Make Film Work — I make videos. Sometimes I write about it.

Last week a small group of us headed out to Kennedy Space Center. Meagan and I wanted to see it one last time before we left for Salem at the end of the month, and Brian just hadn’t been in a while.

We were lucky enough to arrive on the same day as the launch of a new telescope called GLAST, which is going to be studying gamma rays. Pretty cool. We took some pictures which can be found on Flickr but I thought I’d post a couple here too.

You might even be interested in grabbing that picture of the engine as an iPhone or iPod touch background.

I’m a huge fan of the Consumerist, a website advocating consumer rights and sharing the terrifying ordeals that some companies put their customers through. It’s got a certain car-wreck shock value to it, I suppose.

It’s the kind of site where you hope you’re never the one writing in with your own tale of woe. Unfortunately, a recent shipping experience I had prompted me to write in with one such story.

You can head over to my post at the Consumerist’s website for all the bloody details, but the short of it is this:

I ordered a new Sennheiser G2 100 Wireless Mic set from B&H for an important last-minute shoot. I choose overnight shipping via UPS. Instead of the package arriving at my door as I had hoped (and expected), I was told I would have to drive out to a construction site where I could meet up with the driver as he helped another, already overloaded, UPS driver with some of his delivers. Ultimately my driver never showed up and I had to drive 30 minutes to the UPS distribution center later that night.

It wasn’t a good time. I was pretty miffed about the whole thing and asked for a refund on the $40+ I spent on shipping. I was told that somebody would be in touch. About a week went by and I hadn’t heard anything from UPS. I did get an email from somebody at B&H who expressed concern over my story, and said that they’d get in touch with their UPS people to straighten things out.

A few days went by and I got a phone call from “B&H’s UPS guy” who offered a really sincere apology as well as a $50 B&H gift card. Not too bad. He also assured me that nothing like this would ever happen again; not to me or anybody else.

I really appreciated the apology, and especially the personal phone call. Somebody (actually, his name was Lou) went out of their way that day to make sure I was being taken care of. You can’t over-appreciate something like that.

In the end, I don’t imagine this is something that happens very often. Nevertheless, it probably shouldn’t have happened in the first place. That being said, I’m really happy with how B&H (and ultimately) UPS handled everything. And I especially like that I should soon be getting a $50 gift card to B&H. A card that I intend to use on my first visit to the B&H store in New York later this summer. Can’t wait. No shipping required.

You probably already know this, but I also work on a podcast called SOLMI. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a (mostly) weekly comedy podcast made up of scripted episodes, a-la sketch comedy. Although I don’t really think we’ve every really called ourselves sketch comedy people.

We don’t know what we are.

We also haven’t had a new show out in a while, but that’s another story altogether. Anyway, I went ahead and took one of our recent episodes over to the Enzian, a film house that screens local filmmaker’s work at monthly film slams. From what I understand the barrier to entry into these slams is pretty low. That being said, we were probably lucky to sneak into the running with our (probably highly offensive) episode, Superhero.

Superhero from Jason Hawkins on Vimeo.

Superhero was actually originally shot as part of Apple’s Insomnia Film Festival, a 24-hour film competition open to students. It’s also a response to NBC’s Heroes, which includes a character (Isaac) that requires the use of heroin to activate his super powers. An interesting premise to be sure, but we wondered what it might be like if other people had similar… limitations. And what those limitations might be. And what that might mean for those close to that person.

So there it is. Enjoy the show, and if you’re in the Orlando area this Sunday at 1pm, we’d appreciate the support.

I shot and edited this video for Grandma Party here in Orlando.

From shooting until completion it took about a week.

Twice a year the residents of Orlando, FL convene in the parking lot of a coffee shop to buy, sell, and trade their homemade wares. Local bands perform while visitors browse colorful tents, or relax in the giant balloon pool. Basically it’s amazing. No video can do it justice. You should just go.

After almost a month of editing and motion-graphic-ing, it’s finally done. This is the official video for Orlando’s first BarCamp event.

I’m really excited about this because I felt like I really had a chance to make a difference here in the Orlando community. I wanted people to feel excited about their town, specifically about BarCamp; even one that already happened.

Before I started working on this there were two goals I had in mind. The first was to make something people would want to share with their friends. The second was to shame all other BarCamp videos.

Nothing against the other BarCamps (or their videos, even). I just wanted everybody to know that Orlando is not just going to sit idle while the world does its collective thing. We’re in the conversations now, and there’s some pretty great stuff going on here. It’s time everybody else knew that.

Right now I feel like Orlando is saying, “What’s up, World? We should hang out sometime.” So you better damn-well make sure you’ve got time in your schedule for us. Because we’ll keep calling. And not just to confirm your hotel reservations.