Director: Lorenzo Fonda
Executive Producers: Ross Levine, Jonathon Ker, Jeremy Barrett
Creative Director: Emanuele Madeddu
Producer: Jason Baum
Director of photography: Iain Mckenzie
Editor: Arianna Tommasettig @ Final Cut LA
Music: Ariel Blumenthal, Deddy Tzur @ Creative Music Assets
Camera assistant: Justin Chefe
1st AD: Matthew Ross
Production designer: Zebah Pinkham
Animal wrangler: Morgan Bateman
Grading: Union Editorial
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Here are some big cats facts: an adult lion’s roar can be heard up to five miles away – in one stride, a cheetah can cover 23 to 26 feet – a tiger’s stripes are like fingerprints, no two animals have the same pattern – and so on. The motive behind Big Cats Week is to remind people how extraordinary wild felines are, and to remind that they are endangered.
I never had the pleasure before to work on a more simple creative idea, but at the same such a powerful one exactly because of its simplicity.
One of the scenes required the cat (which sadly was given no name because it’s just a commodity of the company we rented it from, apparently – so we called him Houdini because he kept wanting to sneak out of his cage) had to fall asleep. We were instructed by the wrangler to wait to shoot that scene after he had been fed, because that’s when they usually take a nap. So we fed Houdini as much food as it could take, and then we placed it on a chair and, well, waited. I am not kidding when I say we had to wait almost an hour for him to fall asleep, and even then he would wake up at ANY DAMN THING that made a sound, even a mosquito flying, for god sake. Anyway, yes Houdini, you get away with everything because of your cute little face uh?