Curtis Wehrfritz of Untitled Films, Toronto, directed this “We Are The World”-esque music video which gives a human voice to dogs as they sing in a recording studio to raise awareness of animal cancer. One in four dogs and one in eight cats currently die from cancer. Behind the video is Pet Trust, Canada’s first charitable fund dedicated to cancer cure and prevention in dogs and cats.
With support from Purina Canada, Pet Trust–which raises money for the Ontario Veterinary College Animal Cancer Centre at the University of Guelph–teamed with ad agency Red Urban, Toronto, to launch this video, song (both titled “We Could Be Heroes”) and a website for their “Keep Cancer On A Leash” campaign.
The site, at www.pettrust.ca, not only allows viewers to watch the music video, but also gives viewers an option of watching an annotated version of the video which includes survivor stories of dogs who were treated at the Cancer Centre. Viewers can also upload pictures of their own pets to star in customized, sharable versions of the video. The site is also equipped to take donations. The video was produced with the generous help of Purina Canada, who will also match all donations to Pet Trust up to $125,000.
Opening supers set the stage, revealing stats about dog deaths due to cancer. A super explains that a group of dogs thus came together to fight cancer–through a song. The music video takes us right into a recording studio session with a dog at the keyboard and canines crooning “We Could Be Heroes.” We see varied breeds of pooches taking their turn at the microphone, juxtaposed with slices of life showing dogs at play. The song comes to a close when the recording engineer in the control room–a cat–fades out the audio.
A tag shows “operators standing by” to take your donations, the “operators” being dogs standing by phones at the ready.
Pirate tune
The song which, of course, wasn’t actually sung by dogs, was composed and recorded at Pirate in Toronto, sung by a collection of musicians, including iSH, and directed by Chris Tait and Ryan Kondrat.
True to the genre of these charity videos, the cast of dogs takes turns “singing” various parts of this light-hearted appeal to people’s hearts and wallets. Surprisingly the video uses few special effects.
“Once we had a great song from Pirate, we decided that the best way to keep people interested in the video would be to have the dogs’ performances feel as authentic as possible,” said Christina Yu, executive creative director of Red Urban, the ad shop that conceived the campaign. “And we knew Curtis was the right man for the job.”
Yu added, “We knew this was going to be an editing-heavy exercise, So we asked Christina Humphries, at Rooster Post, to come on board.” A full-length version of the song is also available on iTunes and Amazon.ca. Proceeds from the song go directly to Pet Trust.
