Covenant Fellowship Variety Show – Part III

You’ve all seen the Old Spice “I’m a Man” commercial.  We got ambitious and decided to make a spoof of this as our third and final video of this 3 part series.

(If playback is slow or jerky when viewing it here due to the video being resized, it might be smoother to watch it on the Vimeo page)

How did we do it?  Well, a lot of manpower (more like a few guys doing 10 things each). And a lot of dental floss. With no fishing wire on hand, dental floss was the next best thing we had. It doesn’t hurt to have clean teeth too.

What the heck is going on? I assure you, far more than a single picture can show.

Suggey is a human pulley system for the toothbrush and also in charge of pulling off the bathrobe with his elaborate string set up.  Suggey and Peter also magically lower the headset onto Mikey later on.  What you don’t see is that Peter is not only holding the shower curtain and shower head, but he has dental floss that’s attached to the headset IN HIS MOUTH. He uses his tongue to send vibrations down the floss to Suggey who in turn decodes the vibrations into instructions for the rate the headset should descend onto Mikey’s head (in inches per second).

Matt is holding the other side of the shower curtain and acting as a human crane holding a broom pole that has a wire hangar attached to a giant cardboard iPhone (Peter’s Halloween costume!) At the start of each take, with one arm Matt has to lift the pole up to the ceiling and hold it there.  Sounds simple enough, right?  Repeat that 30 times.

Chris was feeling sick that night so we only gave him 5 tasks.  He’s our sound technician recording the audio who also simultaneously flips Mikey’s robe open, hands him an iPhone, catches it, and later hands him a video game controller.

Me? I’m the chump behind the camera telling everyone what to do. Actually, it’s scary trying to frame everything right knowing that if I’m a few inches too far to the left or right, I might have someone’s hand in the scene. Compared to what everyone else had to do though, I’m just the chump behind the camera.

For the final “I’m on a couch” reveal, everyone had to leave while carrying multiple items in their hands AND pick up and move their chairs out of frame.  Chris rolls off the couch and lies on the floor.

We were a little short on time but if we had another 5-10 takes it would have been flawless.  Here’s a practice take where things fell into place very nicely and you can kind of see how we are working together.

The toothbrush and robe coming off are flawless here! Later on we had problems of safety pins breaking whenever we tried pulling the robe off using the wires/floss.

If we could do it all over again, I’d have voted to bring the entire set to the middle of the cornfields! Imagine:

Shower Scene
Corn fields
Couch in the middle of the cornfields!!

Ah, that would have been bliss. Too bad we all have full time jobs and can’t film during the day and have other things (like life) to attend to!

Hope you guys enjoyed that =)

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