Improv Everywhere Mission: Slo-Mo Home Depot
A few years back we executed a mission that involved repeating time. Ever since then I’ve wanted to try something that stopped or slowed down time. How would people react if they found themselves surrounded by people moving forward at a different rate or time (or not moving at all)? I decided the Home Depot on 23rd Street in Manhattan was the perfect place to try this out for two reasons. 1) The assonance in “Slo-Mo Home Depot” sounds funny. 2) The mere existence of a Home Depot, an enormous behemoth of a store, on our tiny island is hilarious. It also helped that the store is located on the exact same block as the Best Buy we invaded earlier this year.
On a Saturday afternoon, around 225 people showed up at the meeting point in Madison Square Park, a short walk from the Home Depot.
A pretty diverse group of folks showed up. One family drove down from Connecticut to participate. The wife joked that her husband looked like Tom Selleck. They were the first to arrive at the meeting point.
After everyone had assembled I revealed the mission details. We would sychronize our watches and then walk over to Home Depot and shop. At exactly 4:15 we would all begin moving in slow motion. We’d do that for five minutes, and then shop normally for five minutes as if nothing had happened. At exactly 4:25 we would all freeze in place for five minutes. When that was over we would go back to normal and eventually leave the store.
This particular Home Depot location has a ground level, a lower level, a balcony, and a contractor services area. I divided the group up by months of birth and spread everyone out equally among the different sections, ensuring that we’d be spread out over the entire store. I also divided the group up by year of birth, instructing the even numbered birth year folks to approach and exit the store from Sixth avenue and the odd years to approach and exit from Fifth. I did this to make us seem less like a parade of people and more like random individuals entering and exiting the store.
One thing that is unique about this mission is that the photos are pretty worthless. You can’t show movement or stillness in a photograph so we needed to capture as much video as possible without getting caught. We learned in our Best Buy mission that while corporate chain stores have security cameras monitoring you on every aisle, they don’t much care for you videotaping them. We snuck in six DV cameras and two video capable digital cameras, concealing them in duffle bags and shooting discreetly from the hip. [...]
I had talked about this group before and the wackiness they have caused. Well in the same order sas the Best Buy improv, and with a “few” more people. They created more laughs and much more video and less cops then last time. Go ahead and read and enjoy this new great caper, Slo-Mo Home Depot.
Tags: Acting, Humor, Interesting, Irony, Photographs, Theater, Video
