They say never work with children and animals, but we at DTW recently broke both of those rules when we decided this year to produce a Christmas video instead of a greetings card.
But could we really pull it off in such a short space of time? Despite many a dubious glance, and at least one “I’ll eat an elf’s hat if you pull this off!” we got everyone together for…an interesting couple of hours.
Trying to direct a one-year old to “Crawl like this”, and explaining to at least three separate six year olds what their motivation for the scene was, you might have been mistaken for thinking you had walked onto the set of a Hollywood blockbuster film.
But, you wouldn’t have been mistaken for too long, with mince-pie encrusted carpet stains and tinsel coming out of our ears… literally, I thought, maybe, this time we had gone too far, reflecting back to the night the idea was born, I asked myself ‘Had someone had too many wines on a school night?’
However, despite the crying noises of several tired and frustrated babies, chocolate handprints all over the photocopier, dog hairs on the Christmas Tree, and the curious case of the missing chocolate coins that never made it to the bright lights of the tree branches, (a mystery still to this day) we somehow managed to get all the footage we needed.
But, chaos and stress aside it was a lovely afternoon… Hopefully not to be repeated too soon, and the lesson we all learnt was when you prove people wrong…make them eat their elf hat!