Fill bowl with cereal, add milk, turn on camera

Heather Menicucci, Director, Howcast Filmmakers Program, is writing weekly guest posts for the YouTube blog on filmmaking in the digital age. This is her second post. Her first was “Embracing exploration: being a filmmaker today.”

Partly motivated by wanting to hear why our filmmakers produce Howcast spots or upload to YouTube, and partly curious about what they eat for breakfast, we decided to interview them about web video last Friday morning. Since our filmmakers are all over the world, we had to conduct the interviews remotely and ask them to send in their footage.

It turns out they like to eat cereal, drink juice, and sip coffee. Puzzling creatures. It also turns out they have a lot to say about why they started uploading to the web, what’s great about web video, and what’s not so great. We received over 100 minutes of footage and in the end, produced a five minute video.

From Craig Staggs explaining that he started putting videos on the web, well, because there was nowhere else to put them, to Oriana Syed talking about the pressures of having to produce more quickly (and possibly skimp on her work) to William Reed’s idea that his web projects offer a taste of what he could do with a real budget, all 11 of our filmmakers shared honest valuable insights.

Open a box of your favorite sugary treat, add milk, and watch. Get to know them a little better by checking out some of my favorite Howcast spots they created in the links below. Then, please, send them (and us) your questions by posting them in as comments below or as comments to the video. (But please note: comments are moderated due to spam.) These guys have a lot to say and I’m sure they’d be happy to share more of their experiences producing for the web.

So, without further adieu, we present some of our awesomest filmmakers: Craig Staggs, Dimitri LaBarge, Michael Sanchez, Luke Neumann, Morgan Crossley, Andrew Quinn, Oriana Syed, Barry Michael, William Reed, Mark and Lisa Morrison.



Come back next week for another session of our "Modern 101 for Emerging Digital Filmmakers." Next Friday: our list of websites every filmmaker should know.

Heather Menicucci, Director, Howcast Filmmakers Program, recently watched “ChatRoulette.”