Slug & Lede

The basis for Cats need homes lies around Frank Currell and his wife’s love of cats. The video further outlines why he must get rid of the 90 odd cats now occupying his Scarborough residence. His health and the death of his wife offer reasons as to why he can no longer keep up with the extremely large number of feline friends parading around his home. 

There were many great elements to this piece. I really appreciated Pawel Dwulit, the videographer’s, use of angles in his shots of the cats. You can tell he really put himself into character as his angles seemed to be in the perspective of the cats themselves. This idea really led the main focus of the story to be about the cats, which I felt were the most important elements of the story.

I also felt Dwulit did a great job of editing the material, the transitions flowed quite well and I never felt awkward instances of voice overs or placement of pictures.

Some elements however I felt should be changed. When Dwulit was taking medium shots of Curell sitting on the couch, it seemed to distract me when he would cut of the very top of his head. I’m not sure if this was to be a creative element, but I felt he should have been more cautious of these small errors.

I also wish the video would have offered more information on where the cats will be going now or how he will deal with their absence. I feel this information is vital to the story and it may have given a much needed depth to this piece.

I really enjoyed this piece as a video, I feel the presence of the cats and how they occupy the home were essential to understand visually. 

Overall this piece was put together very well and I found a great interest in the story. I also felt this piece was much too sweet to be overly critical!

Pawel Dwulit’s video piece, Cats Need Homes, features the interesting story of Frank Currell, a Scarborough resident who has over 80 cats living with him.  Now, after years of caring for the stray felines, he has to give most of them up due to the death of his wife and health reasons.

One thing that I really liked about this video was the different shots of the cats.  Instead of just viewing them lying around, Dwulit showed one peeping out from under the kitchen table, two black cats behind a set of canned goods, and a close-up of one with its tongue out.  This variety of shots kept me from getting bored.

Another part of the video that I thought was done well was the use of b-roll.  A more specific example of this is when Frank is talking about “his boys” helping him out, and the video cuts to his son and possibly his son’s wife in the kitchen with some of the cats.

One detail that I noticed during the piece that I feel could have been done better was some of the audio editing.  About halfway through the video there was an awkward pause that didn’t really have any good nat sound or anything.

A second small thing I noticed that I didn’t really fit into the video was when the picture of Frank’s deceased wife.  I felt like the shot was forced and it was also tilted at a weird angle, so that made it kind of awkward to look at.

If I had edited this piece, I would have only done a couple of things differently.  Mainly, I probably would have gotten a better variety of shots with Frank in them.  I might have shown him feeding the kitties or cleaning the litter box or something other than just sitting on the couch petting a cat.

I think that a video was the perfect type of media for this story.  I don’t think that text really could have conveyed the enormity of how many cats this man has.  I think that actually being able to picture what a house filled with over 80 cats looks like is much more effective than simply stating, “Frank Currell owns more than 80 cats.”