So the Open House was a huge success. We had a good turnout, good food, and everyone I talked to said that they had a great time. To demonstrate just how good of a time everyone had, here's a video of the Open House.

Roxanne of CTEP fame, who is a mentor for Set It Up and comes in every Tuesday, was in attendance. Thanks to Jeremy, Josh, Erin, and Emily for coming out and seeing what I do and the people I work with.

I posted some pictures for everyone's enjoyment. The photo cake was both tacky and delicious. The headshot of me is from the "pin the goatee on Kevin" game that was set up. In the words of Nicola, "if you ever needed a reason to not shave your goatee off..."

Bekka and Ivan put on a fantastic tour that included editing and studio demos. Awards were handed out honoring everyone's individual contributions to the show. Xavier even received a lifetime achievement award. All in all, it was a pretty awesome night.

This morning I hosted the All Things Access show, which is a show put on by the SPNN Access staff. When I say I hosted the show I mean that I read a script off of a teleprompter. On the bright side, I pretty much did it in one take. Not too shabby for not having read the whole script before doing it. I'll be famous one day, you'll see.

As promised, I've posted a couple of pictures from our third studio shoot. As you can see, our set was a bit more "newsy" this time. Our hosts are sitting at a large desk with the Set It Up logo displayed on an LCD screen. We got a bit of a late start that day, having to deal with a number of technical difficulties, but we got through the entire script in less than an hour. Our hosts performed admirably. This was our first shoot without a dress rehearsal (which was cancelled due to excessive snowfall), and everyone worked well together to pull it off.


Last Friday was the first meeting of the Youth Advisory Committee. The YAC is a group of talented youth who have been involved in a number of different SPNN programs. YAC provides an open forum for them to share their opinions and have a voice in the future of SPNN and the Youth Education Department. For our first meeting, I decided that we should spend the first hour getting to know each other, talking about general issues, and eating delicious pizza. The second hour was spent doing a one hour video project. The teens split into two groups and were given 15 minutes of pre-production, 25 minutes of production, and 20 minutes of post in order to complete a short video. The topic was classes or events that you would like SPNN to have in the future. The group that I worked with did a news report about a new class being offered at SPNN where the end product is a feature length movie. The other group did an advertisement-style piece for a music-video class. I'll try to post those videos online in the next few weeks.

FYI - The Set It Up website has been updated (by me). I'm now doing all of the design in Frontpage, so if you have any suggestions for things that could be changed, please post a comment. I'd love feedback.

Well, that's all for now. I have to start setting up for the Open House. It's going to be awesome!

Hey everyone, check out this sweet invitation Bekka created yesterday! And come to our Open House if you live in Saint Paul, it's going to be awesome! Stay tuned, I'll be posting pictures from our last studio shoot in the next few days.