It’s one snappy way to highlight the importance of social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic: The Ohio Department of Health on Thursday released a simple, yet stunningly effective, PSA featuring dozens of ping-pong balls and mousetraps.
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Check out the video ― which gained more than 5.8 million views in its first 20 hours on Twitter ― here:
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Social distancing works. We are all #InThisTogetherOhio. https://t.co/jU4ZAkm3Py pic.twitter.com/uKJtfi4cuP
— Ohio Dept of Health (@OHdeptofhealth) April 9, 2020
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“I don’t usually get stressed over work,” said Andy Nick, from the Dayton, Ohio, creative agency Real Art that produced the video.
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“But in this case, when you have 400 traps set 1/4” apart, and you have to put that ping-pong ball on the last 100 without letting a single one go off… yeah, that’s pure stress,” he wrote in an email to HuffPost on Friday.
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Nick said his team had four days to come up with the PSA’s concept and complete the project. They spent two days getting ready ― including finding 500 mousetraps and 500 pingpong balls ― and another two days shooting on set.
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One accidental chain reaction “cost us a lot of time,” Nick said.
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A lot of people have been asking how we did the @OHdeptofhealth video (aka – the Mouse Trap project). Here’s an iPhone clip of our first “shot”, which took 8 hours to set up. pic.twitter.com/3xxjiiz2N5
— Andy Nick (@nickAD) April 9, 2020
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Nick said the video wasn’t like anything he had ever worked on before.
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“The pandemic isn’t just another ‘project,’” he wrote. “This [is] a piece with some gravity behind it. Of all the work our team has done lately, I’m glad this one means something to people.”
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Here’s some behind the scenes… I knew it was impossible to make the perfect throw in a single take. With only 1 hr left in the shoot (no room to start a chain reaction & reset), we used gel superglue to “freeze” the traps. And then… I threw the perfect throw in 1 take. 🙂
— Andy Nick (@nickAD) April 9, 2020
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