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Why Do Dogs Lick You?
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Editorial collage explainer · 49 seconds · English
A 49-second editorial-collage explainer: a dog’s lick began as a wolf pup asking an adult for dinner, a puppy habit dogs never grew out of and turned on us.
- The brief
- “Why do dogs lick you?”
- Style
- Editorial collage
- Length and frame
- 49 seconds · 16:9
- Made for
- Lessons and courses
- Also on
- YouTube
How it was made.
The whole brief was the question, worded the way people search for it. The director picked the style itself. It answered with an origin story: wolf pups licking the mouths of adults coming home, then the same move on a laughing human face.
Editorial collage: torn paper and cut-out shapes. It cost $4.16 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
- Your dog licks your face.
- It feels like a kiss, but it began as something less romantic.
- Wolf pups are too young to hunt, so when the adults come home, the pups lick at their mouths, and the adult brings dinner back up, right there.
- Pups eat this way for weeks, until they're old enough to hunt.
- Dogs kept that puppy habit for life, and turned it on us.
- Now it means hello, I mean no harm, and a little bit of: what did you just eat?
- And every time you laugh or pet them, you teach them it works, so they do it again.
- So it's not quite a kiss.
- It's the oldest thing a puppy learns to ask: look after me.
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