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CHARLIE TODD: I love crowds.
I'm a big fan of crowds and y'know crowds can be seen in a negative way.
Y'know, you can have angry mobs, but I love seeing a crowd come together for a common
good or just pull off something that's awesome.
For Improv Everywhere projects, I've learned that I need to make things very simple.
Y'know, to get a group of hundreds or thousands of people to do something there just can't
be too many instructions.
You can get a couple hundred people to freeze in place.
That's such a simple instruction.
And the other thing that I've learned about crowds too is that it's better to trust the
creativity and the wisdom of the crowd than to try to micromanage it yourself.
So, for example, in our frozen Grand Central project, I didn't give people specific instructions
for how to freeze in place.
I didn't say like, okay, you guys will be a couple and you'll be drinking a can of Coke
and you'll be doing this.
I just sort of crowd sourced it and let them decide.
I gave them the instructions of freeze doing something active.
If you're just like standing there then it may just look like you're standing there,
but if you're in the middle of a high five, or a handshake it's very clear that your'e
frozen.
But I y'know, apart from maybe listing two or three examples that was it.
And I let everybody decide by themselves and I was so happy that I did that because everyone
made such creative choices that I—if I had sat down and tried to write down 200 interesting
things, I wouldn't have thought of the couple that kissed for 5 minutes or the woman that
was like eating a yogurt for five minutes and the yogurt's like dripping down y'know
off her spoon by the end.
So I have learned to allow people to use their own creativity in these situations to bring
their own ideas and their own perspective to it and it makes the whole experience richer.
One thing that I've learned about crowds that is sort of a negative thing if one person—all
it takes is one maybe two people to sort of break the rules or do what they're not supposed
to do for everything to spiral out of control.
We did an mp3 experiment in Bryant Park a few years ago where one of the props people
were supposed to bring was a roll of toilet paper.
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And the idea was that at the very end we were going to make toilet paper mummies and everybody
danced around looking like mummies in the park.
And it worked and it looked really cool visually.
Especially we had cameras on top a tall office building across the street, but the Bryant
Park people who had invited us to stage the project here were very concerned that I was
having people bring toilet paper to the park.
Rightfully so.
And I said no no no, the instructions are going to say several times do not throw your
toilet paper.
They were picturing all their trees being toilet papered.
And it went well and then right at the end of the experiment, one person threw his toilet
paper into the air and y'know that person was an asshole.
They shouldn't—they were very clearly told don't do that, but that one person did it
and then I think it's really the fault of the second person even more.
The person that saw the person and said, yeah I'm gonna do it too.
Cause after the second person does it, then it becomes okay we can all do it.
This is something we're doing.
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So pretty quickly we had like 1,000 people throwing toilet paper into the air and it
looked amazing.
Like, visually, it was so cool.
Ultimately I'm happy that it happened.
That's certainly one thing that I've learned about crowds is that it can just sorta take
one person to set a crowd off on the wrong path.
But in general, the people that come out and participate in these things are doing it for
the right reasons.
I'm Charlie Todd and this is Epiphany!