“French CATastrophe,” a film by Chicago-based husband and wife team Michael Gabriele and Alana Grelyak, snagged the prestigious “Golden Litter Scoop” award at the 2015 Catdance Film Festival in Park City last week.
Clawing over hundreds of submissions to earn the $10,000 check that comes with the honor, the four-minute short stars an unusually vocal grey striped puss named “Rocky” as a French foreign exchange student who arrives in Chicago with something other than education on his mind.
“As a filmmaker, it’s a great feeling when you show your film before an audience and everybody likes it,” says Gabriele, a director with Daily Planet.
He and Greylak — an actress, writer and musician — went to Park City to accept the award during a feline-themed extravaganza hosted by actress and “Twilight” star Nikki Reed in the Sky Lodge Resort on Historic Main Street.
Founded by Fresh Step litter in 2013, Catdance is part of the company’s “Million Meow Mission,” a program to help homeless cats. The festival’s guidelines require that each film submitted includes “an original storyline about a cat,” “at least one cat,” and a depiction of cats’ tendencies to be smart, funny, quirky or picky.
Gabriele and Greylak first entered the competition three years ago. Their 2013 submission, “Catalogue,” generated 500,000 YouTube views, enough to convince the proud owners of five cats and a dog to pounce on the popularity of cat videos.
By the end of the year, they had launched “CATastrophes,” a YouTube series that has since been picked up by Discovery’s “Animalist” channel.
“French CATastrophe” was shot on Canon 5Ds, mostly in the couple’s River North condominium. Gabriele worked with the talent as best he could.
“You can’t really direct cats,” he explains. “A lot of times when we write our cat film scripts, we work around behaviors that the cat will already do.”
In Rocky’s case, this meant taking advantage of his tendency to “sit in place” and “meow on command,” habits that prompted the director to call him “our best cat actor.”
Once the couple agrees on the general plot, Grelyak writes the scripts and begins composing the score. Her masters in music from UW Madison is complemented by an internship at Sonixphere, where she learned the digital tricks of the trade.
Although she usually favors the “cartoon sounds” of pizzicato strings, bassoons and chimes when making videos about cats, the music for “French CATastrophe,” relied almost entirely on accordion.
“It just seemed like the French thing to do,” she says.
Supporting Rocky were veteran Chicago actor / comedian Kris Flanagan, who unwittingly enables the cat to live in Chicago on a limited “Passpurr,” and Grelyak, his more sensible wife, who realizes that he misunderstood the words, “French chat.”
Communication between the couple and their foreign four-legged guest is facilitated by Amadine Minaud, a French interpreter who plays a French interpreter.
The awards ceremony — which included cat-themed movie poster spoofs, cat-suited waitresses and cat-shaped beanbag chairs “with the ears and everything” — solidified Catdance’s reputation as one of the most beloved events taking place during Sundance.
