The Dogs of San Francisco

Just got back from the Bow Wow Film Festival. I’m not going to go into it too deeply, as I didn’t take notes or anything. But in brief: it’s kind of fun, as long as you do not expect the Sundance Film Festival going in. The quality of the video, the quality of the writing, and the quality of the material all varies extremely widely, from quite amateurish and downright poor videography with simple (yet often engaging) storytelling, all the way up through some very polished and very, very effective videos.

The film project as a whole could have been much better set up: the transitions between different shorts are often so abrupt that you literally are unable to tell that one has ended until you are well into the next one. Half of them have credits, the other half do not, and it’s not always the half you’d expect. They really cried out for title cards between the featurettes.

Oh, and a couple of the shorts kind of read like blatant ads for specific products. (One example: a particular video camera, and no, not the GoPro.) I have to admit I did find that a little annoying. Several of the others were sponsored by a given company but didn’t actually push their products (e.g. the first one was sponsored by Vasque but aside from some people wearing hiking boots which may or may not have been made by them we didn’t see anything particularly Vasquian) which didn’t particularly bother me.

Honestly? It was a fun set of movies, and it’s a good cause. But I can’t help thinking that, considering how professionally the event itself was put together, the presentation of the videos seemed… much less so. Still, it was well worth seeing. And not just for the silly cartoons.