60bpm :: Newsletter
The past three months have been the busiest months of my life. An 8-5 job + significant freelance work + an intensive on-going video project (see The Amerikans below) + volunteer work = not a lot of time for fun, creative stuff of my own... but, don't take this as a complaint. I've met more great people and seen more interesting places than I have in a long, long time. So, I should really be thanking all of you who have dragged me out of my house for a change! ~Robbie
Kitchen 808:
Butternut Squash Soup
While this video hasn't become an internet phenomenon or anything, it has easily provided me with more compliments and praise than just about anything I've ever done before. Kitchen 808 started-out as Kitchen 1448, a straight series of cooking tutorials featuring recipes I had never made before. Then, I started rapping over the assembled footage as a goof and decided the idea of a series was probably out of the question, which didn't bother me too much because the first episode alone had taken so much time and effort to produce. I mean... composing a two-minute long song that accurately describes how to execute a recipe isn't a snap to pull-off.
However, the response has really been so great that I feel compelled to try creating a few more. If you have any recipes in mind for me to make, let me know and I'll see what I can do. Recipes that involve scooping and blending would be appreciated!
Click here if you haven't seen this video or want to watch it again.
This is another example of why I've been so busy lately: When an idea comes to mind, I can't say no! At some point last month, I got it in my head that I finally had to get around to making my Flash-based web sites compatible with mobile phones (i.e. enable Apple-based mobile devices to view these sites).
DaydreamTV was the first of my sites that I've converted. Once my work load lightens-up, I intend to redesign the site completely and re-convert the videos to use their native aspect ratios (i.e. no more letter-boxing my HD compositions) which should improve the overall quality of the pieces.
Another one of the on-going projects that I've been participating in over the past four months is The Amerikans. In the words of the filmmaker himself, Mika Johnson:
"The Amerikans is a web series featuring 3 - 5 minute portraits of people involved in the Ohio-based production of "AMERIKA: a notebook in three parts," an in-development feature film that endeavors to explore the hopes and excesses of the 'American Dream,' all experienced through the perspective of a foreigner."
While I have primarily been the web developer for this project, I've also spent a bit of time helping with the production of some of the episodes, including bringing some of the production to my home in Akron, Ohio. Check-out The Amerikans web site to see what we've created so far. Hopefully, there's much more to come.
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