YouTube filmmaker spends entire $25K film ad budget on Yolanda relief

How would you live your dreams?

YouTube filmmaker Casey Neistat was contacted by 20th Century Fox with a commission: make a big-budget ad for their upcoming movie, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” starring Ben Stiller.

The ad would have the concept “Live Your Dreams.”

Neistat replied to them in this manner: “Here's my concept: give me the budget, I'll go to the Philippines and spend every penny helping people in need.”

This short movie documents how Neistat and his colleagues spent all of the $25,000 budget they were given buying basic necessities in Cebu, renting two passenger buses to Tacloban, repackaging the goods and distributing them to people in need.

Neistat dedicated his video “for the typhoon victims, the most resilient people I've ever encountered.”



The film “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” loosely based on the short story by James Thurber, is about a daydreaming Life magazine employee who sets off on a journey across the world to find a picture needed for the magazine's closing issue, thus living out his dreams. — Vida Cruz/BM, GMA News