ONSCREEN
What: Superpower Dogs
Where: IMAX Victoria, 675 Belleville St. (in the Royal B.C. Museum)
When: June 28 through July 18
Tickets: $12.95 ($11.75 for students, $11.25 for seniors and youth, and $6.40 for children) from sales.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca
W.C. Fields once cautioned actors to never work with children or animals, for fear of being upstaged.
Writer-director Daniel Ferguson apparently mistook that to mean it was perfectly fine for directors to do so, and signed on for a four-year IMAX film shoot about some of the world’s most remarkable dogs.
Superpower Dogs, which opens today at IMAX Victoria, is a documentary with six remarkable canines at the centre of its story. Ferguson and his crew followed the dogs and their human partners around the world, shadowing them as they attended to often-dangerous duties ranging from earthquakes to avalanches. “We go off and meet dogs with extreme examples of their special skills,” Ferguson said. “There’s a unity there. It isn’t just a bunch of cool dogs doing cool stuff.”
The Toronto filmmaker (whose parents live in Victoria) has been involved with Imax productions for the better part of 20 years, but nothing compared with his first foray into the dog world. He took several unusual steps to attain peak accuracy, including designing a camera rig that shot footage with a range of 250 degrees, which is how dogs see the world. He also experimented with adjusting the colour, so you get a sense of the limited palette of a dog’s eyes.
“We also had a lot of fun translating a dog’s olfactory world to our visual one. People will see their pet in a new light.”
The film’s pointy-eared star is Halo, a Dutch shepherd who is in training to join an elite disaster response team. The film crew filmed the puppy from the age of eight weeks to its third birthday, when Halo gets certified and embarks on its professional career.
Other storylines in the film involve Henry, a border collie whose skills as an avalanche rescue expert are put to use in Whistler and the surrounding mountains; Reef, a Newfoundland whose job is to patrol the coast of Italy as a K9 lifeguard; Ricochet, a surfing golden retriever who provides therapy to chidren with special needs and soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder; and Tipper and Tony, a pair of bloodhound brothers who protect endangered species in Kenya.
Superpower Dogs is narrated by Chris Evans, who plays Captain America in The Avengers franchise. It was a fitting bit of casting, as Ferguson had originally imagined the film to be something along the lines of what he called “the Doggie Avengers.” As the shoot progressed, however, he stuck upon the heart of the picture — the relationship between the dogs and their human counterparts.
“I initially came at it like a novelty, a bit of a gimmick,” Ferguson said. “But as we started to make it, and learn about that world, I realized this is the real deal. These dogs are actually saving lives, and the bond between these dogs and their handlers is what makes real superheroes.”
