Ustream Report: ZCHFS Episode 1

On Saturday 2/6/10, we had the premiere episode of the Zak Claxton Happy Fun Show (which will henceforth be abbreviated as "ZCHFS" to avoid typing fatigue). If you don't feel like reading whatever else I'm about to write, I'll cut to the chase: it was good, we had fun, we ran into technical trouble exactly as I'd expected, and we've already scheduled Episode 2 for 2/20/10. Okay, if you're in a hurry or something, you're hereby excused.

Weekend Wetness
I started Saturday in an, uh, interesting way. I was asleep, as I prefer to be at 8am on a lovely weekend day. But Kat had gotten out of bed, perchance to make coffee, and noticed that both the floor of my master bathroom and much of the desk in my office/studio seemed to have accumulated large puddles. We're in the midst of a very rainy storm season in the LA area, and my poor old flat roof wasn't ready for three inches of precipitation in 24 hours. After getting out of bed and making sure my MacBook Pro was still functional despite its dampness, we put out some buckets to catch the interior drizzle and used various assortments of towels to sop up the excess water, then carried on with the day.

Glitches from the Get-Go
Like most things I do, I started the ZCHFS over-ambitiously, perhaps. I'd put together some fun video clips, some slide shows with picture-in-picture voiceovers, and more. And, of course, it all seemed to be working fine until the moment of the actual broadcast. I will say, though, that if the show had gone off without a hitch, it would have been like two hours long and I would have sacrificed way more time than I'd realized for the news/commentary sections of the show, leaving not nearly enough time to do what I really wanted, which was to play some live music. So now we know for next time. In a way, the tech glitches were good that way; the old adage K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) will always apply to projects like this. We still did manage to keep our show logo displayed in an overlay graphic, and did manage to switch back and forth seamlessly between our news and live music performance setups. I can't complain (though sometimes I still do).

On with the Show
Once I blew off some of the planned material and just had fun with the show, I think it went really well. We had about 20 people as viewers, and played a nice set of ZC original songs. Here's what we did, by the way...

This Afternoon (Zak Claxton)
Falling Down (Zak Claxton)
Thanks Anyway (Zak Claxton)
You're Like a Cloud (Zak Claxton)
Always Tomorrow (Zak Claxton)
Fade Away (Zak Claxton)
Waiting for This (Zak Claxton)

Don't Touch That Dial
Episode 1 of the ZCHFS went well enough that we're going to try another show, in two weeks. Visit us at 12pm PST on Saturday 2/20/10, when Episode 2 strikes back! To see the live show, simply click this link on the day/time of the next broadcast: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/zakclaxton.