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.

Wifi is coming...

The CTEP Wifi Video Project is now available for your viewing pleasure! Click here to watch the clip.

We spent a lot of time and energy putting together about 2 minutes of video. Let us know what you think.

Chicago was a blast. The Wrens were spectacular, as was The Casket Lottery. Jeremy's family was an absolute pleasure.

We drove to St. Cloud last Friday to see Kevin Smith. He spoke for four and a half hours before they had to close the place down. It was awesome.

The Alliance for Community Media Conference took place this past Friday and Saturday. There were a number of fantastic presentations, including one on youth media in which two Set It Up members, Donald and Xavier, participated. They did a really fantastic job representing SPNN and discussing their work on the show.

The second episode of Set It Up for the season is now available for download! Click here to watch it. Alternatively, you can right click on the link and choose "Save Link As" to download the file to your hard drive. As with the last file, Quicktime is required to view the clip. Please post comments!

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Originally uploaded by kevinkalla.

We recently went out and shot the new ending to the wifi video. It was very, very cold out during our shoot. That's why Roxanne looks angry. I'm in post-production right now, and I've run into a few snags with some clips having gone missing. Fortunately, we still have all of the raw footage on tape, so I can always re-capture that if all else fails. Tomorrow morning I'm getting up extra-early to drive to the windy city with my roommate Jeremy. And then we'll see The Wrens. And it will be awesome.

I'm definitely overdue for a post, but it has been a bit hectic lately.
Here's a quick recap of what's been going on. We had the studio shoot for our second episode of the season yesterday. It went fairly well, although it took longer than we anticipated. Andrea's back was hurting, so it was up to me to set up the studio.
Fortunately, Donald came in early to help out and saved the day. As you'll notice in the picture I've posted, we projected the intro to Set It Up as the backdrop of the set. It was an experiment (and hopefully it doesn't come across as too distracting).

The media committee has been meeting about future projects - we're going to reshoot the end of the WiFi video tomorrow. Upon completion of that project, we have a couple of other ideas in the works. We're planning on creating another presentation involving a film screening and a more in depth discussion of the power of media to create change. We've also been talking with other CTEP members about possible video projects, including a short documentary piece on the WiFi initiative.

At SPNN, I've written an article for the latest issue of the SPNN newsletter about our four youth films that were accepted into the Walker Art Center's 2006 Girls in the Director's Chair program. For those who are interested in checking the event out, it takes place at the Walker on Saturday, March 4th starting at 10:00 am. There are screenings throughout the day, lasting until 5:00 pm. The films from SPNN will be showing at 2:00 pm and 3:30 pm. I'll be bringing youth to the festival, and I highly encourage everyone to attend.

In other news, I've started helping out on Mental Engineering once again, which has been a lot of fun. Al Franken is going to be on the show April 1st, so I'm definitely not going to miss that taping. That's all for now.

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Originally uploaded by kevinkalla.

As I'm still not feeling well, I left work early today to do some work at home. Tomorrow's my birthday, so I'm hoping to feel slightly less out of sorts come tomorrow morning. As for a progress report, things are going fairly smoothly at SPNN. We're still working on our fashion and clothing episode of Set It Up, and I've been very busy doing all sorts of small tasks (computer maintenance and the like). Also, I was involved in two presentations last week for CTEP. I use the word involved loosely. The first was a presentation that Roxanne did on teaching media literacy. Riley and I talked about the tools and techniques that companies employ in the creation of advertisements, but all of the credit for the presentation goes to Roxanne. Then on Friday, our committee did a presentation on media representations and the power of media to create change. This presentation was Dave's baby, but we helped position his discussion of representations of American Indians and the film In Whose Honor within a greater context of the power of the media. For having little time to prepare, I think our presentation went relatively smoothly. And while the film was exceptionally difficult to obtain, I think people responded favorably to it. All right, that's all for now. I've included a photo taken last month at the studio taping of our first episode. Enjoy!

Hey everyone! A real post is coming soon, but here's something to tide you over until then. I've been very excited that our current episode of Set It Up is going to include an animated piece. In the spirit of this, please check out the video for Okkervil River's "For Real." Click here to view the video!

The season premiere of Set It Up is now streaming on the web! This episode was a learning experience, and the technical difficulties are apparent. However, there are flashes of brilliance. In particular, look out for the show opening (even the music was done in-house) and for a spoken word piece entitled "Racism: Then and Now." Click here to watch the first episode! (If you have any problems playing the video, try installing the newest version of Quicktime).