Once a week, a cozy bar in Omaha has jazz, and on certain nights the room feels like magic. One of us wants to make a concert film there in the spirit of Jazz on a Summer's Day and The Last Waltz, on the original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, an old Super 16 digital camera that records to one SD card. Between us we own three, and they're tougher than we expected: a 256 GB card holds about 90 minutes of raw CinemaDNG, and others have shot past an hour without overheating. The short film one of us wrote is pushed to spring, and the jazz film is how he means to keep moving until then.

Brian Eno came to treat his work as a practice rather than a job. One of us wants that, with his friends' names in the credits as the most permanent record he can leave. The other has old hang-ups about being on set and would rather help edit, as long as the edit doesn't swallow weeks of family life. We riff on the 6-hour cut of a 14-minute short. Talking over that script, one of us saw the other recognize his own younger self, which leads back to 2008, before the Canon 5D Mark II, when there was one narrow way in. Short films still earn nothing, we agree. It ends on Hollywood, where one of us reckons talent without attention is no currency.

Mentioned in this episode: Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day, Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz, the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, CinemaDNG, Brian Eno, the Canon 5D Mark II, the Black List.

-Ai

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We spend this episode bouncing between a barn in Malvern, Iowa and the question of where creative work actually comes from. It opens with the story of an 8x10 view camera pulled down from a stranger's rafters and handed over for free, then moves into what's been driving a recent stretch of creative momentum: too many scripts, a short film, a software project, and the discovery that having several unrelated things going at once beats grinding on one.

From there we get into the harder question: how do you take a photograph, write a scene, or make anything that doesn't just repeat something you've already seen online. We talk about pink-door photo clichés, Kubrick's early films, Basquiat working with the radio and television on in the background, and why Adam Sandler's comedies read differently once you know where they came from. That turns into a longer argument about genre dissolving, the sheer volume of culture now available compared to a bassist learning ragtime off a handful of records in the 1980s, and whether that flood helps or drowns out a personal voice.

We close on the physical stuff: CRTs selling for triple what we paid for them, a customer building a VHS wall, and Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies cards as a way to get unstuck. There's also a detour into Apple tech-support logic and why the simplest fix is usually the right one to try first. -Ai

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madebyalex.online

Last episode of "season" 3! We start with a Squarespace redesign that's been sitting untouched for over a year and end up on the case for building a site from scratch. Alex walks through his history with web design, from MySpace CSS to Adobe Portfolio to a few hundred dollars a year for templates that never did what he wanted, and what changed once LLMs made a custom build possible for someone who isn't a developer.

From there we get into the IndieWeb, Neocities, owning your distribution, and the thousand-true-fans idea. We talk about deleting Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, why Instagram and YouTube stay on as the only two funnels for now, and what happens to your creative range when everything you encounter comes through a recommendation engine. That turns into effective creative entropy, a term Alex coins mid-conversation, and a deck-of-cards argument about the odds of getting to an original idea.

We finish on what's actually being built: print layouts for every story and essay, marginalia, contact sheets, a guest-curated gallery that rotates every couple of weeks, postcards and a newspaper at cost. Also what's left out on purpose. No SEO, no paid ads, no Google Analytics, no Google-hosted fonts, no metadata on the photos, and AI crawlers blocked. The site is a place to visit and leave, not a place to get stuck. -Ai

Support the show

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.

Links To Everything:

Video Version of The Podcast: https://geni.us/StudioSessionsYT

Matt’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/MatthewOBrienYT

Matt’s 2nd Channel: https://geni.us/PhotoVideosYT

Alex’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/AlexCarterYT

Matt’s Instagram: https://geni.us/MatthewIG

Alex’s Instagram: https://geni.us/AlexIG