Stuart Davis’ new television series Sex, God, Rock ‘n Roll is being filmed this fall in Boulder, Colorado. The show is an hour long format of comedy, news, and in-depth interviews with spiritual teachers and unconventional icons. Sex, God, Rock ‘n Roll blends Davis’ spoken word comedy and playful reporting of news from around the World with conversations you won’t find anywhere else. KEN WILBER will be joining Stuart via satellite phone in each week. Sex, God, Rock ‘n Roll will be launching a subscription-based site to anchor its community, and will feature High-Def 60 minute episodes, as well as an enormous amount of free extras and bonus gift bundles (including dozens of free downloads of Davis’ music, and regularly ‘behind the scenes’ sketches shot exclusively for members). The series will be shopped to national networks upon completion. Join Stu and his cute spokesmodel Marci Davis as they take comedy Beyond Irony…

Hopefully that description will clue you into its content:) I am extremely grateful for this opportunity to work with Stu, Jason Lange, and Jason Digges, the other producers. My role is a meta-role with multiple responsibilities, while Lange and Digges are the guys heading up photography and the set. A few of the tasks I have are: putting together the live elements of the show, running them when we shoot, giving feedback on Stu’s scripts, coordinating and prepping guests, and leading up the creation of the website. Subscribe to the newsletter and tune into our temporary Tumblr blog on the site for behind-the-scene shots in pre-production.

Spring 1998 Finished second year in college, my first at Missouri Western. My first formal training in music, prior to that being solely a self-taught rocker. Start off majoring in music performance and sound engineering. No, I did not see any flutes being placed in any orifices during band camp. Disappointing, I know.

Fall 1998 Met my love, Aimee’, in marching band, her freshman year, my junior. As I recall it, I “sent out my man vibes”, which compelled her to ask me out after band practice one day (she has a different version:P). I gave her a Little Debbie on the band bus one day, the rest is history. Hmmm….that could be interpreted in certain ways.

Fall 1999 First year as a Resident Advisor. Did that for a year, then Senior Resident Advisor for another two years. Learned a lot more than all the ways to look like a dumbass trying to cover up your weed smell. Though, while on rounds one night, I saw a guy bust out of his dorm room suite, outside in the middle of the night, which seemed to be his victory lap after having had sex.

Spring 2000 Aimee’ and I were engaged on March 31, 2000. Same weekend I meditate for the first time and plunge into Buddhism. That’s a damn good weekend. Lots of dorm room meditation to follow.

Summers 2000/2001 Studied Spanish in Cuernavaca, Mexico, three weeks each time. End up majoring in Spanish as well. Also discovered that I really don’t like tequila.

Winter 2000 After lots of performances over three years, I did my senior recital. I performed a four-mallet marimba piece, a part in a marimba quartet, a drumset solo, and my favorite: performing various parts in a percussion ensemble piece live to a recording of the other parts that I played, recorded, and mixed prior to the recital. Then I went and got my third tattoo.

Spring 2002 Graduated with a BA from Missouri Western triple majoring in Music Performance, Sound Engineering, and Spanish. Luckily, they overlapped a lot:P I expected a statue of me carved from gold, but I just got a puny piece of paper. Six years of undergrad in the bag.

July 5, 2002 Aimee’ and I are married. Yeah, we both looked hot. Honeymoon in Acapulco.

Fall 2002 Start my graduate study at University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), in Counseling and Psychology, therapist track. Also started 3 years of being a Hall Director, though minus the naked victory laps.

Somewhere around 2003/4 Discover Ken Wilber, become an integral geek. Also connect with Dzogchen master, Namkhai Norbu, who is now my teacher.

Summer 2004 Started my first blog, Integral Awakening. The first step into a world of tech, web 2.0 (and beyond) obsessions. Aimee’ dubs my laptop “my girlfriend”.

Fall 2004 Completed a 12-week strength training program. Gain 27 lbs, from 127 to 154, thanks to Anthony Ellis’s program for hard-gainers. I’m a lean diesel strength-training machine.

Spring 2005 Learn to swim over two or three weeks, then train and complete a Sprint Triathlon.

Spring 2005 Graduate with an MSEd in Counseling and Psychology, but decided to not go the therapist route. Also, realized I had been struggling with social anxiety all of my life. Take up therapy with a peer in her practicum in my grad program. Helps tremendously. I co-create Anxious Living as an exploration of social anxiety.

Summer 2005 After being lost for a month or so about the next step in life, I decide to do at least a year as a professional Hall Director. I luck out with a position at CU in Boulder, a city that Aimee’ and I had grown to love and so desperately wanted to move to. One of the best things to happen in our lives.

Fall 2005 Audited Tibetan 1 at Naropa, applied and was admitted for Spring entrance in the MA Indo-Tibetan Buddhism Program w/ Tibetan Language.

Summer 2006 I complete a 5-Week Solitary Retreat. I get to know what is meant by “The Dark Night” intimately, but won’t realize that until 2 years later. Not as funny as this Dark Knight.

Fall 2006 Buddhist Geeks was founded by Vince Horn, Gwen Bell, and I. The podcasting world shook with excitement, and all the Buddhas in all the realms throughout infinite time and space bought iPods.

Spring 2007 After the launch of Buddhist Geeks, I attend the Gear Media Tech podcasting conference with Leo Laporte, Scott Bourne, and Alex Lindsay leading. Return to start Falling Fruit with Lion Albaugh. Falling Fruit soon is a full-blown start-up with many of my close friends. I am Executive Producer and CEO (for a portion of the time) and help create several shows.

Summer 2007 Aimee’ and I celebrated our 5th anniversary.

Spring 2008 Falling Fruit dissolves as a company, I’m unemployed, but on the move. I hit freelancing with full-force, start PowerUp Productions. Major turning point in my life as I discover my love and passion for film and screenwriting. This realization leads me to completely gear my life with this in mind. Also, I discovered Technoviking and my life was revolutionized. Just kidding.

August 22, 2008 I celebrate my 30th b-day, except without the clown strippers I was promised, but I have some fun anyways:P

Here’s the link to vote.

If you have time, we submitted it to another category (link to vote for that).

We had a blast shooting this and, all in all, it was a great experience. I am really happy with the quality, especially given it’s my first time out of the gates:) Everyone I worked was/is amazing. It looks like we have the beginnings of a wonderful crew.

I learned a ton writing and directing this, but most of all working with a time limit - tough stuff! Thank goodness for post in this case.

Credits for the video:

Director, Writer, Music: Ryan Oelke
DP and Editor: Jason Lange
Actors: Scott Cooper Ryan, Tony Vo, Ryan Oelke, Charles Gammill
Production Assistant: Bonnie Arnold
Boom Operator: Charles Gammill
Sound Engineer: Ryan Oelke
Dolly Sound: Richard Frohlich
Special Thanks: Troy Omafray, Niwot Market

Recently I wrote a post about the new design of this site and its reflection of my new career focus. Well, turns out I was part mixing up terminology and part needing more time to get completely clear about things. So, now you can see that I have changed the tagline on the site and rewritten the about page.

Ryan Oelke is an aspiring film director and screenwriter.

Currently he is collaborating with a film crew to shoot and complete a short film each month for one year. They will also be participating in Shootout Boulder, a 24 hour film competition in October 2008. During this time Ryan is directing and writing many of the short films. You can view them on this site.

I realized how deeply I am moved to create art and I am drawn into film through directing and screenwriting. Producers do get to be involved in some of the creative process, but they are most logistical coordinators. While I have learned over the years how to handle that side of things, it is completely life draining for me. Creating art gives me life. Film in particular pulls on so many of my passions, talents, and abilities. It’s the first path, aside from meditation, that I feel comfortable giving long days and hours to. I could write a book on how much insight I’ve developed over the last two months, but that’ll just have to come in small posts over time:)

I’m excited to both share my process in developing as a director and a screenwriter, as well as all the projects I work on. Last weekend I completed my first shoot that I directed and wrote for a contest. We should have the final cut before the week is over.

The past year of founding and leading Falling Fruit gave me invaluable experience in so many ways, and its closing has provided me a renewed fresh outlook on life and what is I ultimately want to do and be. I, of course, will sharing my experience and development as a producer here on this blog, but for starters, check out my about page. The first paragraph succinctly describes how I see me myself and the work I am doing and will be pursuing as my primary career focus:

Ryan Oelke is a Producer who designs and orchestrates ideas, passion, and talent into creative media - from music to podcasting to video. Envisioning and identifying passionate ideas, Ryan has a keen eye for bringing the right mix of talented people together, and cultivating and designing the ideas through his creative and practical direction to bring them to life.

I’m still fine-tuning my focus as a producer and doing a good deal of experimenting, so if you’re interested, you can share in my process on this blog.

I’d like to mention a few folks who have been invaluable and wonderful in helping me through this: Gwen Bell, a good friend and brilliant woman, has and continues to be phenomenal on all accounts. She has catalyzed my internal process, given me insight, and has also been my go-to person for all-things design. Eric Wolterstorff, a business consultant, of Shifting Culture has also rocked my world with his ability to dig in deep, cut the BS, and also to the get at the big picture and then ground that into something real. In fact, “business consultant” seems woefully inadequate to describe my relationship with him and what he gives me. I had a meeting with Eric yesterday that is further propelling me to clarity and direction. Last, but not least, Lion Albaugh, my good friend and the crazy guy who started Falling Fruit with me, continues to be a person that shares so many of the same passions as I and I love talking producing with him, and hope we continue to find projects to work together on.

A few things about the site and some things to come: The theme used here is Omnitheme and the creators have been overly helpful in assisting me in working on bugs and any difficulty I have, especially due to my lack of knowledge. Currently, I have done away with the traditional blog page - blog posts listed on the front page with the current on top. The tabbed section on the home page pull posts from a handful of categories that the tabs indicate. The default tab on the left shows the most current post. You can see older posts through the categories and archives in the side. If you subscribe via rss, this probably won’t even matter.

I will be creating separate portfolio(s) site that will be linked from the About page and in the sidebar.

If you really want get friendly, check out my Tumblr blog and follow me on Twitter. The Tubmlelog will have more frequent, but shorter posts around a lot of the topics I write about here, including personal stuff. And you should know what Twitter is by now:)

If you need a productivity boost in the virtual realm of dealing with bits, today’s your lucky day, because the first episode of Precision Change, Falling Fruit’s new personal development/productivity show is an interview with none other than Mark Hurst himself. And guess what? You can listen to it right here on my site because we’ve also launched our custom created, innovative audio embed player!:)

If you’d like to share any of the episodes from our shows, now you can:) Just grab the embed code, copy and paste. One note, it’ll show up like it is here with the "share" and "subscribe" menus dropped down. Hey, I said it’s innovative, which also means tweaking bugs:P

Unlike other blog sites that recycle tired old aphorisms and
over-generalizations, we will focus on precise, practical ways to bring about change using the richest and deepest models available, backed by real experience. We will wrestle with complex issues while keeping it simple.

Think of it as personal development 201.

Also, Falling Fruit TV is launching a companion podcast on April 2nd, also called Precision Change.

You want more. More from your career, more from your time, more from
your life. To get more you’ve got to grow, from the inside out. Growth
is not always easy, but it can be a lot of fun, and a healthy
challenge. Precision Change is a show about growth. We explore the
technologies of transformation—from personal productivity to personal
power, lifehacks to life mastery, GTD to NLP, and other acronyms you’ve
never heard of.

Our first guest is Mark Hurst, author of "Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and Email Overload". We already have several well-known personal development bloggers on the schedule, and one HUGE productivity author on the bill. Stay tuned for it’s launch!

Check out my first post on Precision Change, "Overcoming Obstacles by Listening to the Voices in Your Head".

As Executive Producer, I’m pretty geeky about the studio at Falling Fruit, to say the least, and I thought I’d give you all a little tour of the space where our shows are recorded and produced. I’ll cover our studio in layperson’s terms, but I’ll also throw in some geeky lingo for those audio/producer nuts out there:)

Our studio is located just off of the Pearl Street Mall in downtown Boulder, Colorado. Pearl Street is one of my most favorite places to hang out in Boulder, not for the shopping really, but for the awesome coffee shops! Around the corner from us are the Boulder Bookstore and Bookend’s Cafe, and down the street are Trident and Saxy’s Cafe. On any given day you’re likely to find some of the Falling Fruit gang at one of these joints sipping on some tea. Before dropping into our studio, I highly recommend any of these cafes:)

Now, on to the studio! When designing and creating our studio we had two goals: 1. To make the experience inviting, warm, and exciting. 2. To be professional and have the capability of producing high-quality audio content. Basically this comes down to aesthetics and technology, both of which we emphasize equally. Our shows are similar to talk-radio shows in nature, and often radio stations have great technology and gear, but you feel like your in a sterile, boxed-in environment. We want you to feel like your in a warm, cozy living room as much as possible:) At the same time, we set our studio up with the same equipment you’d find in any professional studio.

The first thing you see when coming to our studio is the “green room“. This is a space where hosts, guests, and producers hang out before recording an episode. It’s a relaxed, informal space, and is a great space to get to know one another and to chat about the topic of the episode prior to recording. It also happens to be a prime hacky sack space for Falling Fruit when we’re not recording:)

Next is the recording studio. Hosts and guests grab a seat at the broadcast table, where we have five broadcast mics (industry standard, Shure SM7B’s). These mics make you sound smooth, with a nice radio voice, although it doesn’t guarantee you’ll sound Theolicious Now, you don’t have to be in the studio to be on an episode. Non-local guests are brought into the conversation via Skype, and we set it up so everyone can hear everyone else. All in all, we can have five people in the studio and, theoretically, an infinite number of folks non-local (though we prefer no more than two or three).

Now, for the geeky tech stuff, for those of you interested:) To help everyone sound the best they can, we run everyone’s voice through a voice-processors during the recording (we use DBX’s). After the recording we edit the audio in Pro Tools, another industry standard and favorite. We use Garage Band 08 to piece together the main parts of an episode (intro, dialogue, outro). We also use Garage Band and Apple Loops to create the music in our shows. For the voice-overs, we have an special mic (Shure KM32) and a vocal booth. At the heart of everything is our Mac Pro (we’re Apple addicts at Falling Fruit).

We have other gear that we use to make our shows sound great, including equipment to record outside of our studio, which I’m excited to try:) If you have any questions about our studio, geeky or not, feel free to ask in the comment section.