A YouBoob Moment
Rice students want to Feel Your Boobies with $10,000 on the line
Three Rice University students want you to feel your boobies! Sophomores Gabi Chennisi and Adrien Pellerin and senior Austin Lipinski submitted two videos to the nationwide “Feel Your Boobies” breast cancer awareness campaign. The contest calls for a humorous video that reminds women to check for breast cancer by “feeling their boobies.”
Chennisi, who wrote the script for the first video entitled, "Can I...?" explains, “We saw contest two weeks before the deadline. Wrote a script and then, you know, filmed it pretty quickly.”
"Can I ...?" plays off the idea of a guy awkwardly trying to cop a feel from his date in a movie theater, using humor to drive home the notion that potential romantic partners shouldn't be the only ones checking out a woman's breasts.
As for the high production value? The students have the university to thank, at least in part.
Chennisi tells CultureMap, “We used a lighting kit and a sound kit from the film department.” (Chennisi and Pellerin are both film majors.)
The team didn’t plan on making a second video until they realized viewers could vote on multiple videos per day. They figured they’d have a better shot at winning with two submissions, so Pellerin came up for the “Save the World" video.
"Save the World" features a woman saving the world from the evil plans of Dr. Apocalypto by feeling her boobies and includes a cameo by an old-school typewriter (you have to watch to completely understand).
“We didn’t expect (the second video shoot) to go all night long," Chennisi says. "We kind of recruited some people, well, I made my roommate be the girl in it because we really needed a girl. I was like, ‘Please, please, please!’ The other people who are in it are all in the Rice improv group. A lot of the stuff in the video (wasn't) actually in the script.”
Filming didn’t go as smoothly for the second video as it did with the first.
“We asked if (the actors) could come and start at 11 but by the time we got the lights put up it was almost one in the morning," Chennisi says. "So we ended up having them in there all night long.”
However, the hard work paid off. The students’ video “Can I...?" is ranked second out of the 80 some submissions. Voting concludes on Wednesday. If they win the $10,000 first prize, Chennisi says they will throw a celebration for all those involved in the filming as well as invest in video equipment for future projects.
The entry with the most votes wins, so go to YouBoob and check out the Rice team's submissions and vote for your favorite.
Feel Your Boobies is a nonprofit — really — that uses unconventional methods to remind women to give themselves breast exams. The "Feel your boobies!" slogan is slated to appear in spots such as "boobies buses" and airplane banners. The founder of Feel Your Bobbies, breast cancer survivor Leigh Hurst, feels that many young women tune out breast cancer messages because the messages are overly clinical.
In company literature, Hurst argues that while a girl might shrug off a medical pamphlet in the doctor’s office, she’s unlikely to ignore a bumper sticker telling her to fondle herself.
Watch Chennisi's "Can I ...?":