We worked with the owners to showcase many of the elements that they were most proud of, as well as crafting a narrative around the adoption process that takes place at the cafe itself. By focusing on the specific stories of many of the cats that came through the doors of the cafe, we created a more compelling narrative that engages a viewer than a simple ad or awareness campaign. Showing the process from start to finish also helped educate viewers who may be interested in adopting a but was unsure how to. Playing on the emotions of the viewers with the stories of the cats helps drive engagement with the cafe as people feel the need to step in and help many of the cats at the cafe. 

We encountered a few problems in our production that initially seemed like they could call into jeopardy the entire production itself. Our initial idea was to heavily incorporate customer testimony into our film, and structure it more like a typical ad. However both days that we visited for filming there were no customers present and therefore we had to entirely scrap that aspect of our film to due deadlines. This forced us to completely reframe how we were going to promote this small business. 

When sitting in the editing room we had to make a pivot to what we ended up going with in, which was a film that ended up focusing on the cats of the cafe, rather than the people. Using the story of the cafe's previous cats moving through the adoption process it created a more entertaining piece because it added a sense of motion and narrative, but it also explained the adoption process subtly to potential customers and people who may be interested in adopting but didnt know how.

These aren't the only issues we ran into once we got into the editing room. Due to poor lighting conditions where we filmed our interview, all of the interview talking head footage we collected was low enough quality that it was entirely unuseable for our film. Combined with aspects of the filming location being less photogenic than we were initially expecting, we were left with much less usable footage for B roll than we needed.

This is in part what led to us choosing a more cat focused approach, as we had plenty of footage of cats, and the cat footage was engaging by nature of cats just being really cute in general. However just that alone was not enough to create an entire narrative, so we had to get more creative. We incorporated a lot of online footage, early videos from the owners vlogs to establish the characters and origin story, in place of where we would normally cut to the talking

head footage. We also use things such as old facebook posts announcing the adoption of cats to use as background B roll footage when talking about many of the cats.

In the end we produced a documentary that we were very proud of. It captured the important parts of the cafe, while maintaining the vibe that the cafe brought. Many parts of the cafe are set up to look like an old living room from the 90's and so we captured a lot of that by giving the documentary a more slow paced cozy feel. The owners were very pleased with the final result and the film received positive feedback from both our target demographic of university students, and the professional documentary filmmaker that was adjuncting the course.