Last night I attended an office party at CTEP HQ. The party was a joint effort by the people who share the sixth floor of that office building - an interesting assortment of artists, writers, and independent media producers. I brought Jeremy, Josh, and Erin along for the ride. There was a solid CTEP presence at the party, including Roxanne, Linda, Lindsey, Ken, Catherine, Jeff and his awesome girlfriend Olivia, and Rich with his lovely wife Barb. I stuck around to watch All the Pretty Horses play a set. The picture on the right was taken with my cameraphone (hence the graininess) during the opening song. I've also posted a picture of my awesome new shoes that I got yesterday in order to a) show off how awesome my new shoes are and b) pay homage to Linda's fantastic blog post about getting a pair of clogs.

Hey everyone,

So today we had our super awesome committee meeting/bbq. And it was super awesome. Much was accomplished, as can be seen by these pictures that I'm posting. If productivity is what your committee is after, then I suggest a bbq.

It has been a fun week at SPNN. Spring break is over and the Set It Up crew has returned. I've posted the mock ups I've made for the Set It Up shirt, which has gone through a number of revisions. What do you guys think? Bekka designed the logo (originally pencil on notebook paper).

I've also asked her to design the new mousepads for the media lab. I'm going to be posting the one-hour-video-project videos that the Youth Advisory Committee made pretty soon, so watch out for those.

I applied for a scholarship on Tuesday for the Netsquared conference in California this May, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for that one. In other conference news, I'm hoping to go to the Alliance for Community Media Conference this July in Boston, possibly even bringing a couple of youth with me. I'll keep you posted on how things shape up.

All right boys and girls, it's the moment you've all been waiting for. I've finally posted this season's third episode of Set It Up for your viewing pleasure. As you probably know, the current episode deals with teen health. The screenshot on your right is a talking cheeseburger. Click it to view the episode. Once again, you'll need the latest version of Quicktime. Enjoy!

Over spring break, David was kind enough to host a couple of workshops on the animation and special effects program Adobe After Effects. It took me over an hour to come up with this short video.

For all of my rabid fans anxious for their Kevin fix, you can catch me on SPNN's channel 15 next Monday at 6:30pm. I hosted the latest episode of the All Things Access show. Don't miss it.

This week is spring break for Saint Paul public schools, and I've been helping out on a class SPNN is hosting called Real Reality TV. It's a documentary video production class run by Niknaz. The class is run through the Connections program, meaning that the youth involved get high school credit for attending. The class teaches them basic camera and iMovie skills, and it culminates in the creation of an actual documentary. Some of you may have seen the Homophobia video, which screened at the Girls in the Director's Chair Film Festival and was recently accepted into the Flaming Film Festival. That video was made as part of last year's Real Reality TV class.

In other exciting news, I'm getting a new work computer! I'm pretty sure I have by far the slowest computer at SPNN, and trying to do things like "multitasking" has been difficult on a 500MHz Pentium III. I put flame decals on the monitor, which seemed to give me a slight boost, but it was probably more placebo effect than anything else. Let me tell you, I'm pretty excited for this new computer.

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.