The other week Kevin Price, Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ R&D North Lab's Programme Manager, asked me to talk to the students at the Salford University Technical College about my experiences working on Horizon’s and .
Me: "Can I bring the animatronic cat?"
Kevin: "Good idea."
Me: "Can I show them the video of the cat throwing up?"
Kevin: "Definitely."
OK then.
This was my first visit to the . An airy building a short walk from our lab and full of 14-18 year olds studying to work in the broadcasting, games and design industries. Who hopefully would be interested in the experience of an R&D engineer trying to outfit cats with spy cameras. We took a box full of different cat cameras to pass around and covered the basics.
Why do you need to make a bespoke cat camera? Because there wasn’t an off-the shelf GPS controllable camera with night vision, insane battery life, high quality video, and almost no weight. Let alone a version you could safely put between a cat’s ears.
Cat wearing a between-the-ears camera
How do you make a cat camera? Take a spy cam. Break it down. .
What does the footage look like? actually. Having the whiskers or ears in shot turned out to be important, if those are splayed or flattened it tells you something about the cat’s mood.
How do you even put a programme about cats together? You assemble a team of world-class animal experts, refine your tech on-the-fly if you have to and pray the cats won’t choose the shoot week as the one they spend asleep on the washing machine. I learnt an awful lot working with the Horizon team, we were doing something that hadn’t been attempted before, and there was genuine experiment happening with an unknown outcome at the time of filming. Watching the production team at work was an absolute masterclass in how to find a narrative in unexpected places, and in joining up the weeks of research and what happened when the cameras were rolling into a coherent narrative that, crucially, made good telly.
We had a lovely time and would like to thank the UTC for having us. And letting us play the the vomiting cat clip. You can see it here if you like: .
When you thought you wanted to see something but you really didn’t