Event Farm
The COVID Monster
COVID moves in with an event planner a week before her event.
Watch the full campaign · 3:06
The Strategy
Event Farm makes software for running events, both in person and online. In 2021, in-person events were coming back, and the people who planned them had a new job. They had to check every guest's vaccine card or test result at the door.
That job was hard to do well. A photo of a vaccine card proves very little, and fake cards were for sale. Event Farm built the Event Safety Toolkit to fix that. A guest shows a health pass on their phone. The app scans it, confirms their vaccine or test result, and checks them in.
By 2021, people were tired of hearing about COVID. So we made COVID a character. He's a gross houseguest in a bathrobe, with a "19" on his shirt and used tissues stuck all over him. He hangs around Lindsay's house. She's an events coordinator and a mom who works from home.
Lindsay's boss has just emailed her. How will they check vaccines at next week's event? While she tries to figure it out, COVID makes everything worse. He tests thermometers, sells a blank vaccine card and wipes the event plans off her whiteboard.
Then the toolkit shows up, and Lindsay walks you through it one step at a time. The film runs about three minutes, so there's room to show how the whole product works, not just to tell the joke.
The Process
Brian, our director, wrote the script and directed the film. We shot it in one day in November 2021, in a rented house. We used the living room, the kitchen and the front porch, and we set up one corner as a spa.
We cast actors to play Lindsay, her kids and COVID. Our makeup artist painted COVID's face green. We put together the rest of his look ourselves: a wig, a worn bathrobe, a "19" shirt and a lot of tissues.
We did most of it for real, during the shoot. When COVID tests the thermometers, the red and green light flashing across the room came from lights on set, not from editing. In editing, we added the on-screen text that spells out each feature, so you can follow along as Lindsay explains it.
During the same shoot, we also made a second, shorter film: a walkthrough of how to set up an event in the toolkit. The main film shows why you'd want it. The walkthrough shows how it works.
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