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It's the video you can't miss on Facebook. Eleven barking dogs stand on 11 pedestals in a white room. But after a beat, the noise shapes itself into a song: the "Imperial March" from Star Wars. And is that dog dressed like Chewbacca? In one week, the Volkswagen teaser ad has racked up 8.5 million views on YouTube. Boxoffice asked its director Keith Schofield—a music video and commercial helmer with an inventive geeky streak that draws on video games, retro kitsch and wild in-camera effects—how it was done.
How did the concept start?
Volkswagon has a Super Bowl commercial coming out and it has a dog in it, and so they wanted to create a link between this new Super Bowl commercial and last year's, which was that Darth Vader kid. And the idea was, "Oh we'll do something with Star Wars and dogs." And then we came up with an idea, which was pretty simple: a bunch of dogs singing the "Imperial March." It was one of those great ideas from the beginning and I pitched on it and said, "Here's what I'd add to it and here's my take," and then it moved pretty quickly. We were in production about a week before we shot it, we shot on January 6, and then it was out less than two weeks later. We had to train the dogs ahead of time and then build the set which didn't take that long, and then make those little costumes and all that. And then the post was a little bit time-consuming because of the editing the dogs and the music.
What are the logistics when you have to get dogs to bark the "Imperial March"?
We started with the song first, where basically a music house just created a song with library sounds. And then I broke that down into assigning each dog its own part. Then they sort of rehearsed the parts, but dogs can't really do anything in tempo—there's no concept of that. What we had them do was basically: bark, pause, bark, pause. And then in post, we cut out that blank space and made them go right in tempo. And then they added a little bit of post effect to kind of smooth it out a little bit. Even though it doesn't really look like it, a lot of it was kind of in-camera tempo editing to achieve that effect and make it all work.
The video starts with chaos, just a bunch of random barking before it breaks into the song. Why is that important?
The original idea was that it was going to open with a title screen or that it would be on YouTube and it would basically say "Dogs Barking the ‘Imperial March.'" And so there'd be this element of the audience watching and saying, "Oh look—it's a bunch of dogs in Star Wars costumes on a Star Wars set and it's cute. But okay, well, they're not very good." Instead, after 10 or 15 seconds it starts kicking in and then you kind of dazzle the audience for the next 30 seconds or so.
It's about creating expectation.
Exactly.
Are you a Star Wars nerd?
I definitely like the original Star Wars movies a lot, although actually I also really liked the Revenge of the Sith when it came out. I thought it was really good, maybe because the first two were so bad. But I watched it again recently, and it's like a good-bad movie. There's just so many things that are poorly done in it. I do like Star Wars, I feel like I know more than I should, I have like pointless knowledge to have. Wookieepedia, have you ever been there? It's basically like a Star Wars wiki. There's so much history and information that is so pointless and stupid, but I happen to know a certain amount of it, I guess.
What's interesting is you pared down the information. You didn't have all the dogs in costumes—you only had some and you left it open for people to figure out who is who.
Yeah, although to be fair I wanted them all in costumes and the agency's idea was to take them down. So like the Chihuahua had a little Yoda costume we made, the brown dog on the top had like an Obi-Wan kind of vest costume. I was disappointed because the Chihuahua in the Yoda costume was so funny in the little robe.
Was the idea to make people watch it again and again for the game of figuring out who each dog was?
An angle I pitched was that it was like an elementary school play, the sort of vibe where you have all these kids on stage in their homemade costumes and it's cute and charming. The kids aren't necessarily talented or well-cast, but the cuteness kind of makes up for it. Everyone's got their little role and some costumes are better than others. That was one thing we were talking about, having people guess, but from the beginning our costumes were always really simple. The idea was like, okay, the Han Solo dog looks like he's wearing a vest, but he's not really. Or Leia just has the buttons on the ears.
Tell me about casting the dogs. Where do you start in trying to pick out which dog is best to Luke Skywalker?
First, we started with a trainer and we found a trainer that I'd worked with before. She had access to a pool of 40 dogs or so and we looked for roles among those 40 dogs. The main thing was that these dogs had to be on screen together, so if they're familiar with each other, we can spend more time focusing on the actual performance and less time letting the dogs get to know each other. With dogs, if they haven't worked together, they don't work that well as a group.
They're a little prima donna.
Exactly. Some dogs are afraid of other types of dogs and all that. You can almost find any dog and sort of fudge them to be a couple of these characters. There's a Rottweiler that could've been Darth Vader, as well. We ended going towards the main characters from the original trilogy, and then there were a couple other weird ones—like the pug is actually supposed to be the Rancor monster from Return of the Jedi. We had a scene where he's eating a Gamorrean guard, that got cut. Other people think he's R2-D2, and I think that's fine. I guess that makes sense because he doesn't talk, like R2-D2. The truth is any kind of shaggy dog sort of looks like Chewbacca, so we had a couple options for that one. And then the Ewok was a special dog brought in. Our Ewok dog is named Ewok actually in real life.
No way, really?
It was so funny. On set, we just called them by their character names. I couldn't remember that Duke was Obi-Wan and Pearl was Leia or whatever. Darth Vader's name was Dexter.
I was surprised to hear that all of the dogs were all in the same room together, because my first thought was that you just had each dog come in separately.
There weren't really any problems with the dogs interacting together, because they're all in these little boxes, the stands. They kind of have their own space, and when they're on, they're in their space—and when they're done, they get off it. We really didn't have any problems with the dogs on set. They were all well-trained and the trainers did nice jobs.
Are you a dog person?
I actually live with a cat, but I like dogs.
This was meant to be an online viral video, but the internet is all about cats—why dogs?
Somebody did make a cat response video.
Already?
Yeah. It's pretty simple. But if you think about it, in commercials dogs can do a lot more things. They can run, they can travel. If I were to guess, there's probably more dogs in commercials. You could never do, like, Air Bud with a cat, could you? Remember that? The dog who plays basketball.
How could I forget? What are some other ideas that you had to leave in the editing room?
At first, I thought we'd sort of be playing it straight for 30 seconds and then the last 15 seconds all this crazy stuff happens. We shot all these other little gags that were supposed to take place in the last 15 seconds or so, but ended up getting cut. So we had Luke raising his hand and a lightsaber—a bone—comes to him using the force. Darth Vader and Obi-Wan had a lightsaber fight. The stuff came out pretty good. It wasn't like perfect and it didn't cut flawlessly, but I think it could've been fun if they kept it in. I think they're going to make a behind-the-scenes.
Which dog was your favorite?
The C-3P0 dog because he was kind scrappy and he was kind of shy and he wasn't good with the other dogs, but I liked him. I can tell you my least favorite dog was the bulldog because he kept having an erection, and it was so disgusting. The entire time we were rehearsing, it was so gross. He was a nice dog, it just kind of grossed me out.
The Obi-Wan dog is also kind of out there. But you know, dogs have no concept of full frontal.
That's funny. And true.
Besides Star Wars, is there another film with such a cultural presence that you also could make a commercial like this starring singing dogs?
I think you could do things that have more of a cult appeal, but if you're going for hits, Star Wars and dogs—it's right on the money. While we were looking again at these movies, you really do realize this is a movie where every single costume is iconic. That you can do a dog version of it and an audience would get it, that's pretty amazing in itself.
Check out more of Keith Schofield's music videos and commercials at www.keithschofield.com
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