This is the true scent of danger: English Leather. 

Not to get in a hipster match of who did it first, but before Old Spice came out with their ironic ad campaigns, I made the English Leather videos. Starring Viktor Champignon - aka Vik Champion - as the daring, east-to-love and hard-to-beat face of the iconic cologne brand from our parents' childhood (and maybe earlier), we unveiled a modest set of commercials, produced with an even more modest budget. They were a resounding success with the few hundred people that saw them. And with the help of our digital world, they'll live in on in obscurity until the end of the world as we know it. 

In this video, there are two different commercials. The first one featured was what we originally produced with this idea. Honestly, it's not necessary for me to put any description in this text field of what you'll see below, since I describe it all in the voice over, but, what the hell, I'm paying for this website, so I may as well wax poetically about the video. 

So, the first video we shot in my basement in a house where I lived in Ann Arbor. If you look closely at one of the shots, you can actually see a glass piece on the cinder block wall in the background. No idea what happened to that glass piece. 

Jay Patton shot this video, and he has gone on to much success as a director of commercials and documentaries in the Chicago area. If you ever need to get a hold of him, then I guess look him up online. He doesn't have website yet, but you can check out what he's currently working on by checking out this Kickstarter that he has successfully funded. https://goo.gl/EBv2U2 It's a documentary about artist Jim Pollock. If you watch the About video on that page, the music is Jay's, too. He's a wonderful man, and a great artist. 

Playing the devious villain in the first video is John Buzon, a motion graphic artist and colorist in Los Angeles by day, and a photographer and miniatures painter by night. And also a fantastic husband and father to two beautiful humans. John helped produce this video, and a few of the subsequent as well. 

In the second video featured, the one with the Labi Siffre's "I Got The" that I so obviously ripped off, we shot in our hometown of Saginaw, MI. It features one of John's older sisters, her husband, and a Michigan-based graphic artist Eric Schantz as the villain making the handoff of the empty case. 

And, bear in mind that these videos were shot in 2006 and 2007, on the old Canon GL2, and uploaded back in the day when Youtube hadn't yet been purchased by Google. So, yeah, I'm gonna get hipster on this shit. 

Most of these second round of English Leather videos were produced on the same fall weekend as the second video from above. We shot them at a horse ranch in ol' Frankenmuth, MI. John Buzon filmed them, once again on the Canon GL2, and I enlisted the incredible voice of Charles Schultz to do the voice overs - and he killed it! 

The final video, the ambiguous "chase" scene with no one apparently pursuing me, and likewise no one whom I'm pursuing, was shot in Berlin when I spent a few months there in 2008. 

Thanks for checking them out. Action! 

Below I'm just listing a few of the commercials on their own.