At the beginning of the semester, during one of our class breaks, while I was at 7-11, I saw this gum called Nutra-trim gum, that allegedly caused you to lose weight. I thought this would make a great project, and so when project 2 came around, I went and got enough gum to last for about 2 weeks, the week of and the week after spring break. During this time, I chewed this gum, and filmed myself eating all sorts of horribly unhealthy food. This is what came out.
After posting the video to YouTube.com, mostly as a way of letting my friends see what I'd been working on, I received the following message:
From The Makers of Nutra Trim....
Hi Brian!
We, the makers of Nutra-Trim Weight Management Gum, would like to let you know that we really like your video! Youtube is such a great site - how would we ever have known otherwise? Glad you made it, glad you posted it. Some very funny stuff in there.
If you've any interest in it, we'd like to send you some free gum - Nutra-Trim as well as our other product, Jolt Caffeine Energy Gum. And, if you have friends who also make movies, we want to extend the offer to them as well: make movies about/featuring our products, post them to youtube, and we'll shower you with riches (read: gum)!
But if nothing else, we'd just like to say good job and thanks.
- the GumRunners
Matt Gearhart
Laurence Molloy
Kevin Gass
I thought it was pretty funny. I have yet to take them up on the offer.
The making of the film:
I did actually eat all of this food. However, my friend Ashley helped out with the eating pizza and wings part, so while it may seem like I single handedly took down a dozen wings and an entire Domino's pizza, I had a little help that time. For the burger shots, I bought several very cheap and not very tasty burgers from Wendy's, so that I could get adequate coverage of first bites. The burger shoot occurred on the first day of the project, you can tell because the night before, I had bleached parts of my hair, but in subsequent shots, the blonde spots are gone. Also, right before the start of the project, and on out until a couple weeks after I finished, my friend Andy and I were participating in a competitive beard growing situation, and there was no trimming or shaving allowed, that is why the beard gets increasingly more epic. For the record, I won the beard-off. The entire thing was shot on one of the small DV cameras available for check out from the university. I was going to include some bowling and more consumption of beer, but when I went bowling, the camera didn't want to cooperate, nor did it want to cooperate on St.Patrick's Day, when my friends and I drank a very healthy amount of Guinness in celebration. I get the impression that I would have had plenty of coverage there. Additionally, I had wanted to include playing video games as an important part of my exercise regimen, but somehow neglected to do so while shooting for this. The programming playing behind me during the wings-eating part is the BBC television show, Spaced, which is the greatest TV show ever. The hot dog scene was shot at my place of employment, Dog Almighty, the hot dog I was eating was topped with carmelized onions, cheese, jalapenos, and lots of barbeque sauce. Also, there are the weird shots from the inside of Jimmy John's with people holding meat and what have you, because when the project started, I worked there, and so I included that as part of my exposition, however, about halfway through, I quit, and so I didn't really want to keep that in there anymore. Lastly, my band changed names after I made this piece.