Dallas PawFest Showcases Dog and Cat Videos, Portion of Proceeds Will Go to Rescues

 
Image via Cat Video Festival/Facebook
 
Video curator Will Braden will be hosting the Dallas VideoFest PawFest on Thursday, August 23, at The Texas Theater to showcase short cat and dog videos packaged as a full-length movie. A portion of the ticket sales will go to pet rescue and adoption groups.
 
The reel has a running time of 80 minutes and features 125 dog and cat clips carefully curated by Braden. The clips are edited into montages with intro cards, complete with a soundtrack, and each montage is classified into themes like drama and comedy.
 
“What I don’t want is being in a theater and having the same experience of watching these videos on your laptop,” Braden tells Dallas Observer. “I put them into categories so it feels like an experience where you’re watching these very short videos.”
 
Braden’s pet movie festival began in Minneapolis in 2012 at the Walker Art Center as an outdoor event. The videos he showed were curated cat videos, plus submissions from local cat owners. It was the Art Center’s most popular event for four years. It was here that he premiered his monochrome film, Henri, le Chat Noir, which then went viral.
 

 
The success of the event spurred Braden to start CatVideoFest, an official organization with the purpose of “bringing the joy of cat videos to the masses and raising money for cats in need,” according to the website’s About page. Now, Braden arranges and hosts events around the world to showcase his cat videos.
 

 
The board of the Dallas VideoFest got word of CatVideoFest and wanted to bring it to their community. The partnership spawned the 2017 cat-centric film festival event, which was a huge hit. In fact, it was so popular that the team decided to make it an annual event and include dog video clips, renaming it PawFest.
 
“When I started putting dog videos into the reel, it was a challenge because dogs videos, we find them funny, but not in the same way that we find cat videos funny,” Braden tells the Dallas Observer. “If a cat falls off a chair, we laugh, but if a puppy falls off, we go, ‘Oh no, I hope he’s OK.’”
 
A portion of ticket sales will be funneled to dog and cat rescue and adoption groups like Cat Matchers and Straydogs Inc. and MADE in Texas Assistance Dogs.
 
“Big, big cities should have something like this,” Braden tells the outlet. “None of this would work if we weren’t doing this for cats and dogs who need help.”
 
All the clips are G-rated, and audiences of all ages are encouraged to attend. Tickets for the Dallas VideoFest PawFest are $15. 
 
 
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