A few months ago the algorithm (or Twitter, I forget which) blessed me with a YouTube series from the magazine Bon Appétit where chef Claire Saffitz attempts to recreate various lollies. I noticed in several of the videos there was a colleague of hers called Brad who was pretty hilarious in a bumbling sort of way. Turns out that he had his own series called ‘It’s Alive, with Brad’, a series I consumed with gusto. The cameraman/editor Vinnie adding hilarious text to make fun of the host (wourder) added to the bumbling charm of this sort of cooking show..? This then led me to another series called Binging With Babbish, a cooking show where host Andrew re-creates food from TV and movies. It’s...addictive. Babbish then lead me to Cocktail Chemistry, a very similar looking show that teaches you how to make delicious cocktails. After a very expensive trip to Kitchen Warehouse to stock up on various cooking implements and cocktail supplies I’ve stopped looking for new YouTube channels. For now.
Apart from wanting to share my main viewing habits from the past few months with other people, I wrote this post thinking about the theme of create. From the high end videos of Claire and Brad down to the simple, yet elegant videos of Babbish and Cocktail Chemistry was the thought ‘I could do that’. It was immediately followed by ‘I’d need to buy a camera, and a tripod, oh and some software. A microphone and recorder wouldn’t hurt either…’ I had a similar thought pattern when a friend and I decided to create a podcast a few years back (we have one episode down but then they moved to Scotland!) and I invested in some cheapish mics instead of a high end Zoom or something. It was around this time that I had seen a few library setups involving recording studios and wished I had access to one.
I’m currently involved in the early stages of setting up a new space at my place of work, one that is based around space and removing barriers to creative technology. The idea will be to provide a few small to medium rooms where the community can come and record a podcast, music, or a vlog series. We’ve kept the rooms to the bare minimum allowing people to get creative with the space, choosing instead to invest in high quality, low tech equipment to take those initial thoughts of ‘oh I can’t afford to do that’ away. How many more creative things would you do if you had zero setup costs and could just pop down to your local library and smash out an RPG podcast with some friends? The project is about a year away but I hope to draw in creative community members, local entrepreneurs (kickstarter videos anyone?), local businesses, and anyone else who needs a space to get creative.
This is by no means a new idea, heck YouTube has been doing it for ages as have other libraries. Ultimately what I would love to do is organise various council properties and locations to be accessible to budding film makers for free. There was a UK project that organised and found locations belonging to local councils or even private locations and paid for their use out of grant funding. Sadly that project has ended, but I don’t see why council’s couldn’t provide access to offices, or even libraries for filmmakers to use as locations. AirBnB but for film locations, and free.
For my own creativity I’ll be sticking to my writing with the occasional well cooked meal and matching cocktails. Of course this doesn’t mean I won’t stop stockpiling weird RPGs just in case someone gets a podcast idea and needs some help.