The Era of Truckerspeed

It’s been awhile since I posted to this blog, it appears that it was before I took off for SXSW. Well a lot has happened since then. I filmed a bunch of stuff on that trip naturally, enjoyed the offerings of Austin Texas and met some seriously cool folks. It was a whirlwind trip that ended with me getting back to start a whirlwind 12-episode weekly public access TV show here in Portland called “Truckerspeed, in 3D.” The show consisted of me sitting around with my guests, talking about music videos (both from our Penny Jam series and live video shot each week.)

Before I left I set up a greenscreen studio in my basement where we filmed all of the interviews and whatnot. This picture is before I got crazy amounts of lighting in there, currently there are 9 lights similar to the one shown. When the lights are on and the white sheets are hung on the sides it really does feel like a studio.

During the series I was pretty much sleep deprived at every moment so I’m thankful for my health that it’s over. I’d consider doing something like that again if I could get a crew consistently together – although I do have to acknowledge Jon Manning and Sean Whiteman for helping out a heck of a lot with the filming aspect.

I’ve slowly been getting the episodes online. Since they run about 30 minutes each I had to host them with Daily Motion, which is kindof like YouTube, but French. Here is Episode 7, my guest is an old buddy Jon Hurst, who I used to work with.

Episode 7 of Truckerspeed in 3D

The video is a little janky, but as you might know if you’ve ever tried it, getting longform video onto a free service is kindof a tradeoff. Daily Motion’s 1GB limit (unlimited length) is generous, but there are limits to the magic.

Along with this show “Truckerspeed, in 3D” I’m in ongoing development of the site (which I’ve owned for a while) http://truckerspeed.com. It’s a work in progress but the idea is that it would become a content-rich site featuring the video work that my circle of friends has been producing, as well as a general forum to spout off about music, film and culture, which is intentionally open ended. At some point in the near future we’ll be offering audio/video/photo services in the Portland area through “Truckerspeed Productions”, which will be incorporated into the site.

The goal in that is to eventually have a way to work on AV projects that are outside of the scope of the Penny Jam, which is an inherently free project. Rather than entangling The PJ in commerce we’re billing Truckerspeed as the production company, with the PJ as an ongoing Truckerspeed project. Hopefully it will also allow us to expand the style of projects we’re involved with.

Case in point: the video work I did for Dave down at SXSW is credited through Truckerspeed rather than the Penny Jam. I put out a special episode, number 8, focusing entirely on stuff shot at SXSW.

Episode 8 of Truckerspeed in 3D

Anyway, the future is promising, we have a couple of secret, awesome projects on the horizon. If you have any video work and you need a crew in Portland, feel free to touch bases with me. And be sure to check out Truckerspeed.com – I’m building a team of contributors and so far we’re up to a couple posts per week.