After a very successful video launch, Denver Bronco’s star Emmanuel Sanders, or Herman Jones as he was throughout the video, helped launch a new store for Dick’s Sporting Goods in Fort Collins Colorado. To pull of this production, we spent a month in pre-production dialing every detail of Emmanuel’s character, Herman Jones.
Video Setup
Herman was a legendary football coach of yesteryear with some very, call them nontraditional coaching methods like running backs cradling eggs, linebackers in a potato sack race, receivers catching with frying pans, and quarterbacks oiling up their hands in grease and throwing balls as if they were “in the elements”. This all took place at Skyline High School in Longmont Colorado, where students were led to believe a documentary was being filmed with Herman, a story by their coaches helped sell to the team. Our production team had an extremely tight set of guidelines and countless “one-take” situations to ensure we were going to capture the absolute best reaction shots, coverage of the drills, and of course the great reveal moment in very short period of time. We had 4 highly skilled camera operators and a brilliant sound recordist alongside production support, creative, a director, a producer and the client. It wasn’t a small team of people moving on the field for the production, but we were very nimble.
Before all of this took place, we had one of the best makeup artists in the west putting together the old man makeup and wardrobe. Due to outlying constraints, they had to pull out the magic in under an hour. We easily could have used 3 hours but in just one we pulled off amazing.
At the end of the practice, the kids were very surprised and no one figured it out, which we were especially proud of, as you can see by their reactions.
The Final Result
This piece was run on the news repetitively on several local stations as well as on a variety of social media channels, gathering hundreds of thousands of view the Dick’s Sporting Goods store opened that following Saturday, the place was packed!
Check out our video, we are very proud of this production!
Here’s one of the news channels that covered the event
You can read the news angle of the story here https://www.9news.com/article/sports/nfl/denver-broncos/emmanuel-sanders-goes-incognito-to-surprise-skyline-football/73-574806458
Some other great behind the scenes moments
