About Ultimutt Animal Actors

Melissa has worldwide recognition as a positive reinforcement trainer, a studio trainer, a speaker for continuing education, and holds 5 Guinness World Recrods aquired in Canada and Italy for performing extreme tricks like walking a 16ft tightrope, dog and cat riding a scooter, and bounce passing a basketball. Melissa also specializes in training cats with clients in Canada, USA and Europe.

While specializing in extreme tricks, Melissa excels at teaching organic looking performances for film behaviours - teaching a dog to look sad and limp, or perform a walking handstand - its ALL tricks.

A great trainer can teach acommpanying body langugae for a positively trained organic performance.

With 25 years experience training animals, Melissa specializes in getting performance out of animals in high pressure environments like film/live appearances. With a positive reinforcement approach, the animals are stress free (stress decreases cognition) and able to think and perform clearly. Production often creates behind the scenes videos, or asks Melissa to take part in media tours, to share the happy performing animals.

Whether we are supplying a trained dog or on demand sourcing/prepping pets with a specific look, we are not relying on the dog's temperament. Choosing the right dog, planning the order of the shots (if the dog is working all day as the star) and managing the animal properly on set dictates performance - and that is our specialty.

A perfect combination of understanding movie making and training/sourcing animal actors, Melissa will oversee project details to ensure that the directors' expectations are prepped and ready to go.

Our animals are highly trained for basic film behaviours like stay, eyeline, go with but also for showing emotion. They will be prepped on camera movement, location, props, wardrobe, special effects as well as the specific desired behaviors in our Animal Actors class.

Melissa Millett

Founder and head trainer of In Dogs We Trust, The Ultimutts and Ultimutt Animal Actors, Melissa has trained thousands of dogs at In Dogs We Trust for the past 25 years.

As an expert in animal training, Meissa is internationally known and has performed successfully with her animals on Canada's Got Talent, America's Got Talent, Lo Show Dei Record (Italy), Good Morning America, Breakfast TV (Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver), Rick Mercer Report, The Worlds Most Amazing Dog and more! Live appearances on TV are unforgiving, and animals must come out focused, confident and ready to perform with little to no time for acclimation.

Melissa has provided an elite serves for animals in film and TV for the past 6 years with Paramount, Warner Brothers, Sony, AMC, Netflix, a US superbowl commercial, and more!

Specializing in training animals in a short time, Melissa trained 4/5 Church cats for Pet Sematary in 2 months (right out of the shelter), Krypto the Superdog for Titans (from pet dog to main character in 3 weeks) to name a few. Melissa's personal animals have extensive training, with a roster to choose from who are trained in her Animal Actors Class.

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