May 24th on Park Ave at 3, around Lake Eola at 5
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Archive for the 'Events' Category
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Why is May such a great month for holding events? Sure, for our Northern friends, it means the end of bad weather, the opening of roller coaster parks, and a change in the scenery as the trees and flowers start to show their summer colors, but here in Florida, it’s more like the start of the summer’s hot, humid, rainy monotony, the arrival of the tourists, time-share owners, kids on summer vacation, religious zealots protesting Gay Days, and of course, bad drivers in rental cars.
The main reason I look forward to May every year is the arrival of the Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival (Thursday the 15th through Monday the 26th). Every year, theatre companies, dancers, comedians, clowns, musicians, improv actors, writer/directors, solo acts and large ensembles, exuberant teenagers and road-hardened veterans alike grace Loch Haven Park with their creativity and energy, and Orlando gives every ounce of it (and more) back to them as many of the national and international acts begin their Canadian Fringe circuit, which brings them to a new city every two weeks. Show prices range from free (as in free software) to $10, and all shows require the one-time purchase of a $6 festival button - 100% of your ticket money goes to the artist. This is one of the only unjuried, uncensored events I know of in Orlando outside of a few open-mic nights, and even some of those are passing judgment on the performers (the other best example here is BarCamp).
18 months ago, I started gathering a group of my friends together every third Monday of the month for an event called Florida Creatives Happy Hour (Monday the 19th, 6PM @ Loch Haven Park). Now, those original 8 friends are hardly in the same room, but the group has grown to something resembling a small political party representing the creative professionals and hobbyists here in Central Florida (with a group getting started in Jacksonville as I write this). This month’s Florida Creatives falls during the Fringe Festival, so at 6PM on the 19th we will be descending upon their “Green Lawn of Fabulousness” to have a beer and some soul food and socialize. At 7:45, we will be attending American Squatter, starring Barry Smith, the creator of last year’s sell-out hit Jesus in Montana. Tickets are $10 plus your $6 Fringe button.
Despite the fact that Fringe starts on the same day every year, another festival seems to think they are better than the Fringe, by starting on the exact same day. Yes, the Florida Music Festival runs Thursday the 15th through Sunday the 18th this year, at pretty much every available venue downtown. In past years, you’ve been able to buy a one-time pass that gets you in to all the shows for the whole weekend, as well as nightly passes - buying a ticket to just one show will hardly do such an event justice. The festival also has a short film as well as an art contest, check these out too if you can find the time in between all of the other events happening at the exact same time.
What other events? How about that bizarre craft bazaar held semi-bi-anually at Stardust Video & Coffee, Grandma Party? (Saturday the 17th, 10AM to Sunset) For some reason they opted out of celebrating Earth Day in favor of overlapping with FMF and Fringe this year - the reason why is left as homework for the reader. Actually, if you find out, please try to explain this one to me too. At G-ma Party, you’ll not only find loads of handmade goods, like the cereal-and-eggs inspired work of the Breakfast Bunch, but trendy t-shirts, buckets of buttons, live music by some of Orlando’s best local bands (at least those who are friends with the festival organizers), a bal-looney community pool, and of course rummage piles and raffles.
Not as culturally significant, but still worth a mention, the second ever Florida Drupal User Group meeting will be held at the offices of MindComet in Maitland this Saturday (May 17th, 1PM). Check out the event and any follow-up at groups.drupal.org/florida.
Still more to come in this round-up of events, because I couldn’t write such a blog post without mentioning the Corazon Art and Music Festival being held at the Orlando Brewing Company (Sunday the 18th, starts 1PM, All Day). As I’m writing this I don’t have access to any listings, but I know tickets are $5, and I can give a serious recommendation, as this event is being thrown by Robert and Jonathan from Gamble Records, the folks who brought us the ELLA Music Festival in October. I expect you will see lots of singer-songwriter type acts, and you can trust Robert Johnson’s rolodex to bring you some great music (and art?).
There must be more happening during the next two weeks, but isn’t that enough? Of course, we can’t forget about this Friday (May 16th, 8AM-11AM) and the Likemind Orlando coffee meetup at the Lake Eola Panera Bread. This month there will be free coffee and hopefully a few free copies of a book called Murketing - I don’t have a lot of details about it, but I know the publishers of the book are sponsoring the coffee and snacks all over the US, so they get serious props.
If I’m missing anything here, please leave a shout-out, and I’ll try to include it in the next bulletin. Until next time, have a great May!
I have a choice: do I take the first three days of Fringe Week off, the middle three, or the last three? I know opening weekend, the last weekend and Memorial Day will be action-packed, but I also don’t want to lose too much money from work.
Blogging Fringe (or this year, my personal blog and OrlandoScene.TV) will be taking up some time, but I also don’t want to take ALL week off so I can save my pennies. Any thoughts, comments, suggestions?
Download Show 16
flcreatives_16_barcamp_ladies.mp3
Length: 14:00
Tisse, Katrina Priore, Dana Delapi and Becky Lane talk to Ryan Price during BarCamp Orlando 2008.
Today at BarCamp I suggested we create a “secret” handshake for Florida Creatives members or people who are involved in the local community.
Here are some suggestions: hugs, peace sign, hang loose, three-fingered wave, etc.
What would you use as the Florida Creatives secret handshake? Record something and post it in the comments!
Download Show 15
flcreatives_15_barcamp_sunir_alex.mp3
Length: 9:19
Sunir Shah and Alex DeCarvalho talk to Ryan Price at BarCampOrlando Dev Day about FreshBooks and ScrapBlog, where each of them are the "Community Guy". We also talk about BarCamp and the aesthetic there vs. a regular conference.
Shameless Links:
BarCamp Orlando is a weekend for all types of creative folks to come together and share with each other. The event is dubbed an “unconference”, a format which derives power from the people instead of the event organizers or the presenters. Everyone has an equal opportunity to get on stage and speak, teach or lead a discussion, playing off of the idea that at any given conference, the people in the audience have more knowledge collectively than the presenter(s) on stage.
This second installment of BarCamp will be held over 2 days, Saturday and Sunday, April 5th and 6th, in downtown Orlando at the Wall Street complex, from 10AM - 6PM each day. Registration is free, and a registration promises a shirt and lunch on the sponsors of BarCamp, businesses who are passionate about the technology and media communities of Central Florida.
Saturday is the designated “Dev Day”, playing host to everything from web programming to robot building and video game development and everything in between. iPhone hackers, guys with soldering irons, the latest technologies, and plenty that haven’t been realized yet. Every 30 minutes, both venues will have a different talk going on, so if you’re feeling lost in the jargon, apply the “rule of 2 feet” and check out what’s happening in the other room!
Sunday is dubbed “Media Day”, and is the place for storytellers, journalists, writers, designers, filmmakers, musicians, 2D and 3D artists, podcasters, bloggers and social networkers to show off their work, share their tricks or talk about the state of the industry. From 12 to 1 we will be talking about the “Past, Present and Future of Media in Central Florida”, hoping to give our community a sense of our story, and where we’re headed.
Registration is free, and the event runs from 10AM - 6PM both days with a lunch break at 1PM. The event will be housed in Slingapour’s and One-Eyed-Jack’s, with Wall St Cantina acting as our “hallway”. There will be projectors and microphones, chairs and a space to speak. All you have to do is write your name on the whiteboard and you get 20-25 minutes to share your passions with a group of energetic, engaged geeks and creatives. I would not use the words “captive audience” to describe the BarCamp crowd, because they all want to get involved.
Visit www.barcamporlando.org today and register for Dev Day, Media Day or both days. Wall Street Plaza is at 18 Wall Street Plaza, Orlando, FL 32801 - barcamporlando.org/where has a map to the venue and information about parking.
Chris Abani, an exiled Nigerian author and human rights activist, will speak Thursday, March 6, at UCF.
Abani, a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, will speak about “Human Rights in Politics and Art†at 3 p.m. in the Cape Florida Ballroom, room 316, of the Student Union. The event is free and open to the public. Details here.
Every month, tons of events happen in Orlando. We post lots of them on this site, and sometimes people attend. This month, our group or our members are planning some cool things:
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Florida Creatives @ Enzian FilmSLAM (2008/03/09)
Second Sundays, Enzian has an event for local Florida filmmakers to showcase their work. It costs just $5 to get in, and you get to see a half-dozen or so new short films. At the end you get to vote on which one you think should get shown at the Brouhaha Grand Slam in December. Enzian even has food and drinks available because they don’t want to hear grumbling tummies over the films.
Then we go across the street to Copper Rocket - you meet some filmmakers, some filmmakers meet all of us, we have fun.
FilmSlam - 3/9 1PM at Enzian
Happy Hour - 3/9 3PM at Copper Rocket -
Florida Creatives @ OMA First Thursdays (2008/03/06)
On the first Thursday of the month, the Orlando Museum of Art opens their galleries up late and has a themed exhibit in the front room - the theme this month is “Beat-niks & Bongos: Abstract Art”. I believe admission is $9 for non-members. There are food and drinks available for additional monies. 3/6 6-9PM at Loch Haven Park
First Thursdays are also when Dandelion CommuniTEA has their art openings, immediately following First Thursday. Dandelion is behind Colonial Photo and Hobby on Mills (they are on Thornton).
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Coworking Tuesdays
This is a new event that will hopefully coalesce itself into tradition in the coming months. Anyone who works out of their living room is invited to work outside their living room by joining some other folks in the same boat every Tuesday… somewhere. A regular location will emerge, I’m sure. We had settled on B&S Daily Market, but Manny has admitted defeat and closed up shop. Watch this space, the Coworking Wiki and Coworking Mailing List for more details.
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Florida Creatives Happy Hour (2008/03/17)
Yes, it comes around so quickly, doesn’t it? We get together at the Crooked Bayou every month from 6-9 PM so you always have a place to meet new people and catch up with folks. It’s important to our community to have these Third Places (not home or work/school) to gather and visit. If you’ve never been or you feel like it’s been too ling since you’ve been around, there’s never a better time to make a habit of attending.
This is the last Florida Creatives before BarCampOrlando goes down on April 5th & 6th, so you’ll want to attend if you’re interested in assisting with planning activities, passing out fliers or doing any other publicity. I also believe that will be the last week to find sponsors.
On Friday, February 29th 2008, Orlando's celebrated performance artist, Brian Feldman will leap off of a 12-foot platform every 4 minutes, for a total of 366 leaps, falling a total of 4,392 feet or 0.83 miles in all.
The piece was designed for Leap Year Day because it is an extra day in the year, to make people think: "How are you spending your 1,440 minutes?"
Brian is searching for volunteers; visit www.BrianFeldman.com for information.
Featuring the scenic and lighting design of Curtiss Lee Mitchell and sound design by Jason Kupfer. Also appearing in this video is Terry Olson, Director of Arts & Cultural Affairs for Orange County.
More videos coming out every week on Miro and iTunes. If you’d like to get involved by suggesting an event or venue for us to highlight, get in touch with us at OrlandoScene.TV - thanks for watching.
April 2008 BarCampOrlando @ Wall Street Plaza, April 5th & 6th
View Video on Vimeo.
Jason Hawkins is a winner. We’ve featured his SOLMI videos here before, and now he’s creating lots of video for other folks in town. I dig his motion graphics, camera work, and the way he (or his camera) captures color.
Also, props to Jason Seifer. Kissy face? Nice work, broseph.
On a very serious note, if you’re reading this blog, you should make plans to go to BarCampOrlando and do a presentation - if you’ve got short films, this is a great captive audience to show them in front of - 20 minute time slots. If you do a podcast or vlog, work in television, motion graphics, design, or anything of the sort, the second day in particular will be of interest to you and you should really sign up to present. As I said on my blog about BarCamp:
I’m recruiting presenters and attendees for the New Media Day. Be there, bring your A-game. (your B-game is equally welcome)
At the last event, I think everyone’s understanding that there were going to be some crazy awesome presentations as well as some mediocre ones was not very solid. I spoke to a few people who presented and said “I thought I was going to be all by myself in a room with like 5 guys all scratching their chins, but I was SO wrongâ€Â, the other half of them said “I thought about presenting, but I didn’t think I was ‘good enough’, but then I saw it was just a bunch of guys like me, so I’m going to blow them all out of the water this timeâ€Â.
Really, those are you only two options. You should have either presented at last year’s BarCamp, or decided that you were definitely presenting at the next one. If you weren’t there, then take my word for it and create a presentation. Really.
If you’d like to see your Orlando Video here, email < liberatr AT gmail DOT com >.
Cheers to Dan Benjamin for giving some of the geekier kids in Central Florida an excuse to eat a healthy lunch yesterday at Power House Café in Winter Park.
lunch_fu is often announced via twitter, but also shows up on Facebook and Upcoming as well, so there are lots of ways to get notified. Meagan Fisher normally posts the invites, so watch her posts as well as Dan’s for whispers of upcoming lunches.
There’s even a fun mascot. You gotta love that.
If you notice from Bill Couch’s photo - the turnout was substantial - the folks at Power House were none too pleased with us pushing 6 tables together. This event is organized in an informal ad-hoc fashion - yet still garners a large following - there is room in this community for more events. Florida Creatives wants to help.
Also worth taking a look at is the coworking event happening every Tuesday in Winter Park called Cup-O-Code. Folks show up around 7PM and sit in the meeting room to work, catch up, have some coffee and enjoy the accommodations at Cup O’ Soul in Winter Park. Ample parking and free wireless.
Watch this space and the Florida Creatives Mailing List for an announcement about an event after next month’s Enzian FilmSlam. The Enzian event starts at 1:00PM and is always finished by 3, so we will be migrating from the theatre to a nearby location for some conversation and refreshments.
Today a friend of mine sent me an email asking him to help him find some resources (like money) for a film project he’s working on. I thought, as I often do, that the best way to chase down opportunities like making money is to get involved with the community. Therefore, I got him in touch with several film types, and pointed him to some film resources with a brief explanation of why he should get involved.
When I had finished writing the email, I realised the opportunity to add a creative guide to the FLCreatives Wiki. The idea with this is that any of our members can write or re-post a how-to, something they feel might be useful to folks browsing for information, sort of the ultimate FAQ for Florida Creatives. Because it’s listed on the wiki, other folks can edit and re-structure the guides to make them more useful, or add pictures, video, slideshows, web links and more useful or up-to-date information.
The first such guide I wrote was a re-posting of my talking points from BarCamp Orlando and BlogOrlando about Podcasting Theory. I don’t think this has received any edits since October, but the wiki makes it easy to find out - every page keeps a full history of all the edits and who made them.
Here’s today’s new creative guide: Getting into Florida Film
Right now the first part of this guide mentions that there’s a Film Industry Professionals Meetup (7PM) tonight at McRaney’s Tavern on Fairbanks Ave - that’s one of the first edits that should be made, of course, because normally they meet on the Second Thursday of the month, not Wednesdays. I just posted the text as it was in the email.
Please help us have a great resource for folks new to town, students or just curious people by adding your own Creative Guides to the list. We’re the locals, so we have a different way of noticing what’s important, we’ve been in the trenches.
I also edited a few pages - like the Orlando Networking, Orlando Events and Orlando Resources lists. Almost anything that deserves a bullet point on this wiki deserves a full wiki page, so that’s another way to contribute - write up the history of your group or a place you like to visit in town. I promise to give it a feature here on the blog and in the mailing list.
Every third Friday, likeminded kids all over the world get together to have coffee, wear nametags and have good conversations. That means this Friday, and that means that between 8 and 11 AM we’ll be enjoying Manny’s hospitality at the B&S Daily Market. As for myself, I’ll be at Likemind in London, participating in a very similar experience, 5 hours earlier in the day.
On Monday, our Florida Creatives Happy Hour comes around once again. Between 6 and 9 PM the Crooked Bayou will serve us up with fried pickles, tater tots, beers, gumbo, po boys and lots of other cajun-influenced treats.
If you’ve never been, or if you came months ago (or over a year ago), now is a great time to get in the habit of attending regularly.
This video belongs to the InsterestingSouth event that was held in Sydney, Australia on November 22nd, 2007. There was a fun talk by Juan Mann, the Free Hugs guy, who was looking for a free place to live at the time, and some other talks by some wonderful creative and informed people.
The video I want to focus on is a talk give by Dan Hill, who is a design, web, media, city, travel, culture, architecture, music, creative type of fellow. He takes several ideas and mashes them up to make you think about a world where you measure your usage of resources, and the possible logical ends of those measurements. You really have to watch the video to get the meaning. Go on, click the link and come back, I’ll wait… It’s a little over 10 minutes, just to warn you.
They start playing “These boots are made for walking” because he’s passed his 10-minute time limit - each talk at InterestingSouth is between 3 and 10 minutes. The event is only one night, and doesn’t take very long, but I’m sure everyone walks away with a head full of new ideas, inspiration and questions.
I’m interested to see what people can think of once we collect 5 years worth of that data, or 25 years. After a century, the world will be in a completely different place. Who knows what our great grandchildren will have moved on to then?
Dan’s blog post about The Well-Tempered Personal Environment
See the ‘Facebook App’ slide from the talk