The staff at Housing Units recently got into the festive spirit by taking part in a Christmas-themed music video. The video premiered at the Housing Units Christmas party last Wednesday and has since been released online – if you haven’t seen it already, you can watch it here:
The video was set to Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’, and featured staff from the various departments in the store singing and dancing along to the Christmas classic. It’s hard to believe from the three minute clip, but filming took over eight hours!
The day started at 8am, and the first stop was the kitchen of The Wickentree restaurant. The chefs were given the difficult task of appearing lively and enthusiastic first thing in the morning, but they pulled it off wonderfully, with Jon and Matt quite the scene-stealers.
Next stop was the store itself, where we tried to get some of the trickier scenes filmed before the customers arrived. We had just over an hour and a half to film some of the group scenes, as although it would have been a festive way for our customers to be greeted, we needed to make sure there were still staff on the shop floor for 10am!
Once the store had opened, we continued filming – this time getting some of the solo and smaller group shots. We carried the camera and equipment (including a very large speaker!) around the main store and the emporium until we had finally filmed most of the shots we needed by around 3:30pm. The highlight of this part of the filming process was most definitely Barbara, who sang her part from a bathtub, complete with two backing singer elves.
Once we had finished the store-based shots, we headed over to the distribution centre to film the staff in both the offices and the warehouse. Although a few of the staff members were a little nervous about singing in front of their colleagues, everybody got into the spirit of things, including Mike from the warehouse, who despite admitting he doesn’t like Christmas, agreed to sing a solo line from his forklift truck. That’s the spirit!
Filming finally wrapped at 5:30pm, and the team headed home after what had been a very fun but very tiring day. We hope you like the finished video, and if you want to catch a glimpse of some of the filming process, you can watch our behind the scenes video here:
Merry Christmas!