On a lighter than usual note, let’s explore some of the aspects that can contribute to fun pet videos, starting with playful pets! If you’re anything like us, you’re quite possibly a dog lover, who appreciates how instinctively they live in the moment and enjoy life to the full. Storm (our Golden Retriever) and Sky (our rescue pup) take this to the next level at our favourite local park.

It’s expansive and beautiful, including open grassy fields, shade-dappled forest sections, a sparkling river and irresistible dams. Well, to Storm especially. He adores playing in water, not to mention any mud puddle that crosses his path, no matter how shallow and the messier the better! We plan our walk, or run in their case, to reach a big dam near the end of it, so that he can splash into the deep water and get a good wash before leaping into the back of our car. Sky is more circumspect, following his older brother a bit more cautiously, but always having his ears perked high with curiosity and eagerness to share in Storm’s unbridled joy.

Capturing this exuberant energy is the key to shooting fun pet videos, which can be made more interesting for your friends and followers when you also feature here and there in the footage, as I do in the above video, interacting with our dogs. Adding a light-hearted, royalty-free music track can add to the fun factor, together with editing your footage into a creative series of short, varied clips that alternate wider positioning shots with tighter ones where your pet is zoomed in close to the camera.

It’s worth setting up your shots for best effect, as Dave and I did by collaborating on the fly. I called our boys to me and held them for a few seconds while Dave got the GoPro camera ready. Then I let them go as he called them to him, resulting in the clips you can see above where they charged straight for the camera and then swerved past it at the last moment. What obliging little stars!

This took a minimal amount of time to shoot, edit and format to a practical size, in the natural course of a laid-back Sunday. It was super fun to share with family and friends via WhatsApp and social media. Few things in life bring smiles to our faces as swiftly as seeing pets having a blast being themselves. We humans can learn a whole lot from them, don’t you think?

If you’d like to lean more about shooting your own pet videos, feel free to post a question in the comments below 😀