ABOUT THE VIDEO: KCB Cha Cha Slide Parody

A couple of weeks ago, Kristi Leigh pointed out to me we were fast approaching our 100th video uploaded to the WJTL YouTube site. We wanted to do something fun to celebrate but most of the ideas we came up with were either too lofty (win a 3-day trip to Nashville and stay in Michael W. Smith’s guest room!) or just plain weird (how about a video of two monkeys fighting over a Wii console).

Later that same day Lisa Landis approached me with an idea for a video. McDonald’s had a commercial on TV set to the “Cha Cha Slide” that was on the air all the time. Every time you turned on the television you’d see that little dude in his yellow track suit bopping around the dining room table eating apples. Lisa had the brilliant idea of swapping out apples for cookies (what do you expect, she’s the award-winning host of The Kids Cookie Break). I loved the idea and the storyboarding process began.

I watched the original commercial over and over and over and we recreated the ad shot-for-shot substituting Lisa, her husband John, her nephew Nick, and her son Alex for all of the main characters. Alex was excited about getting to eat cookies during the shoot but an hour and a half later his sweet tooth was no longer craving chocolate chip cookies.

Because John had to return to work as soon as possible, we shot all of his parts first, which was a little confusing to our young stars. Try as we may, I don’t know how well I explained to them the concept of shooting out of order and piecing it all together later in the editing room.

Editing is my favorite process of putting together a video. It’s a lot like a jigsaw puzzle: You have all of the pieces of everything you shot and it’s up to you to put them in the right order to make the big picture. Of course, since we were parodying something that had already been done, it was a little easier knowing which piece went where this time around.

The KCB Cha Cha Slide Parody is now one of our most-watched videos each month and was a fun little way to celebrate 100 videos. The final product is available to view BY CLICKING HERE. Enjoy!

–Eddie

Tags: cha cha slide, cookies, editing, kids cookie break, kristi leigh, lisa landis, mcdonalds, michael w smith, nashville, parody, storyboard, video, wii, WJTL, youtube