What up to my contest winners: Aleks, Reado, Shaun Hawaii, Aaron Broverman ★ Gail Gabrielle, 40deuce, Dave Coleman, and props to Jon (the Big Thinker)

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You know I’ve got you.  I’m your connection.  So check out this video – catch the game from the best seats in the house and come behind-the-scenes into the heart of the Air Canada Centre…

This was one of those experiences you’ve heard me talk about that you just can’t buy.  These aren’t just great seats that we were sitting in…

We were sitting in the seats that belong to Richard Peddie, President of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (basically, the boss of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Toronto Raptors, Toronto FC, and Toronto Marlies).

↑ Our tickets!  These seats are incredible.  We were dead on centre ice, nine rows up.  We could see everything, right down to the expressions on the the players’ faces as they left the bench or the penalty box.

My press pass

Here’s me and Jon Sinden, my host for this game.  Jon is the community manager for MLSE so he runs the Twitter and Facebook for all of those teams I just mentioned, in addition to a whole bunch of branding and outreach activities.  Jon is one of those friends who I don’t see as often as I would like, but when we do spend time together it’s always tremendously eventful and inspiring.  We’ve got a few projects we’re cooking up (hence why I got to go to this game), so keep this site open in a browser tab for when that drops.

Here’s where Jon works (I presume) ↑

Sonny Weems from the Toronto Raptors sat two rows in front of us!

Face off!

Penalty!

Goal!

Fight!

Another goal! Doesn’t Anaheim’s goalie look dejected??

This game was amazing.  It was as close to the perfect game of hockey as I’ve ever heard of.  It was fast-paced, high-scoring, low on fights and penalties, and the home team won.  I saw the most amazing goals I’ve ever seen.  I’ve always said that the Leafs come off like a bunch of guys bumbling around, accidentally scoring goals once in a while.  But for this game they were smooth and in control.

I’m still overjoyed now, a day later, over how for all the games I could have been invited to with this unbelievable level of access, I got to be there for this game in particular.  Just brilliant.

Here’s me with broadcasting legend Andy Frost, the Voice of the Leafs and radio personality heard on Toronto’s AM640 and Q107 FM:

His voice is so iconic and burned into my subconscious that meeting him and hearing him talk was a trip. He’s a super cool guy and I was really excited to meet him. During 2nd intermission we went to say hello to everyone up in the media gondola. We got to see all of the TV and newspaper people both from here in Toronto and the Anaheim media, covering the away game.

This is a man having an incredibly fun night out.

This was right beside the rink between periods.

Here’s Leafspace Monika running the show during intermission. Remember when she did that freestyle rap for us??

Thanks and congratulations to the Toronto Maple Leafs!

Check out these links for more with me and the Toronto Maple Leafs:
Leafs bum-rush an amateur game and select one player to be Leaf for a Day
Coke Zero Fans First game against the Ottawa Senators

2010 was the year that blogging & social media exploded, and thanks to my daily videos and status as an influencer I was able to connect with a whole bunch of luminaries this year:

Chali 2na from Jurassic 5, Ze Frank, Mike Komisarek & Colby Armstrong from the Toronto Maple Leafs, Biz Markie, Colin Mochrie, Tricia Helfer, Trailer Park Boys, Ron Artest from the Los Angeles Lakers…..

It was a year of putting pieces into place, trying different combinations, getting a bunch of “I always wanted to try that”-type-of-things behind me, and doing work to cut & polish the vision for what I want to do in art, comics, movies, and music.

When 2010 started out, I was about six months into doing Super Party as a weekly webcomic.

I was in the hotel room after getting back from partying with Vanilla Ice back in July, 2008 when I got the idea for Super Party. It’s what I had been putting all of my energy into designing and workshopping lo these several years of hustling underground comics like they were the hottest dope on the street.

Six months of a weekly webcomic gave me a platform to hone my joke-writing, develop my supporting cast, pad out the world, and define the style.  But ultimately I realized that’s not the way I like to do comics.  For me it’s the whole thing of privately crafting the story, letting snippets leak out and building mystique around it, and the explosion of it when I finally deliver that story and put a book in people’s hands.

So in January I was doing a weekly Super Party comic strip, and starting to experiment with daily video.

The last weekly Super Party comic strip went up on March 12 as a tribute to the March 11 anniversary of Biggie Smalls’ murder.

That was right after Canada won the Gold Medal in Hockey at the Olympics (and my video of the downtown chaos that ensued went nuts when it was picked up by local media), when Lady Gaga dropped the music video for Telephone and it was like an atomic bomb went off in everyone’s mind…

…and right when I, Raymi the Minx, Casie Stewart, and Carly-Anne Fairlie were preparing our epic Social Media How-To Seminar.

The story of how this event came together has never been told.

Me and Carly-Anne met and had dinner together in December of 2009, talking about where we saw social media and blogging going in 2010.  We had a lot of similar ideas about it, and we thought that we might work well together.  I shared with her my vision for a social media how-to seminar that talked about the finer points of getting ahead as a ‘personality blogger’.  I felt like Casie Stewart, Raymi the Minx, and me were the premier representatives of this style of blogging in Toronto, so we would be the speakers.  Carly would take all of the credit for dreaming up and staging the event, and I would just be one of the esteemed speakers on the bill alongside one of the pioneers of blogging and the then-social media director for MTV and MuchMusic. It was all very strategic around maximizing the cult-of-personality value for everyone, which was basically the subject of my keynote presentation How to Be a Blog Star: The Artistry of Your Personal Brand.

Our event was standing-room-only at Function 13 in Toronto.  I still think that the me/Raymi/Casie combo at that time was one of the most timeless and historic collaborations ever.  We really crystallized a moment, and had a big impact on Toronto’s Internet scene.

The buzz around the Blog Stars event dove-tailed perfectly with Bite TV reaching out to me and inviting me to be one of the founding contributors to their Bite Daily blog.

Glassbox Media (the company that owns both Bite TV and AUX TV) is notorious in the blogging community for not paying much for blog content, but I had other things I wanted to get out of having that platform available to me. I liked that Bite was a brand established in traditional media, but new and off-the-radar enough that we could work cheap & lean, and do exciting things.  I thought that this would be a good chance to take another stab at the kind of thing I didn’t get to do at Ed’s Night Party.

I was their #1 contributor right out of the gate.

At one point, I was the author of all of the top five most popular posts on the site.

I used Bite Daily as a great opportunity to sharpen my comedy writing skills, and it gave me the impetus to start making more ambitious comedy videos.  It got me and Jennica working together again, and I will go on record right now as saying that Jennica is one of the the most most professional, most agreeable, and most delightful collaborators it’s been my pleasure to work with in all of my years in art & entertainment.  I love the hell out of that girl.

I only wrote for Bite Daily for a few months, but during that time it was great fun to know that I was making a splash.  I really believed that their relaunch as an all-comedy channel presented a brilliant opportunity to make history, and I wanted to be a part of it.  But in the end their approach would be more conservative than the ballsy, gonzo, full-frontal-assault that I was looking forward to, and I wouldn’t be taking part in their relaunch.

At the end of March, I got my first smartphone. My relationship with mobile technology would blossom as the year progressed.

Every year during the first weekend of May, Free Comic Book Day is a great time at the Silver Snail and I was particularly proud of my 2010 drawings.

On May 10, I began one of the biggest projects I had yet undertaken – I would post a video blog every single day for a full year.

Here was May 10th’s video, the first in the official series, announcing that I would be resuming the posting of daily videos.  You’ll notice that I don’t mention that I want to do it for a year.  I kept that private because my confidence was at a lull after a series of projects and partnerships not working out the way I had planned on.  I couldn’t stand it if I ended up cutting it short before a year was up and blowing it quite so publicly.

In June, I first met a future friend and frequent collaborator, Miss Lauren O’Nizzle at a #RandomTO.

My North by Northeast coverage was “Best of Toronto”.

I got day-by-day coverage of both the Music portion of the festival and the 1st-ever edition of the Interactive portion.  I got world-exclusive footage from the epicentre of a massive downtown blackout that affected many festival venues, and got up close with Ze Frank, the NXNEi keynote speaker.

crackin’ jokes with Ze Frank

My coverage of the final hour of the stand-off between police and protesters during the weekend of the G20 summit was a huge hit.

And then what I captured proved to be nothing compared to the horrible abuses of Sunday.

By July, I set myself upon a big challenge: I would make a comedy video, shoot the making of it for the next day’s vlog, and post both videos the next day, quietly ‘soft-launching’ series 3 of The Sean Ward Show.  Series 3 of The Sean Ward Show premiered with the release of the silliness titled Stuntman Steve and the Big Dream.  This was my first experience with the partnership known as The Wonder Mint, and the video would not have been made were it not for them.

When it was Michael Nus’ birthday, he and I had met but never had a chance to connect so I was surprised and delighted to be invited to this birthday party. After that we were buds, became friends, and remain to this day.

Things got super-hot in the summertime when we turned the Toronto Independent Music Awards into a family affair.

I was the host and our friends The Ruby Spirit were the event’s headlining performers as the previous year’s winners in the ‘Best Live Rock’ category.

Toronto Independent Music Awards night with your host… Me! Interviewed by Lauren O’Nizzle

In August I got my first taste of creating a Trending Topic on Twitter when I was part of the #CokeZeroFansFirst crew, going to ambush a mens’ amateur hockey game to declare one player “Leaf For A Day” at the upcoming Coke Zero Fans First game.  This also gave me my first experience working with the Toronto Maple Leafs.  The actual Coke Zero Fans First game, lost 5-0 to the Ottawa Senators, was quite abysmal by comparison.

interviewing Mike Komisarek, Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs

After that, vlogging got super hot all of a sudden and I was starting to get some really cool invitations to cover stuff.

My Dad surprised the hell out of me when he got us tickets to go to the Paul McCartney concert.

As I neared my Day 100 milestone in my Daily V-Loggin’, I wanted to mark the occasion with something suitably epic.  As Social Media exploded in 2010, our calendars were being increasingly occupied with marketing events, and I noticed the degree to which us within the scene were deriving our self-worth in how many invitations and how much free stuff we were getting from PR companies.

Talkin’ Social Media Blues, premiered at a private Daily V-Loggin’ #100 celebration, stirred up both laughs and controversy within the scene for its satirical commentary on the current Social Media landscape.

If you were a Social Media influencer in 2010, the Toronto International Film Festival was your oyster.

Come Fan Expo time, me and Michael Nus and Lauren O’Nizzle totally repped hard for the bloggers and then got invited to organize an epic blog posse for Toronto Raptors Fan Jam ahead of their home opener.

The theatrical releases of Nowhere Boy and The Social Network were each a big deal in my world.

And then it was time for my next release.

My next short film was the much-forwarded William Shakespeare’s Antoine Dodson and the Bed Intruder of Lincoln Park.

It was pretty awesome to perform with the Trailer Park Boys and get closer to Mike Smith (Bubbles) than traditional media can get.

This year was all about the daily videos.  Nothing was going to stop me from keeping it going every day – not being sick, not being too busy, and definitely not breaking up with a girl.

As 2010 neared an end, I launched a new show with TheCellularGuru.com – MOBILE DATA – after a series of successful videos featuring the iPhone 4, Blackberry Torch, and Samsung Galaxy.

When the Los Angeles Lakers came to town to play the Toronto Raptors, I was one of the artists invited to exhibit in the Loveable Badass: Artists on Artest art show.  Ron Artest, Forward for the Los Angeles Lakers, dropped by the show the night before his big game!

At the end of the year, I dedicated my 2010 Christmas Record to the fans, and raised funds for War Child Canada by organizing a great big Twitter Christmas Pageant and Talent Show.

Thanks to all of my friends, fans, and supporters for giving me a spectacular year, one full of growth and rebirth.  I think I felt more me than ever this year, and I’ll keep pushing in 2011. So buy my art and hire me to make your videos!!!

To the ladies: stay beautiful (not that you have to worry because you’re always beautiful to me).

To the children: The grown folk don’t know any more than you do. Keep the ideas you’re having now safe.

“Nothing to get hung about.”
-John Lennon

When I was a kid, we moved often. The average length of time we lived in any one place was probably two years.  One magnificent summer, we lived out of suitcases and the whole family – Mom, me, and sisters Laura & Lindsay –  moved 9 times in six months.

Moving so much and the complications around having to leave stuff behind, starting all over again just when I’m feeling settled and secure, and never quite knowing when the ground beneath my feet was going to come unstable, it’s made me have trouble with momentum.

That’s what I realized when I looked at where I was investing my attention, and decided to do the one year daily v-loggin’ project.

I knew that it would give me some much-needed structure, and the small day-by-day victory of getting the videos up was what I needed to get a rhythm going and get the juice to tackle other projects.

Now I’m working away on those other projects – writing scripts, plotting pages, dreaming up marketing schemes, etc. – and sometimes I feel like I want to drop the whole daily video thing and just focus on next year’s product launch.  But it doesn’t take long to realize that if I stopped doing daily videos, I would just be doing the same thing I always do – jumping from one big idea to another without staying in any one place long enough to tie them all together.

I set a goal for myself of one full year of daily vlogging.  I will admit, sometimes it’s really difficult and I have to dig deep.  I’m a private person, despite how everyone thinks I’m really extroverted.  And my artistic process is such that sometimes I need to vanish for days at a time, seeing and being seen by no one.

But at the same time, I fully credit doing the daily video project with how I was able to start answering long-lingering questions I’ve been asking myself about how I’m going to tackle the next phase of my career.  I’m very blessed to have been able to live out many of my childhood dreams.  Doing the daily videos, in a weird way, gives me the focus and deep introspection to build the confidence and refine the abilities required to tackle the next set of challenges.  And had it not been for the Daily V-loggin’, I wouldn’t have even met many of the people who are now an important part of my life and my Art.

My Daily V-loggin’ is a sketchbook, a sounding board, and a dream machine.

NEXT: Daily V-loggin’ as a portrait of a city.

That’s me!

At least, that’s how I felt when I got to go on a helicopter ride for the first time in my life.  That’s a pretty fun and big fat checkmark that goes beside an item on my big lifetime must-do list.

Check it out, me and my friend Chelsea going up into the sky:

photo thanks to Richard from shot7.com

Next: Hang gliding? Hot air balloon?

At the end of the video, you will hear us talk about how this was an event put on by Microsoft for their #InTheCloud campaign. We discuss how well we think Microsoft is situated in taking on various web services that are already kind of established.

I collect photos of interesting views of the CN Tower. I had to act fast to switch my camera from video mode to photo mode and get a few snaps from the helicopter. It’s not every day that you get the chance to snap a picture of the CN Tower from above!

Six months in a row of daily videos.

As a gift to myself, I got a Spider-Man t-shirt to add to my growing Spider-Man t-shirt collection.

And now my Spider-Man t-shirt collection consists of five times:

Which one should I wear the next time you and I hang out?

You’ll notice that the latter portion of the video is an interview with Mike Smith. This is extremely rare, as the performers only ever do interviews in-character. Entertainment Tonight can’t even get this kind of coverage!

Here’s the story: Thanks to a mutual friend between myself and Mike Smith (Bubbles), I got invited to go down to Buffalo to catch the Trailer Park Boys’ performance at Buffalo State College on the Drunk, High, and Unemployed Tour.  It was Lauren O’Nizzle‘s birthday weekend and since she is a big fan of the Boys and she’s one of my best friends & favorite Internet people, I hooked up tickets and backstage passes for her and her fella and it was on like Donkey Kong.

During the show they asked for volunteers from the audience who could sing, and both Lauren and I were up on stage before other people even had a chance to raise their hand.

During Intermission, I interviewed a real live American to find out what she thinks she has learned about Canadian culture from watching Trailer Park Boys:

And after the show, the backstage antics were the Lulz as we got to play an original Trailer Park Boys guitar that had just been autographed by Bubbles….

…and then we went around the way to a little bar called Cole’s where Lauren charmed the hell out of the Boys (which is the kind of thing Lauren is good at)

Good Night, Buffalo!!!

And Happy Birthday to Lauren O’Nizzle!  (Click for her blog post of the event)

The cool kids at Teletoon had another premiere party, inviting a handful of bloggers to their HQ screening room for a sneak peek at the new season of Batman: The Brave and The Bold.

Check out my video of the event right here:

For those who don’t know, Batman: The Brave and The Bold is based on an old comic book series where each issue, Batman would team up with a lesser known character from the DC Comics roster.  On this new TV series, it’s the same thing – Batman teams up in each episode with a character who might not be popular enough to warrant his own show but who the fans would enjoy seeing animated.

This show is the bomb, I don’t mind telling you.  It’s obviously for kids, but it’s catchy and irresistable.  I have wondered for years why so many superhero cartoons are ugly, and why they don’t use the thick-line cartoony style of Powerpuff Girls or Spongebob Squarepants.  This show has finally taken that up.  I love the character design on this show.

One of the things I hate about superhero comics, and why no one gives a shit about them (generally speaking) is because they take themselves too seriously, and maintain a slavish devotion to ‘continuity’.  This show demonstrates how it should be done: there’s tons of little gags and gems for the comic book nerds who know the history, but they don’t care about reinventing the rules to suit the ridiculous story they’re trying to tell.  In one episode alone, we watched Batman fly a rocket ship into space, fly it to another planet in another galaxy in a matter of a few minutes, and then fight a race of aliens with an Iron Man-style robot suit that he changes into with the push of a button.

When they’re trying to be serious and Batman is hanging out on the Moon with Superman and the JLA, I hate it and I’m not interested.  When we’re not supposed to care about it the next time, it’s all in good fun.

I had a contest here on the blog to take a reader with me to Teletoon, and the winner would also get a Batman prize pack courtesy of The Silver Snail (follow them on Twitter! @SilverSnailTO)

What up to all my blogging, Twitter, and Internet brethren who were there: Michael Nus, 40deuce, Alice Quinn, Escape From RL, Sidewalk Hustle, Mental Kavity – drop me a line if I didn’t catch you in this list!!

]]> http://www.seanward.net/3860-batman-the-brave-and-the-bold-season-2-preview/feed/ 0 http://www.seanward.net/3572-how-to-follow-me-on-the-internet/ http://www.seanward.net/3572-how-to-follow-me-on-the-internet/#comments Fri, 15 Oct 2010 20:37:07 +0000 Sean http://www.seanward.net/?p=3572

As you may know, I am an enthusiast of everything to do with the Internet.  I love it.  I will wax philosophical for hours about how I see the Internet evolving and how people and society will evolve with it.

As an enthusiast, influencer, and agitator it might sometimes be hard to follow all of my many goings-on around the Internet.

Here is a quick guide:

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seanward.net

Obviously the thing you should do most of all is come to this website at every opportunity.  Click on everything there is to click, and watch everything there is to watch.

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Social Media Links

Twitter – I am on Twitter all day.  Less the last couple of days since my phone is messed up (where are you, Samsung??), but generally I am tweeting my fingers off all day.  Follow me on Twitter not only for updates and facts, but also for random postings both ridiculous and thoughtful.

Sketchbook Tumblr – I draw all the time.  Sometimes I take a picture of what I’ve drawn and put it up here.

Youtube – If you didn’t know, I am undertaking a personal challenge to post a new video blog to my Youtube channel every day for a year.  As I type this, I reached five months straight a week ago.  Sometimes I think I am an idiot for doing this, but most of the time it’s fun and I really enjoy it.  Would you be so kind as to subscribe to my channel?  Also don’t forget about my other channel, The Sean Ward Show.

Facebook – ‘Like’ my Facebook page to get all of my news in your feed.  Sometimes stuff is exclusive to Facebook so be sure to get on that so you don’t miss a thing.

Dailybooth is where you can look at pictures of me over time.

My Tumblr is where I post interesting things I find around the Internet.

My Posterous is where I post interesting things I find out in the world.

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My Geek-Out Freak-Out

These are the places where I indulge my pop-culture obsessions:

Beatles on the Cover – a cover version of a Beatles song every night at 11:30

The Empire Likes Black – Star Wars stuff: remixes, mash-ups, making-of photos, retro promotional material (original trilogy only!)

Funky Super Stuff – My blog that’s all superheroes and boy cartoons

Nintendoez – Vintage & retro video game stuff