The Real Watch Cat...

Ideas come from the most unusual places sometimes, for our project Watch Cat, it all started with my friend Greg, who noticed a cat who always seemed to be guarding this certain apartment building.

This is the real Watch Cat on duty.

This simple observation sparked an idea which grew into a story, then a storyboard, turned into an animatic and now is baking into an animated series of short webisodes.

Watch Cat Backstory
by Greg Bradley

I'm a screenwriter who's always looking for good ideas, but I never thought I would find one in my own backyard. 

Every day when I walked home, I would see this black-and-white & brownish cat sitting at the corner of my block. I've often wondered what kind of life this unusual cat lives. Every time I see him, he would be sitting on the same corner seamlessly all day, all night, as if he was protecting his house, his owner, or the neighborhood. To be honest, I'm not even sure if this cat has an owner. I would see a guy sitting outside his apartment sometimes, near where the cat sits, but I never ever actually saw them together. And this cat never wears a collar. People come by to pet the cat, play with him or even sometimes feed him. He rarely ever moved from that spot at the corner of the block which went on for years.

Every time I would pass by that cat to go to my place, I often thought to myself, what a lazy cat.

But I then started thinking, what if, this cat actually leads an amazing life. Full of adventure and excitement that us humans would know nothing about. What if, this is a crime fighting cat, who's sole purpose is to protect the neighborhood.  Wouldn't that make him the people's cat, the neighborhood's cat. I like this idea a lot! That's when I came up with the name, "Watch Cat." He would become a watch cat for the neighborhood, like "Watch Dog", or "Neighborhood Watch". Now, I'm really liking this idea and decided to do something with it. I thought it would make a great story. Maybe, even a great screenplay.

But four years later, I never really did anything with this idea. I did tell my closest friends about it, and they would all say, "hey, that's a great idea," but nothing ever came of it, until January of this year 2014, my friend Jim Richardson, an animator, contacted me about possibly doing Watch Cat as a web series. All of a sudden, it clicked!! To me, that made perfect sense. Everything came together after that and Jim and I have been working around the clock for nine months on the first ever episode of Watch Cat.

Has it really been 9 months?  I guess it has since we have also had to juggle our lives around family and work. Let it be know, we are just to regular guys sharing an idea to put out a series of adventures featuring not an ordinary cat, but a Watch Cat...

Here's the first episode...