INTRODUCTION

Hi, my name is Shay Maney and I’m the writer and director of the student short film BEAN-IT. This film is being produced for UH Mānoa’s Advanced Production course in the School of Cinematic Arts. I’m an aspiring director with a lifelong passion for storytelling. I hope you consider donating to our project!

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

This is a GoFundMe intended to help raise funds for the budget of the upcoming short film BEAN-IT.

SYNOPSIS

After being unceremoniously dumped by their long term partner Jordan, Riley seeks companionship from Jordan’s parting gift: a strange, talking doll called a Bean-it. Bean-it declares itself as Riley’s “new best friend” - and its surprising intelligence and congeniality makes it easy for Riley to reciprocate. But are Bean-it’s motives truly altruistic? Or is there a more nefarious scheme lurking behind its honey-glazed words? The stakes may be higher than anyone realizes…

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

I wrote this film as a meditation on - and satire of - technocapitalism, hyperconsumerism, advertising, and surveillance. It’s hard to deny the philosophical and ethical stagnation taking hold of the tech sector. So much focus on narrowing down innovation to an obtuse idea of “everything” machines. Everything must be customizable. Everything must be personalized. Everything must do everything for you.

And to do that effectively - to truly become everything - everything must know you.

It must know what you buy, what you eat, where you sleep, who you know, what your interests are. You must be squeezed for every drop of information. Your entire life, your memories, your personality, every action you will ever do must be plucked from you - reduced to binary in an ominously humming database sucking away water from nearby towns and cities.

I want BEAN-IT to get people thinking about all of this. I want them to feel horrified at how insidious and disingenuous it is. With one face, corporations create sycophantic AI assistants and other products aimed at becoming the solution to every problem. With the other face, they farm you. Farm your data. All to in pursuit of profiting from your every waking moment.

FUNDS WE RECEIVE WILL BE ALLOCATED TO: