Pink Antlers (MIH 22)

Finally, here it is... the first Austin video!

Take a look at our behind-the-scenes vlog from Make It Happen: Austin Craft Mafia.



For more information on the Austin Craft Mafia go here. Stay tuned for our final cut of thier story after the trip.

Smiley Triangle (MIH 18)

We’re still in Texas!

(Shannon LeBoeuf Frontside Air at Kevin's Ramp: Photo by Dan Barnett)

We’ve been in Austin shooting the wonderful people at OK Mountain. On Monday night we met up with everyone (yet again) to shoot individual interviews about their personal artwork and their connection with OK Mtn.


It was awesome getting to meet so many talented and dedicated artists here in Austin. Thanks to Justin Goldwater, Nathan Green, Ryan Hennessee, Michael Sieben, Sterling Allen, and Corkey Sinks for hanging out and talking with us about OK Mountain.

Yesterday we met up with Sieben and followed him to Seguin, TX to put up an OK Mountain instillation on the campus of Texas Lutheran University.





Until early December, work from the artists involved in OK Mtn will be on display at TLU.

After Sieben set up the beginnings of the instillation, he took us to a local Mexican restaurant for a gut busting lunch.


The food was amazing. No rats were actually involved. However, Jeremey got violently ill that night. Afterward Sieben took off to finish hanging the art in the gallery.

Last night, we met up with Corkey for one last OK Mtn shoot.


She was kind enough to show us around the OK Mtn studios and give us a look into her work.



That’s about it for our Austin adventures. We might go shoot some footage around town before we head out.

We also want to give another shout out to Amy Mullins and Shannon LeBoeuf (and Dizzy!) for letting us crash at their place.


Another big donation came in last night! A ginormous thanks to Sara Henry for placing a chunk of $$ into our Chip In Pay Pal account! Sara said she’s really excited about our stories and can’t wait to see what we do. Hopefully we can make her proud. Thank you Sara!

And last but not least, this one goes out to our friend and web designer, Erik Jessen who is responsible for the look of our blog and of our portfolio site, Jaded Multimedia. Erik’s wife Kaela just gave birth to their first child, Graham Jessen.

Congrats E.J. you’re a dad now, crazy…

On to the next city…

Shot Through the Heart (MIH 16)

We’re back in Texas!


We drove up to Austin on Friday and headed straight to Okay Mountain to start our shoot…


but nobody was there. So, we detoured to our favorite wifi hot spot, called Michael Sieben, and then drove back to Okay Mountain to start our shoot.

Okay Mountain is an Art Collective/ Gallery in Austin committed to creating a welcoming environment to nurture the growing Austin art scene.


One of the artists involved is Michael Sieben who Jeremey interviewed last year for a Current TV project. When we told Sieben about Make It Happen he was psyched and volunteered to help us hook up some Austin stories. He’s been really cool to us and has acted as our liaison with lots of Austin DIY folks, including the other Okay Mountain artists. He even arranged for us to shoot native Houstonian, now New York based artist, Jason Villegas finishing up the installation for his Saturday show.



After Jason was done, we drank Lone Star in the backyard with the Okay crew, set up interviews for Monday, and then headed to Polvo’s for fajitas & margaritas with some friends.

On Saturday we headed back to Okay Mountain, shot Jason Villegas’s opening, drank more beer… cause Okay Mountain supplies a keg and chips for patrons of the arts… and then we headed to Scoot Inn for the after party…


Scoot Inn was double booked with a wedding reception for Kevin and Rachael Trahan, who we happen to be acquainted with.


In fact, our gracious host’s Shannon and Amy we’re both in the wedding party, which was supposedly the “best wedding ever” complete with tuxedo t-shirts, gang of four, and lots of (you guessed it) booze and food during the ceremony… at least that’s what we heard. While we can’t confirm any of that, we can testify that the reception was pretty rocking.


And we mean a live band on stage, backing rock and roll karaoke with the bride and groom (and even the groom’s mom) doing Bon Jovi covers.


Congratulations Trahan's!

So yes, the Okay Mountain After Party/ Kevin and Rachael’s reception was a blast. A couple of other ex-Current TV employees (now Austin transplants) Sydney Katz and Ruth Rosenthal even met us up there and partook in the festivities.


Yesterday morning we went back up to the Mountain to interview Jason before he headed home to the NYC.


And tonight we’re going back to the Mountain to shoot interviews with the artists involved in the collective. Tomorrow we're going to try and check out the bats of Austin… word has it they leave in October, so hopefully there’s a few still hanging out (no pun intended).

Until next time…

Who Dat (MIH 11)

We are in Austin, TX. We got here late Sunday night and then had a little adventure looking for Star Seed’s Café, which was “close” to where we’re staying.


But apparently close in Austin means several miles, not like close in S.F. which means you can walk to it. Soooo we ended up at Denny’s- but it was a totally rocking Denny’s all decked out fifties style with a big outdoor patio… it was cool, we swear. We’ve been slacking on the blog the last couple of days. We’re staying with Jeremey’s friend Shannon of Banana Farm fame...



and Shannon's girlfriend Amy (Buckshot) of the Texas Roller Girls. They’ve got a big tournament this weekend so if you’re in the Austin area go out there and show them some love.

Shannon and Amy just moved into a new spot and don’t have the Internet. So right now we’re lurking at Clementine’s Coffee on Manor using their free wifi.


Austin’s been pretty rad; we shot our first story on the road, Austin Craft Mafia. Now, there’s a ton of ladies who are part of the Craft Mafia… we shot three of them. The first was Hope Perkins who does amazing portraits of dead rappers.


She did not do one of Mac Dre for Jeremey…


(but she said she’d do it for $250.)

...Oh yeah and we saw the most bizarre bug outside of Hope's place...


If anybody can name it, we'll let you donate fifty bucks to us.

Tina Sparkles was next. She showed us how she makes the coolest guitar straps in the world. Last but not least was Jenny Hart of Sublime Stitching who was gracious enough to let us interrupt her incredibly busy day to interview her and shoot her operation. She has so much stuff going on, we’re truly grateful that she let us bug her for a couple of hours. She dropped some very thoughtful and intelligent commentary about D.I.Y. culture on us and she even hooked Abby up with an embroidery kit.

Thanks ladies. And look out for some tidbits from those shoots coming soon.

We spent part of Monday night at a New Orleans Saints Bar with Shannon and some other Austin folks watching the Saints get stomped.


So then we headed to Long Branch to numb the pain. Everybody keeps telling us to go swimming in one of the creeks here, but we didn’t bring swimsuits and Wally World was a huge disappointment. Next stop Savers…

Oh yeah, and the Queso is rocking.

And it Begins… (MIH3)

Huge news for us, we’ve decided on a rough route. …Which has a few detours to Jeremey’s hometown for a couple of weddings and a reunion. We’ll be posting that shortly. We also sent out feelers to a bunch of our friends, hitting them for insider info on their towns, story ideas, and couches to crash on. Then we started our story outreach and emailed dozens of potentials… and we even got nibbles from some really talented people in Texas, the Austin Craft Mafia. It looks like they’re down to work with us, and we’re really excited to shoot their story… especially since it includes portraits of dead rappers. We’ve got some other cool stuff cooking in Austin, but none of it is confirmed, so we’ll let you know when we know.

Last but not least, you may have noticed that in our first vlog, there are some shots of skaters. That’s because our first shoot was right here in San Francisco, the Lowcard Story. Lowcard is a D.I.Y. skate ‘zine in San Fran that has developed quite a following all around the country. More importantly, it’s built up a pretty solid skate community in S.F… which is a huge accomplishment in this city full independent skate “cells.”

We wrapped shooting on Lowcard Friday morning, with the option to do one extra shoot before we leave… if we think we need it. We’re really excited about this piece and we’ll upload some teaser clips as soon as we have all the footage captured in the next couple days.

(Also notice the naming convention at the top: MIH3, meaning this is the third Make It Happen entry. That way once we’re on MIH2447529083475, you can gauge just how far we’ve gone.)

Making it Happen…