MTV’s stars of The Buried Life visited Carleton Sept. 5 to speak to first-year students at Fall Orientation Week for the second consecutive year in the Fieldhouse.
The group is made up of Ben Nemtin, Dave Lingwood, and brothers Jonnie and Duncan Penn, all hailing from Victoria, B.C.
The stars invited students to line up and share with their peers some of the items on their bucket list. Answers varied from saving a life to fighting a bear, riding a great white shark to putting people on Mars.
Since their last visit to Carleton’s orientation week in Sept. 2011, they completed another goal on their bucket list: penning a best-selling book.
This past March, the group released the book, entitled What Do You Want to Do Before You Die?
It introduces a compilation of 250 aspirations, hopes, dreams, stories and accomplished goals both from the group, as well as people they’ve met who’ve inspired them along the way.
The book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list, helping the guys cross yet another item off their list.
“We’d always known we wanted to make this book and so we’ve been collecting our favourite answers from the beginning,” Duncan said.
“Once we started the book process we started with around 10,000 stories and then from there we kind of just narrowed it down to our top 250.”
The adventure began in the summer of 2006, when the group devised a premise of an original documentary: the Buried Life: What do you want to do before you die? The idea hit them while sitting in a garage in their hometown.
“We were all going through different stuff in our lives, and I think the main reason was discontent with what we were doing,” Dave said.
“Our original motive [for the documentary] was to have something to do in our lives that we were happy with.”
The four decided to compile a list of 100 things they wanted to complete before they bought a gigantic purple bus that they call “Penelope”, and set off across North America to complete their goals.
“Our goal is to provide people with the same feeling we had in 2006, [when we wrote the list] sitting in our garage,” Duncan said.
“We felt really inspired at that moment in our lives and we wanted to offer people that same feeling.”
Along the way, they met some interesting and inspiring people, and vowed that for every item they crossed off their bucket list, they would help a stranger do the same.
In 2007, MTV offered the Buried Life a television show, but the guys ultimately turned it down for fear of losing creative control. However, in 2009, they signed with MTV with the condition that the group film and edit all their material themselves. The show successfully ran for two seasons.
“Before we hooked up with MTV we were dealing independently for 3 years. By the time we met up with MTV, we were ready for it,” Nemtin explained.
“When it came to game time we were ready because we’d already fought for so long.”
Organizers at the Student Experience Office, who worked in conjunction with CUSA and RRRA, were also pleased with the Buried Life’s second consecutive performance for Fall Orientation Week.
“We had really great success rates with their performance last year,” orientation co-ordinator Grace Valentine said.
“The kids loved them, it seems to have gone well so we’re really happy.”
The overall response from students and faculty was positive.
“I think they did a really good job at capturing what orientation is all about; just getting out there and doing what you want to do,” first-year student Hannah Finn said.
The positive feeling seemed to be mutual among the guys from the Buried Life.
“We love Carleton. Ottawa reminds us of our hometown, Victoria,” Duncan said.
