Welcome to day four! We’re on £1175! I wanted to update you on our latest commercial and let you in on the making of the commercial and how it came about… and obviously how much fun we had making it! If you haven’t yet seen it, take a look before reading this update!

So it was on Monday about a month ago we rounded up a troupe of staff and performers to take on the challenge of making a campaign video and two commercials to help promote Operation Circus. Having never made a commercial before I took to the internet to learn… I came up with the concepts, took on James from Front Row Films, created a story board, found an army tank, borrowed lots of costumes from a friend of ours Andy who has an Aladin’s cave house worth of costumes (had hours of fun in there), got the equipment ready and off we totted!

We filmed in three different locations for all of the videos. Firstly we started in the space where we did all of the circus stuff. We then had a huge amount of fun filming lots of dancing and cheesy shots that, after initial embarrassment from everyone, they all got into it and I know they loved it! We also learned that Zaq is a secret camp comic… He got well into it and took on the persona Corporal Camp for the day.

zac two

A couple of weeks before filming I was driving through Kings Heath and seen on someones drive a big armoured vehicle which I was blown away by and thought how amazing that would be for Operation Circus! I knocked on the door and told the guy about what we were doing… I don’t think he understood completely what it was but he agreed and on came the tank to the square which made our second location.

As you can imagine quite a crowd started to build up in the square as 12 circus performers contorted, hula hooped, handstood, and acro’d all over the tank. We roll called, saluted and showed Kings Heath square what Operation Circus was all about! Zaq got into the tank and decided that was going to be his new home. Getting in was a task all by itself. Can you see his face in this picture?

The third location we walked to the top of the high street, which created a few faces of… ‘who are these people’. In our full pin up army get up we travelled to the Howard Road East end of the high street where we set up shop right by the Kings Heath crown and welcome sign! We stayed there for around an hour as we filmed quite a few shots. Every time the light turned red we had quite a bit of an audience… they hooted their horns and waved… we were glad to give a little bit of circus entertainment to them as they stopped on red!

We finished off the day with a few more scenes in the space and then collapsed on the floor. I want to say a huge thanks to all of the performers that helped us out that day. A big shout out to Beth also who had to get out of Birmingham that night to go and perform for an event! Circus trooper is what we call people like that!!

I think that’s enough chat for me today. Hope you enjoy the commercial and please help spread the word so we can get the £15,000 we need for the aerial rig for our space! Until tomorrow…