When I was fortunate enough to make movies in the Hollywood studio system, I was immediately typecast as the 'animal guy' and that gave me a chance to tell stories in the age old tradition of using animals as characters. Both racing Stripes and Underdog used a lot of live animals to tell those tales. I loved it. I also love working with actors but there's something magical when you can make people believe that animals are thinking and talking. Especially a kids audience.
Now that I do a lot of corporate gigs, there's not a lot of opportunities to work with animals, so together with a couple of friends we shot a little test about miniature donkeys who have adventures on a small farm in Central California.
We did not use any CG to replace the mouths but told the story in the same way Homeward Bound worked by hearing the animals talk but we did not see their lips or beaks move. It's as if we're inside their heads. We noticed this worked really well when the film Racing Stripes was tested before the VFX were applied and audiences loved it. Moving mouths are nice to have but don't make or break the movie -- great scripts do.
The challenge was to put together scenes with untrained animals while still following a script. This was quite the awakening and makes you appreciate all the work the animal trainers do. Ultimately we got something together which we will pitch around town to see what comes of it. Check it out under the projects. It's called Donkz and I am sure your kids will love it.
back in the day when we shot on film.
It took two units and multiple cameras six weeks to shoot the track scenes in Racing Stripes.
One of the stars of Donkz.