Culture
29 Jun 12

Trash Of The Titans

Excruciating corporate instuction videos are among the many delights that can be sampled at the imminent Trashfest, a celebration of all things too bad to be true.

It all started in the staff canteen at McDonald’s, when the then 16-year-old Nick Prueher found a corporate video inducting janitors into cleaning the Big Mac way.

“I could not believe how insultingly ridiculous it was,” says Prueher. “I kinda stole it and had friends over to watch it. It became this kind of cult thing in our small hometown.”
Since then Prueher and his best friend Joe Pickett – their credits include The Late Show with David Letterman and The Onion – have been collecting strange, bizarre and outrageous video footage. Although home movies sometimes feature, their great love is for corporate and instruction videos. In 2004 they decided to share their collection with the world – and the Found Footage Festival was born.
Now in its eighth year, FFF is making its way to Ireland as part of July’s Dublin Trashfest, a celebration of bad taste and failures in film and television.
“Since it’s the first video we found, we’ll be showing the McDonald’s video in Dublin,” says Prueher. “It’s pretty special.”
Don’t think FFF will just be about laughing at Americans being foolish. The show includes an Irish exercise video from the 1980s proclaiming the workout benefits of an auld jig. Fans send videos to them from all around the world, and it is this, says Pickett, that has allowed them to keep the show on the road successfully. Prueher and Pickett only use VHS footage from the 80s and 90s.
“We try to find videos that you can’t find online and I think there is something to be said for a guided tour – we talk about where we found the clip. And a lot of the time we track down people who were in the video,” says Pickett.
For Prueher, the joy of video is also in the format itself.
“You have this nostalgia for the big, clunky, boxes and having to adjust the tracking. It’s the same as people who collect vinyl – they kinda like the hisses and the pops!”
The 1980 hair and clothes are comedy gold in themselves.
“The 1980s were not very kind to men, at least American men,” laughs Pickett. “We have this one video called Video Dating and it is a series of guys who have a minute and a half each to woo potential mates, and some of the sweaters – they should be illegal!”
In these days of easy digital recording, very few of us haven’t made fools of ourselves on camera, although perhaps not as badly as Prueher, who as a 12 year-old made a video rapping to Will Smith’s ‘Parents Just Don’t Understand’, which featured his younger sister as his co-star.
“I put on everything – Hawaiian shirt, massive sunglasses – and as a kid I was about thirty pounds overweight. My voice hadn’t changed yet so my sister’s voice was deeper than mine. There are lyrics where he is trying to pick up this girl and the girl is putting her hand on his thigh and my sister is playing the girl. At the time it didn’t seem weird – but as soon as I went through puberty I was like ‘Oh this is so wrong!’”
It is unlikely we’ll get to see it. “We can dish it out but we can’t take it!” Prueher laughs.
Making fools of ourselves in front of a camera seems to be pretty universal, says Pickett. “The technology changes,” he concludes, “but bad ideas are here to stay.”