I’m Huge on Public Access: The Era of Truckerspeed
I recently took up producing a 10-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.) Here is a recent episode in which I was joined by my friend Jon.
Episode 7 of Truckerspeed in 3D
Prior to production I set up a greenscreen studio in my basement where I’m now filming 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.
Producing the series (in addition to working full time) has resulted an an acute lack of sleep – In that way I’ll be thankful when it’s over. I’d consider doing something like this again – but only with the help of a consistent crew – although I do have to acknowledge Jon Manning and Sean Whiteman have been helping out a heck of a lot with the filming aspect.
The show is titled “Truckerspeed, in 3D,” which is somewhat related to a website that I write for and design called http://truckerspeed.com that focuses on music, film and culture. It’s a work in progress it has been a fantastic creative sandbox for both myself and creative collaborator Sean Whiteman. Anyway, the future is promising, we have a couple of secret, awesome segments coming up on the show. If you’re in Portland Oregon you can watch the show on Monday and Wednesday at 9pm on (Comcast cable) Channel 21 and on Saturdays at 10pm on Channel 11.
Headset Hotties Featured in Practical Web Design Magazine
One of my websites, http://headsethotties.com, which skewers the overuse of stock photography in today’s design environment, was featured (rather prominently) in an article called “Give Niche a Chance,” in the publication Practical Web Design. I’m not sure exactly what this means, but score one for me!
Old Mini-Project Plus a Video Mishap
I was just poking around on my computer came accross this:
It’s not exactly a masterpeice, just something I did over the course of a couple hours with a Wacom tablet sitting in front of Flash, rotoscoping some low res video. What is awesome though is that I am one of the 2 people in said video. My friend Rob Yee and myself were practicing the fight scene as part of an assignment for an Effects and Compositing class at the University of Oregon and just happen to record this on his digital camera.
In the course of uploading it Vimeo gave me this:
This video is the result of some wacky codec malaise. I’m curious to see if I can reproduce the effect with a longer clip.
Instant Rimshot Lands in the Pages of GQ Magazine
With about 10,000 visitors a day it’s safe to say that my website http://instantrimshot.com has gone viral. But when someone in the real world (aka outside of the internet) takes notice, it’s worth mentioning. Which brings me to this: Instant Rimshot in GQ magazine:
To clarify, the reference to Instant Rimshot was part of a list of “50 reasons to have (Actual) (Legitimate) (Genuine) Hope”
It clocked in one place ahead of the “miracle of life” and one place behind kiva.org.
I guess it must have been a slow month and someone decided a list article was a good idea. Anyway, pretty awesome!
Headset Hotties is now it’s Own Standalone Site
Many of you know about my ongoing series “Headset Hotties” which I started months back on this very blog. After getting good responses from many random people I decided to turn it into it’s own site. Plus, I was drunk off of Adsense revenue from Instant Rimshot and was strategizing on how to expand my empire.
So with a little development time, along came headsethotties.com!
One fun little sidenote is that the background image I used on the header is actually a pic taken by Joe Mansfield during the most recently released episode of the Penny Jam (see previous post.) Click here to see what I’m talking about.
Traffic has been good (about 12,000 unique visitors in 7 days) and it’s been mentioned in some hilarious situations online.
My favorite comment thus far is from Jeffrey Zeldman in his Wednesday Link roundup. Zeldman says:
Burned. Oh well it’s still flattering.
After a couple of weeks I’ll probably write up a synopsis of the greatest hits of such occurrences. In the meantime, if you come across any Headset Hotties in the wild, send them my way!
World’s Greatest Ghosts in Milwaukie
Episode 18 of the Penny Jam features World’s Greatest Ghosts performing “Magick Words” at Matrix Networks down in Milwaukie (which is Algonquin for “the good land”). Normally we don’t venture that far south but our good friends Kyle and Jennifer (after seeing many episodes of the podcast) offered up the place – which they both work at. Going into it we didn’t know much about the location aside from a few pics on the website – there turned out to be an overabundance of cool locations, including a big ol’ warehouse space.
We ended up setting up the band in front of the server room, which is unusually placed in the communal area of the business. Rather than hide it they’ve made it a centerpeice. We’d forgot the clamp lights back at Balloontown USA (though it had yet to be christened such) but over the course of complaining about it Kyle offered us two oversized umbrella lights that were on hand in the building. You can see them reflected in the glass near the end of the video and in the photo below.
One weird milestone for this episode is that it is the first episode of The Penny Jam where I wasn’t a cameraman. Sean, the other videographer who’s been around since the beginning and Jon Manning (who joined us on episode 14 and has since filmed a few) took care of that. Meanwhile I was feeling useless and hungover so I went to play pinball in the back room.
Be sure to check out the pics by Joe Mansfield in what is perhaps the best Penny Jam photo sesh to date on flickr.