The Magic of Contains: Eggs

There is no one answer for what Contains: Eggs exactly is: a multimedia team, an innovative music video and concert hub or simply a passionate group of friends. 

“[Contains: Eggs is] a group of people that believes in the quality of innovating what music videos can and should look like, and whenever we have an opportunity that gives us the potential to do that, we pursue it,” said William Higbie, a rising senior majoring in cinema and media studies and the group’s producer.  

Contains: Eggs was originally founded in 2019 by rising seniors Shantanu Jhaveri and Joel Yoon, who said the group’s name was inspired by their friend and musician Sumit shaving his head bald, which “looked like an egg” and inclined them to “make something.” 

At the time of the group’s creation, Jhaveri and Yoon were freshmen and excited to start projects but found it hard for people to take them seriously as first-year students. This passion, combined with their desire to collaborate on projects with other students, sparked what would become a space where anyone with an idea for a project had the ability to come and work on things together. 

“[Yoon] came from a very traditional storytelling background, and I came from a traditional engineering background,” said Jhaveri, who is majoring in arts, technology and the business of innovation and computer science. “If you see any of our videos, we try to do some technically captivating things. If we do anything technical, we want to try to capture some element of storytelling, or some level of art behind it, so that’s how we kind of came up with this cool collaboration between us.”

With Yoon, who is majoring in arts, technology and the business of innovation, and Jhaveri, Sumit and Higbie make up the core of Contains: Eggs.  

One of the major projects pursued by the team was TinyDorm, an event where musicians perform in an intimate college dorm room. All of the team members agree that TinyDorm has come a long way since its first rendition in 2020. 

“That first one was so chaotic because we had never done it before. We were all running around,” Yoon said. “We did it in McCarthy [Residential College], and there was still a guest policy at McCarthy. You could only bring two people up. We were trying to put like around 90 people into that dorm that night. It was like three groups of 30, rotating out. It was very janky.” Since then, TinyDorm events are now filmed, and have evolved to include 3D printed tickets and a partnership with student-run traveling coffee shop Cup of Troy. 

In addition to their work on music videos and putting on tiny concerts, Contains: Eggs also works on “bold tech,” such as projection mapping, a projection technique used to turn objects, often irregularly shaped, into display surfaces for video projection. 

“We like introducing fun little concepts that people don’t really see before,” Sumit said. “For instance, projection mapping in a dorm room is something no one had ever seen. Then we have these [wooden] tickets that we would burn to mark people’s drinks. We had [3D printed] physical tickets for each person. We use the tools we have to make the experience a lot more engaging.”

As Contains: Eggs grows older, there is even more of an emphasis for projects to feel polished, a desire for things to look better than anyone else they are competing with. 

“We want you to pay like $20 for a $100 experience. It should be done to the point where you’re surprised that college students were able to put this together with absolutely no budget or funding but simply because they want to do it,” Jhaveri said. “Anything we do, anything we build, we want it to feel like magic.” 

An integral part of the magic are the musicians who Contains: Eggs work with, whether on their music videos or inviting them to perform.

“Very plainly, it was the creative control that they gave me, this vision they collaborated with me to help see through for the night, with the drinks and the lighting and the camera angles and what the idea was going to be behind it,” said Ethan Sak, a rising junior majoring in music production, of his performance last November. 

Sak performed at TinyDorm after his friend, who ran sound for Contains: Eggs in the past, recommended him for the gig. 

“As the people were shuffling in, you started to get a little bit more aware of just how close everybody was to each other, just how intimate it was. In my opinion, that or the biggest stage you can get are two of the best stages you can play. I finished my first song and I was looking at somebody in the eyes who was just crying, just bawling, and it was just me and my acoustic guitar.” 

Moving into their final year at USC, the students working on Contains: Eggs have no intention of stopping anytime soon. 

“We’re so excited about these ideas that we have taken a vow. None of us are allowed to talk about it outside of our group, just because we want people’s jaws on the floor when they walk into the show,” Yoon said.