Behind the Scenes: The Making of the Tails of Connection Challenge
Picture our first day of shooting this challenge: As I sit in one of those high barstool chairs, three large studio lights are about two feet from my face. The camera is so close that I worry it must be capturing every single pore. My co-founder, Jess, counts down with her hands, “three, two, one,” and I sit in silence, completely unaware that I missed my cue. She chuckles and begins her countdown again: “Three, two, one.” Silence. This time I know I am supposed to speak, but I lose all ability to form words. Eventually, the words come, but so do some very (and I mean very) awkward eye movements. “What in the world is happening to my face? It has a mind of its own!” Before we continue with this director’s cut and the story of my meteoric rise to on-camera stardom (I hope by now you’re picking up on my sarcasm), I want to go backwards and tell you the story of how we landed on launching a challenge in the first place.
Why We Never Dreamed of Launching a Challenge
This is a look behind the scenes at one of our first days of filming the challenge in my living room.
When Jess and I envisioned Tails of Connection (TOC), we weren’t thinking of a challenge. We’d already assembled an awesome community of dog parents on Slack and wanted to keep taking steps toward our larger goal of launching the dog community of our dreams. Truth: our initial ideas for progress were more like building a jet and flying halfway around the world than taking a baby step forward. Perhaps it was the wisdom from our mentors - both those we met in person and those we felt we knew personally thanks to podcasts (Alli Webb, if you are reading this, we basically believe you’re our friend) - or maybe it was the fact that we couldn’t (yet) afford to build our metaphorical jet, but thankfully we course corrected, so to speak. We eventually hunkered down to figure out how we could produce something realistic that would provide value and give us a chance to get some feedback from our audience. Our brains immediately arrived at building an ecourse of sorts.
How I Ended Up on Camera
We realized that in order to move forward, I needed to be on camera. I never wanted to be “the talent” and had been fighting this concept for months. I even dismissed countless mentors who told us that this was the best way to start. Since we were out of options, I finally agreed, with the following conditions:
We create an ecourse that feels more collaborative than a “me-telling-you” thing.
The focus is on having fun and helping people make training a regular part of their lives. I did not want to promise perfection.
We are clear that I’m not a professional trainer. Don’t get me wrong, I have learned A LOT over the years (and wow do I wish I’d known so many of the simple dog training concepts I learned later in life much earlier), but being transparent and authentic mattered to me.
Our Creative Process for Producing the Challenge
The ex-consultant in me created this spreadsheet to organize our initial concept for the daily topics for the challenge. This definitely evolved as we filmed!
We sat down at The Wing in Washington D.C. to storyboard the content for the course, and as we were going back and forth we tossed out the idea of a challenge, where users could learn together during a set period of time for five minutes a day. We realized that format would allow us to create something fun with community (similar to what we’d built on Slack) around the information that we presented. As a recovering ex-consultant, I built a spreadsheet of all the dog training things I wanted to share, categorized them according to the type of skill (i.e. foundation, basic obedience, advanced obedience, and tricks) and then drilled down into those categories even more. The list got big in a hurry. We initially thought about creating a month-long challenge, but it didn’t take long for us to realize that a 30-day challenge (with new content every single day) might overwhelm people (later, we realized that it would have meant double the amount of work for us - ha!).
So we landed on a two-week challenge and worked to narrow down all of the topics that we wanted to cover. We knew we had to pick the right mix of entertaining and informative activities to fill the 14 days and then provide some space for more experienced people/dogs to progress. I always enjoyed revisiting foundations, so we decided to slot those in on some days as a value-add for any dog, regardless of their experience level with training. Format wise, each day we decided to help make this challenge work for a variety of levels by providing both a “how-to” section that explains how you teach the behavior or game to a dog who doesn’t know it and a “#ShakeItUp” section where we show fun ways to progress and offer other options participants can try to advance a behavior even further. We also invite users to show us the special way that they like to practice each skill in our private Facebook group dedicated to the challenge. Just like Slack, how cool would it be if people started sharing their own videos and other participants could really get motivated and inspired?
What It Was Like Filming the Challenge in My Apartment
Otis and Sully were amazing to shoot with during the challenge. Sometimes they would beat me to their marks “on the set.”
Each day, we transformed my apartment into a set and shot videos in my living room. We decided to invest in a professional camera and lights (which we stored next to my bed - hurray for city apartment living).
Luckily for my relationship with Jess, I got significantly more comfortable on camera. Jess also played the role of wardrobe supervisor and raided my closet. She had me wear the same shirt for every day of the challenge (it’s now collecting dust in my dresser).
In general, filming with dogs made for some interesting bloopers. On more than one occasion, Otis was sitting next to me as I nailed a segment, and then suddenly decided to leave the shot to kiss Jess. For the most part though, Otis and Sully actually did really well. We had to watch the schedule and their behavior to make sure they were willing to continue filming. To keep things realistic, we chose to embrace imperfect takes. In fact, you will notice in the challenge that we used a #ShakeItUp video where Otis fails to do the exercise I set up. We easily could have reshot that segment to capture Otis succeeding, but we wanted to show real dogs having fun rather than being perfect all of the time.
Why We Kept the Daily Challenge Videos Short
Here’s a peak at Jess’s edit bay at home. She spent hours editing the challenge after we finished shooting every day.
From the beginning, we filmed each daily challenge segment separately (e.g. the intro, how-to, perks etc.). We initially did this to reduce the number of “lines” I had to deliver in a given take and give Jess a chance to reframe shots if necessary. We actually envisioned splicing those segments together into a single video for each day of the challenge, but as Jess edited them, we realized that people might also like to watch them separately. For the most part, I improvised each segment and Jess constantly harped on keeping it short (no wasting words) and human (less technical “trainer speak” and more conversational advice). So often when I watch a long dog training video, I need to go back to a specific section of the video when I actually go to teach my dog. However, I can never find the 45 seconds I need in the 29 minute YouTube video. We hope that by creating a better experience, it’s easier to finish the challenge.
This is Just the Beginning
While our vision extends far beyond this challenge, we are really proud of what we have built and are so excited to launch. What we created is far from perfect, but after testing the challenge with a group of dog parents like you, we know how fun and effective it is.
We hope that you will join us!
