SXSW Steer for IFC via Feel Good Anyway

You never know what job will come your way next as a free-agent designer. Case in point: drawing a cow (I really mean steer) diagram for Feel Good Anyway’s IFC promo for SXSW (appears at the 30 second mark).

This short stint of steer-drawing took me back to my childhood because I grew up in Steer Country. Every summer we would spend endless days near Grass Valley, Oregon on our friend’s farm for the annual castration/innoculation/slaughter. We played in the hay barn, took Bubba the lab with us into the hills to sic rattlers, counted how many young calves got their nuts cut off, and hand-ground pounds and pounds of beef for the year ahead.

Enough reminiscing; check out more of Feel Good Anyway’s work for the Independent Film Channel – it’s good entertainment from some very talented dudes.

The Soda Pop Man

Some people’s joy is effervescent, and John Nese is one of those people. He owns a soda shop that carries over 500 varieties, including cucumber. Boy would I like to try that. This man is soda incarnate, spreading the gospel of REAL soda (not Pepsi or Coke and the like)! Amen.

How Globes Are Made

My Dad was a geography, history and politics teacher, so I’ve always been surrounded by maps, atlases, and globes. My sister and I would rise early on school mornings to compete on the local radio quiz show, the Geo Bee. There were only two other families in our small town that also competed regularly in the Geo Bee, so we quickly amassed a stockpile of geography related items: map placemaps, globe-topped pencils, keychains, you name it.

When I started my studio and moved into the Povey Perch, one of the first decorations I bought was a vintage globe on a stand, featuring Czech and Slovakia united as one. So when I saw this video on how globes are made, I had to share it…

Oui, Oui: Halloween 2010

This year for Halloween I dressed up as Avant Garde French Toast. It was a subtle costume, and not exactly a crowd pleaser. There were a few French Toast embracers, but for the most part it was a flop. It wasn’t a pop culture reference, gory or scary, a knight or a princess. It wasn’t an outfit that had been “sexified” with skimpy college-era duds (although one person told me that “Sexy French Toast” would have been a better outfit). It didn’t fit into a category, and that doomed my Toastness to strange stares and obligatory “ah, haaaa, hmm, yeah OK, I get it”. I guess my outfit was more avant garde than I expected.

So, I figured I would make my first foray into creating moving pictures and shoot a short short about it. I even wrote a part for my dog Lucy, who turned out to be the consummate professional on set.