I’ve had some great opportunities to create video with Peach State Overland and the Overland Sash is no exception. The idea came about when I was perusing some old photos and two pictures of my mom stood out. One was of her as a young girl wearing her Girl Scout sash and the other as an adult from a few years back jokingly wearing the same sash. I figured this would be hilarious to re-purpose a sash like this for today’s morale patch fad in the overland and tactical shooting clicks. Patrick Metzger from PSO wrote a script based on the style and cadence of the infamous Sham-wow commercials starring Vince Offer. I also wanted to ride the 90s craze that was/is happening now in commercials, fashion, and social media so we let that guide some of the wardrobe and gags. The rest of PSO then came together as a group and started tweaking and pre-planning what was possible given a budget of zero and decided that April 1st was the day for the launch. That gave us roughly 2 months to complete the project in our spare time. We decided to keep a few scenes while we axed a few others. We wanted to capture a few poignant jabs at some overland cliche’s as well as some of our own in our experience in the overland space. That narrowed it down to the elevator, the selfie-stick, and the epic b-roll scenes as well as the hilarity of what the patches represent to us.

The spot breaks down to 7 scenes and/or locations:

  • A host/narration scene at an overland camp site
  • An elevator
  • A scenic view with our 90s guy using a selfie stick
  • A camp site cooking b-roll montage
  • A scene with PSO member Andrew dressed in full tactical garb for the Tacti-cool segment
  • Sash b-roll with a 3/4 mannequin
  • Customer testimonials

Each had their own challenges, be it timing, travel, props, green screen, etc, but the elevator scene required the most coordination and people power. We opted for an undisclosed location that we’d have relatively uninhibited access to on a weekend, we cast Lauren Taylor (a friend and local music and acting talent in the Atlanta area), called in a favor from friend Josh Crosby to assist with grip and gaff duties, as well as PSO’s Steven Sorenson as our 90s guy. Patrick shot the scene and I directed. All in all, it turned out pretty well. Shooting an elevator scene with the assist of false walls is a little difficult, lighting, doors closing constantly are all troublesome, but we made it work.

Everything was shot on a Fuji XT3 at 4k/60p or for some of the slo-mo 1080p120. For green screen I took advantage of the camera’s 10bit HEVC codec to get a nice clean cut.

Once we had all the pieces, the edit was relatively quick. I put together rough sequences the night after most of the shoots, so assembling them and adding some SFX and beds as well lots of crop-ins and dutch angles was about it.

It’s not perfect, but for a fun passion project, done is the goal and we received lots of positive reaction and re-posting on social sites.