Gummi Boogie Bear Chortles

Greetings candy lovers. The most recent shoot we did for "GASA" involved my wife, Jackie Milad, white paint, a big cube and 10lbs of gummi bears.

As usual, we converted a crevice in the "5th Dimension" (H+H Building, Bmore) into a soundstage for the movie. The idea behind the scene, which occurs in the "Part 1 Vignettes" of GASA, is that Tom (1st person singular narrarator of this very paragraph) confronts a very bleached out "bear nymph" somewhere inside the infinite computer and is seduced into voluntarily eating a LOT of gummi bears, which inevitably cause him severe and psychedelic gastric overload. For this shoot I "took one for the team" and drank what seems like a pint of corn syrup and ate a shit ton of those iconic candies.

Jackie and Sarada Conaway arrived on day two of the construction phase to helped to design an enormous nearly invisible mandala in the corner of the set. The mandala would eventually be a large animated mosiac consisting of several hundred Gummi Bears.

The animation, to be realized via "stop motion", took approximately two hours. The bears are glued to the set with hot glue, incidentally. I felt maxed out on italian cookies from Trinacria Foods that night, so i only ate about 8 gummi bears during tedius ritual, though Dan sacrificed 28 bears to the gummi diety.

The completed manadala was ultimately remarkably durable and if i may, rather christmassy.

Some nights later Jackie arrived and with Sarada's assistance and make-up mastery turned Jackie into this beguiling creature.....


Sigrid Lauren, Bethany Dinsick, and Dan's hermano Patrick Breen came over to help "bleach" Tom. Because we wanted the bleaching to also animate via stop-motion effect, we need the extra hands to move quickly....

Note in the above photo how Pat had to work "crotch detail".

Above, Sigrid makes me even more white. We instructed our assistants to feel free to eat as many gummi bears as they wished. There were many.

This shoot proved to be a "yoga of the body" for me, as i experienced many sensual things i have never felt before. These include having cold white watery make-up brushed into my groin, having gummi bears break down and melt while stuffed into my nostrils and drinking and pretending to puke bright florescent colored "puke" made of nearly pure corn syrup. The sickening sweet taste lingered in my mouth all night long. I got up twice in the night and pounded water to to try to rid the cloying, hideous tooth-rotting taste from my head.

But kvetching aside, some of the stills and imagery from this shoot are among my favorite of the entire film. Unfortunately we have no photos of the puke. The end.