Six years ago, Bryan Reisberg was a struggling New York University film school grad whose first feature had been described by Variety as “an 84-minute shoulder shrug.” He was working in advertising and barely making the rent when he and his fiancée Alex Garyn gave themselves a wedding present in November 2015 that changed their lives.

It was a corgi puppy, who they named Maxine. Reisberg started posting videos as @madmax_fluffyroad because, he said, “I just wanted the world to see how damn cute my puppy was.” Maxine built up a respectable number of followers—about fifty thousand—and within a year, Reisberg’s filmmaker instincts returned. “I shot a video with a cinematographer friend in Brooklyn,” said Reisberg. “Then I wrote a script, and hired the voice-over actor Jon St. John (he was the voice of Duke Nukem in the video game); he responded to a casting notice I put on Voices.com.”