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A Dog’s Story

Directed by Jill D’Agnenica

Story by Margaret Adachi

Cinematography by Guido Frenzel

Music by Goh Nakamura

Edited by Jill D’Agnenica


Produced by Guido Frenzel and Jill D’Agnenica

A Dog’s Story had its genesis with a series of humorous sculptures that my friend artist Margaret Adachi did of unhappy and angry pooches in dead end jobs. Like all of her various animal sculptures, they were anthropomorphized stand-ins for Margaret, in this case aged out of her work life and feeling irrelevant.

Margaret wrote a back story for one of the sculptures which became A Dog’s Story and together with our friend and collaborator, cinematographer Guido Frenzel, we hatched a plan for how we wanted to portray that story in film, landing on the character of The Dog giving a slide lecture, like a Ted Talk.

Guido wanted to shoot the entire movie with a 50mm lens "like Ozu" and the one-walled set I built in my studio had just enough room for him to get our wide shot.

I prepped the art for two weeks and then we had a blast, setting up and shooting in one long night, laughing and chatting through each of the shots, since I decided to record all the sound in post

I knew hitting the right tone with music would be absolutely essential to the telling of the story and also no small feat. To our absolute great good fortune, musician Goh Nakamura agreed to compose the score for the movie and it is perfection.

I am delighted that my friends and I got to play in this sandbox together to create A Dog’s Story. 



 

It’s hard to be a dog these days.


A Dog’s Story is an absurdist tragi-comic tale of an old dog who contemplates his bleak future after being laid off from his security job.

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