role, “We began this project with an intense casting session and pre-production planning that included a stunt coordinator and a special rig to simulate the curtain gag. Cats act like diva rock stars, their demeanour is so dry, and unaffected. It’s not that the cat drops the vase but rather his ‘who gives a shit’ attitude that really makes them funny. We wanted to make sure we captured that.”
To keep the homemade or YouTube look of the genre intact, they shot all the people-cats on an iPhone 6…and found out that staying true to the viral cat video look is easier than it sounds.
“A lot of what we think of as bad footage on YouTube really dates back along way to early days of camcorders and bad phones. To keep the film look true to that of the average viral cat video was important to me. So after some video tests, I felt it important that we not try to achieve the look in post, but rather figure out a work flow that allowed us to shoot HD on an iPhone 6,” Wehrfritz added. “I did however employ a handheld GIMBAL ISEEI by SHAPE. It’s a type of a handheld steady device that allowed us to control the light weight of the iPhone and use it more like a traditional camera.”
Wehrfritz and production company, Tony Petersen Film, Berlin, shot the spot over 3 days at 3 different locations. The end cat and car shots were not captured on an iPhone. Post production was done by NHB Studios and the cat animation was created by Fido, Sweden.
Creative credits for Cat Video:
Agency: Mangan Berlin
Copywriter/concept: Christian Fries
Art directors: Christian Peters & Felix Szymoniakn
Production company: Tony Petersen Film Berlin
Director: Curtis Wehrfritz
Director of Photography: Stefan Austmeyer
Executive producer: Fabian Barz
Producer: Stefanie Schuster
Editing: Hannes Andresen
Colour grading: Pana Argueta
Post production: nhb studios Berlin
Cat animation: Fido, Sweden
Music: Steve Ibsen
