What Working With Animals Teaches You About Making Great Commercial Video
- Cameron Smith
- Mar 25
- 6 min read
Enjoy New Media · Commercial Video Production · Atlanta, GA
Producing a commercial with animal talent is one of the most humbling, unpredictable, and ultimately rewarding challenges in production. Here's what we learned from our BarkBox shoot — and what it means for brands bringing animals into their campaigns.
His name was Kevin.
Wire-haired, sharp-eyed, and possessed of the kind of natural screen presence that most human talent spends years trying to develop. Kevin knew his tricks — sit, stay, spin, high five, the full repertoire — and he delivered them with the unhurried confidence of a professional who's been doing this his whole life. On set for our BarkBox commercial, he was the best talent in the room. And he never once looked at a call sheet.
That's the thing about producing commercial video with animal talent. The normal rules don't fully apply. You can prep the shot, nail the lighting, cast the right supporting talent, build a set that sings — and then an animal walks in and rewrites the day entirely. Sometimes that's a problem. More often, if your team knows what they're doing, it's the best thing that could have happened.
Working with animals has shaped some of our most memorable productions. Here's what we've learned — and why, if your brand involves animals in any way, the right production partner makes all the difference.
Animals Don't Hit Their Mark. They Find Something Better.
Every experienced commercial director will tell you the same thing: the most important skill on an animal shoot is knowing when to stop directing and start watching.
The storyboard is a plan. The animal is a collaborator who hasn't read it. And in the gap between those two things is where the best footage almost always lives.
With Kevin, we saw this play out in real time. He knew his cues. He hit the scripted beats with genuine reliability — the kind of working-dog focus that makes a shoot day actually possible. But the moments that made the edit were the unscripted ones. A pause between takes where he held eye contact with camera for just a beat too long. A reaction to something off-frame that was more expressive than anything we'd planned. The wire-haired charisma that comes through in his stillness as much as his movement.
You can't manufacture that. You can only create the conditions where it can happen — the right set, the right pacing, a crew that knows how to stay quiet and ready at the same time.
The Production Prep That Makes Animal Shoots Work
Producing a commercial with animal talent requires a different pre-production discipline than almost any other kind of shoot. The margin for error is tighter because you can't call a pickup day and expect the animal to repeat a spontaneous moment from six weeks ago. What happens on the shoot day is mostly what you have.
That makes preparation the whole game.
Before Kevin arrived on set, we had already mapped every shot around his capabilities and working patterns. We knew his strongest behaviors, his likely distractions, and how long a productive working window would last before a break was needed. The set was dressed and locked before he walked in — no loose adjustments, no scrambling, no elevated stress energy that animals read immediately and respond to.
The crew was briefed on animal set etiquette: calm voices, deliberate movement, no sudden loud sounds between takes. The handler was treated as a full creative collaborator, not a wrangler standing off to the side. Because when you're working with a trained animal on a commercial shoot, the handler is the director's most important partner in the room.
All of that preparation is what makes a shoot like the BarkBox project look effortless in the final cut. The seams don't show because the work happened before the cameras rolled.
What BarkBox Needed — and What We Delivered
BarkBox is a brand built entirely on the emotional reality of dog ownership. Not the idealized version — the actual version, where a dog destroys a toy in four minutes and you buy them another one immediately because their happiness is genuinely your happiness. That authenticity is central to everything BarkBox does, and it had to be central to the commercial.
That meant the production couldn't feel performed. A stiff, over-directed dog doing tricks on a clean white set would have been technically competent and completely wrong for the brand. The creative approach had to leave room for the real personality of the animal to come through — and then build the production around it, rather than trying to fit the animal into a rigid concept.
Kevin brought his whole self to that set. Our job was to be ready for it.
The result was commercial content that felt genuinely alive — not because we lucked into it, but because the approach we brought to the production was designed from day one to make that possible.
The Bond on Camera Is Real Because the Bond Off Camera Is Real
One of the things that makes animal talent uniquely powerful in commercial video is something that can't be faked and can't be directed: the bond between an animal and the humans around them reads on camera.
Viewers are extraordinarily sensitive to whether an animal on screen is genuinely at ease or subtly uncomfortable. They may not be able to articulate what they're seeing, but they feel it. A dog who is stressed, overstimulated, or uncertain reads differently than a dog who is engaged, comfortable, and enjoying the work. The difference shows up in the footage.
Kevin was happy on set. That wasn't an accident — it was the result of a crew that understands how to manage energy in a room, a handler relationship built on trust, and a shoot structure that respected the animal's needs rather than treating him as a prop with fur.
That's what separates productions that look good from productions that feel true. And in the pet category especially, feeling true is the whole ballgame. Consumers who love their animals know what authentic looks like. They've seen it every day of their lives. You don't fool them with a dog that's performing tolerance. You earn their attention with an animal that's actually in the room with you.
If Your Brand Involves Animals, This Is What to Look for in a Production Partner
Not every commercial production company has experience with animal talent. It's a specific skillset, and the gap between a team that has it and one that doesn't shows up quickly on a shoot day.
What you want is a team that has worked with animals before — ideally in your specific category, whether that's pets, wildlife, livestock, or trained performance animals. They should be able to tell you how they structure shoot days around animal working windows, how they approach handler relationships, and how their pre-production process accounts for the unpredictability that is simply part of the deal.
You also want a team that knows how to be patient without losing momentum. Animal shoots require a different rhythm than standard commercial production — more stillness, more waiting, more willingness to let a moment develop rather than forcing it. A crew that can hold that kind of focused patience without the energy of the set going flat is a genuinely rare thing.
And you want a director who understands that with animal talent, the job isn't to impose a vision. It's to build a container for one to emerge.
Kevin taught us that, too. Or reinforced it, at least. Some lessons are better delivered by a wire-haired dog who knows seventeen tricks and has never once second-guessed himself.
Planning a commercial shoot that involves animal talent, consumer products, or brand storytelling? Our Video Production Budget Guide breaks down real production costs so you can plan smart before the first conversation.
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Working on a commercial that involves animal talent — or anything else that doesn't follow the normal rules?
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Enjoy New Media is a commercial video production company based in Atlanta, GA. We produce brand commercials, product launch videos, and campaign content for consumer brands and agencies across the U.S. and worldwide.