[CAT] "Tibs"

[rfmcdonald]

Lewis Wallace's Wired article "This Two-Minute Cat Video Is the Purr-fect Antidote to Kitteh Overload" pointed me towards the quietly and cutely chilling cat video "Tibs."

TIBS from SAM HUNTLEY on Vimeo.

Director Sam Huntley does get the terrible pragmatism of cats down. Yes, they're cute, but they're also solitary predators.

[Huntley] planned to use a friend’s pet for the shoot, but hired a trained feline as tension rose during pre-production. “People kept saying we were mad to use a ‘normal’ cat, in case he just froze up and didn’t do what we wanted him to do,” Huntley told Wired by e-mail.

So he hired a ringer — and learned the hard way that even kitteh thespians can exhibit a stubborn streak. “It was a professional ‘actor’… but I would use that term extremely loosely,” Huntley said. “To be honest, it was an absolute nightmare. The cat literally wouldn’t do a single thing we wanted it to.”

The filmmakers tried all kinds of tricks to get the cat to perform.

“It started out with the trainer using a laser, and a clicker, then quickly descended into people making all sorts of ridiculous noises, lots of clicking of fingers, throwing bits of tuna, etc.,” said Huntley, a 32-year-old Londoner who works for Mad Cow Films and landed his big break with 2010 feature documentary Zoomer. [. . .] “It was incredibly frustrating, but equally, when I knew I had got a little look or reaction I was after, it was such a relief.”

Tibs, which Huntley crafted with writer Andy Preston, quickly goes from cute to creepy. Unlike the web’s flood of lolcats — which seem to spring from the minds of an endless army of cat fanciers — the short film is clearly not the work of your typical cat-obsessed video maker.

Instead, Tibs flowed from the filmmakers’ “mutual distrust of cats.”