The Making of Our Holiday Card
How to Duplicate Yourself for the Holidays
What do you do when all your ideas for a company holiday card seem lame, unoriginal or totally boring? Just do a seemingly typical holiday card …but make it weird.
As many noticed (and many did not) our holiday card featured stand-ins for French Press staff members. Yes- we decided to cast other people that looked like each of us. As casting progressed, we did have to adjust our expectations. It turned out that casting five look-a-likes is not that easy. Only two or three models applied for each of our roles (Except Shirley, who had 17 submissions! You go girls!) Plus one guy that applied for all the male roles and looked like none of us. We quickly realized that we’d have to settle for very, very vaguely looking like us. (i.e. maybe same race and gender …and maybe height?) We came to think that would even be funnier.
The day of the shoot, as our “doppelgangers” arrived and put on our clothes- all laughed at how much we did NOT look alike. All, that is except for Chris Walters’ stand-in who was stranded in Marin; bus service having been cancelled during that underwhelming “storm of the decade.” So for him, we had to resort to Photoshop and used Chris’ brother Charles and kind of morphed the two brothers together.
The result is disturbing. Almost as disturbing as the morphing at the end of Michael Jackson’s 1991 Black or White video. (Why is that so gross? The morphing, the dancing, the smiling, the shirtless aspect? Something to ponder.)
An odd side note is that as work on the card progressed, we found ourselves referring to the group in the photo as “us” even though none of us were really in it. Ok, maybe it’s not that odd. The final touch was all the holiday flare- making it look as corporate-cheesy as possible. For some reason that cracked us up even more.
Anyway, we realized this odd joke would be lost on people who have never seen us in person or who have only seen us in passing and haven’t committed our physical looks to memory (you lucky people!) And that’s how it turned out. Most responses were a warm “happy holidays” back. Closer friends and colleagues reacted by laughing or some form of “WTF?” Then there are the people who only really knew one of us and wondered why they looked so different or what we had done with them! Anyway, we hope you enjoyed our dumb little holiday prank.
Check out each employee and their “doppelganger” below!
