Jakob Lodwick started shooting videos and putting them on his website at school. He went on to college in 1999, armed with a Sony Digital 8 video camera, and Blumpy Films was born in September 2000. Some of the videos are college projects but Lodwick describes the site as 100% for fun and 0% for profit.

Go create...
Someone smart once said that you either have creative freedom, or you don't – there is no in-between. I'm in a good position of having my work seen by thousands, but also of being able to do, literally, anything I want.

Spoof not!
Two important steps: 1) come up with an original idea 2) get off your ass and make it happen!

The Internet doesn't need more derivative spoofs. Don't make Star Wars parodies. Don't shoot a remake of the Matrix, starring you and your friends. Don't get inspiration from Scary Movie. Instead, come up with your own ideas. Keep in mind that you can do anything you want.

The hardware, the software
We have a Sony TRV-310 Digital 8 camera and bought a Canon GL-1 camera in May 2001. The Canon is of much higher quality, so we have used it in most videos since then, but actually as long as it's digital the camera itself doesn't really matter. There are very few differences shooting video for the Internet, though there is no 'TV safe zone', which refers to the area on the border of a TV screen that is lost during broadcast. You will also need a fire wire card to transfer the footage. Most of these cards come with some kind of basic editing software, which is all you really need. We use Adobe Premiere for editing and encoding and Adobe After Effects for special effects.

This website itself is made with Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Notepad, and programming is in HTML and PHP with a little bit of mySQL for the database backend.

Editing is quicker than it might sound. I'd estimate I spend about 60 minutes for each minute of video. Of course, capturing the footage, encoding the video for distribution, and working on special effects shots can add sick amounts of time. For example, I spent six hours making the title sequence for Jacob's Breakup just right.

Fun, fun, fun...
I can't stress how important it is to actually make the video happen. Even if you're sure it's going to be terrible, do it anyway.

By goofing around and turning weird ideas into MPEGs (www.mpeg.org), I've amassed what I consider a pretty entertaining site. So just work on your ideas. Don't worry what people will think of them. If you make something terrible, you've at least learned boatloads from it.

Now go get a camera and make something beautiful!