Fat footage
My roommate and I were watching the news this morning while we were internetting and drinking coffee. NECN tends to be our news of choice, as they have weather every five minutes, which is very important to someone who has a bi-weekly 50 mile bike commute.
They frequently have wire stories about dieting and losing weight, as most news channels do. And if you’ve seen any of these before, I’m sure you’ve seen the from-the-neck-down footage of fat people walking around, at a gym, or shoveling piles of fast food in their face (not that there’s anything wrong with occasional fast food).
I always wonder about this footage. Every time I see a news story highlighting how incredibly fat our nation is, I always see new footage of fat people. I can only think of two possibilities of where this comes from:
1. There is a massive repository of fat people footage. It is accessible to news networks, and it contains hours and hours of footage of fat people walking, eating, climbing stairs, in crowds on a New York sidewalk (why is this such a popular shot?), having a triple-bypass or yelling at cyclists for wearing gay spandex.
2. Every time one of these stories is produced, Dave the Video Intern has to go out with a camera and surreptitiously shoot footage of fat people in their natural habitat.
I feel like option 2 is the most terrifying option – imagine that you’re the poor sap who, twice a week when there’s a health report about obesity, has to go out and find fat people to film. You become a hunter of fat people, studying and learning their daily routines so you know the best place to get five seconds of usable, generic footage.
Alternatively, there is a series of hard drives containing hours of fat footage…
probably not the best things to think about at 8:30 in the morning.
Think of the poor bastard who has to get these stock-footage-fat-people to sign a release. Perhaps he just lies his ass off as to how the footage is going to be used. “Yes Ms. Shamu, we’re doing a piece on really, really good looking people…or not-fat-people…or something…but whatever it is, it has absolutely nothing, I say nothing to do with really, really fat people (sigh)”.
Or maybe he just tells them the truth and then pays them off with gift certificates for Angry Whoppers.
Maybe they were doing a related story on this website
http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/
I saw a few examples of other burgers (use the term loosely) that you can try when you are sick of the Baconator.
m