“The idea came from Mr. Watkins the TV and Media teacher at the school. We wanted to do it at the football game because that was going to be the time when we could get the most student involved in the challenge,” Spencer Boucher (‘17) said.

On Friday, November 11th, Forge participated in the Mannequin Challenge, a challenge where a large group of people freeze in action while someone takes a video, usually with the song “Black Beetles” by Rae Sremmurd. The entire Green Wall participated, as well as cheer and dance team, the press box, band, and the football players.

“With this challenge popular across the internet, I think it totally raised the excitement of the game at halftime,” Julia Weaver (‘17) said.

Spencer Boucher (‘17), Mackenzie Nolan (‘17), Grady Sadlier (‘18), and Julia Weaver (‘17) teamed up to film this video.

“With the help of Spencer Boucher filming the Green Wall, Mackenzie Nolan filming cheer and dance, and Grady Sadlier filming the press box, and my self filming the band, the project was a success because of all of us working as such a solid team,” Julia Weaver said.

One of the goals of this challenge at the game was to bring students together and it definitely did that.

“It took everybody’s cooperation because if one person did not want to go along with it, the whole thing would’ve been messed up. Everyone had to work together at the same time,” Sadlier said.

When they first began to put the plans in motion, no one expected the video to become quite as popular as it did. After going viral on Twitter, major news organizations such as USA Today began to republish the challenge.

Through planning with administration and band, the group was able to bring everyone into the video, not just the student section.

“We talked to Mr. Berry and Mr. Hill and they approved it for us to have 2 minutes set aside at halftime,” Weaver said. “We talked to band, and they said that they were planning to do it in the middle of their performance so we decided to put our two minutes in sync with the band.”

Filming the challenge was not as simple as it may have looked. It proved difficult to make sure over a hundred students stayed completely still for the two minutes they had. Not only that, but although it seems like they had a long time, there were a lot of things that these students had to film so it was much more difficult.

“The most challenging part of the video was getting all the shots that we needed in the short 2 minutes that we had,” Boucher said.
Overall, the mannequin challenge was beyond successful, with 349 retweets on Weaver’s account, over 10,500 shares from the USA Today, and hundreds more views.