I co-produced, edited and co-directed the crowdfunding campaign video for the insanely successful Soylent food replacement product with Abram Cox. Along with our producing partner, Derek Beumer, we met the creators of Soylent, Rob Rhinehart and David Renteln one Saturday morning for breakfast in Santa Monica to discuss the possibility of creating their Kickstarter campaign video with them. It didn't take more than a couple of minutes to see that we were all on the same page, with creative ideas being thrown around the table about how to most effectively present their product to potential customers/supporters.
We were fascinated by the fact that Rob had in fact been living off a prototype of the product for the past five months and was healthier than ever based on bloodwork. He told us that he had grown tired of feeling the detrimental effects on his body from living off of Ramen and Quesadillas while working a demanding schedule on a start up business. So he did some research and developed a chemical formula for a product that has all the nutrients the body needs in a fast, non-perishable format.
We could also clearly see the potential that the product had for helping to improve lives in developing parts of the world where malnutrition is still an unfortunate fact of life. One key aspect of the world hunger issue truly stood out in our discussion: World hunger is not a food shortage issue, but rather an issue of cost of distribution coupled with the perishable nature of the foods we eat. If Soylent could be brought to market sucessully, it really could play a massive role in bettering the lives of countless people since it has a very long shelf-life and can be distributed easily to the places where people need it most.
About half-way through breakfast, we started to discuss schedules in addition to script ideas, and it became clear that we needed to dive in right then and there since they were headed out of town the next morning and were coming back on a day that we had been already been booked on another project. We nailed the concept down and opted to shoot them in front of a green screen using our own gear, with a plan to meet up at Abram's flat in Hollywood in an hour and a half... just enough time for me to run home, and grab my green screen, lighting gear, camera and sound equipment in a mad dash (thankfully my battery-charging-fu had been strong after our previous shoot).
