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- What Is Catnip, and What Does It Do to Cats?
What Is Catnip, and What Does It Do to Cats?
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Editorial collage explainer · 49 seconds · English
A 49-second collage explainer: catnip is a mint whose scent sets off a cat’s own endorphins, and the blissed-out roll may really be insect repellent the cat paints onto its fur.
- The brief
- “What is catnip, and what does it do to cats?”
- Style
- Editorial collage
- Length and frame
- 49 seconds · 16:9
- Made for
- Lessons and courses
- Also on
- YouTube
How it was made.
The brief was the question, worded the way people search for it. The director built the film around a turn: the plant makes the scent to keep insects away, and the cat borrows it.
A third of cats inherit immunity and simply walk away, a fact the film gives its own beat. It cost $5.59 of model spend to make.
Every film on explain.film is made the same way: one sentence in, a storyboard you approve, then the director paints, voices, scores and animates it, and a critic model grades the cut before you see it.
Transcript
- Drop a pinch of dried leaves near most cats, and watch them melt.
- It's catnip, a kind of mint, and the trick is one scent: nepetalactone.
- One sniff sets off a rush of the cat's own endorphins, ten blissful minutes of rubbing and rolling, until the nose switches off.
- Though a third of cats inherit immunity, and simply walk away.
- But the plant never made that scent for cats.
- It's a shield against insects.
- So a cat rolling in the leaves paints that repellent onto its own fur, and mosquitoes keep their distance.
- That blissed-out roll may be the most charming bug spray on Earth.
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