An assignment for my Fiction Filmmaking class, the basic jist was to have Person A enter a room to find Person B sitting in one of two chairs. Person A must then proceed to do something (anything) that causes Person B to get up and leave. Person A then takes Person B's chair, achieving her goal.

My initial ideas for this was to do something really extreme. Like, Person A would gut himself, or start humping Person B, or something equally crazy. For some reason, however, the idea for using chips persisted in the back of my head. I have no idea where it came from, but I just loved the idea of having Person A crunching loudly on chips while Person B gets more and more annoyed. I began to run with the idea, and I decided I wanted to do a short parody of Psycho in the middle. See, in Psycho, you never see Janet Leigh get stabbed during the infamous shower scene. In my film, you never see Karen eat a chip. Film school humor. Ha.

My two leads, Po-Yuan Chen and Karen Weber, have been begging me to put them in a film since they found out I'm a wannabe director, and I hope I didn't ruin their filmic aspirations too much with this. I ended up waiting til the very last minute to finish the filming on this, and it turned out to be a night before some pretty important midterms for each of them. In any event, they both pulled off some great performances, and Karen went above and beyond the call of duty when she ate all those chips. I never want to see a bag of Lays again!

When I was editing the assignment together, I realized that we weren't allowed to use any sound. At first, I was terrified, because the CRUNCH seemed such an integral part of the film in my mind. Then I realized that with some tight editing, the crunch could be conveyed through images. I worked heavily towards this goal, and I think the end result is pretty successful. Eisenstein would be proud.

---Nick