Many years ago, some brilliant people from the Ivy League (nothing to do with the schools – The Ivy League was a one hit wonder band from the early 80s) realized that Halloween is too awesome to only celebrate once a year.  Now Halloween Day is an annual tradition in honor of Halloween that happens every year on May 31.

Halloween Day was a big deal around the bnotions and Harth TV offices.

I brought out my special occasion cape for it.

Front:

Rear:

Peep the costumes at the office:

Who Ya Gonna Call?  Maybe Carolyn…

Regina is an 80s girl.  You might think Marie from Nat & Marie did not participate, BUT…

…she is an Olympian rockin’ the official gear and the official sponsor’s food.

Happy Halloween Day to everyone!  Make sure your workplace takes part next year if you didn’t on this one!

On the way back from our adventure in Austin, Texas, there was only one all-out touristy thing that we all wanted to do: visit Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee.

The man’s flying 2 bedroom apartment, named after his daughter.

This is where Elvis received The Beatles when they dropped by to visit.

They make a big point about how Elvis spent most of his time upstairs, and only came downstairs when people came over. Also, no one ever got to go upstairs – that was his private space. And so they’re not going to show us the upstairs out of respect. #EPICFAIL #WACK

So here we are going downstairs – but it’s cool because the whole stairway is mirrored!

The basement:

The sign on the TV set above reads “Gift from RCA to Elvis for the sale of 50 million records between the years of 1956 and 1960.”

This was the part I perked up at the most – the display case with the memorabilia from Elvis’ 1968 prime time TV special. He hadn’t had a hit in a while, and had been out of the public eye for a few years. It’s scarier for a performer to go out after he’s been big and isn’t so much any more than it is when he’s just starting and no one knows who he is yet. And on the show you can see how nervous Elvis is.

#WANT

This trophy room used to be Elvis’ personal racquetball court:

The house itself was way more modest than you might think, being that it’s the home of one of the biggest stars of all time, but it’s decked out so that you can see where Elvis got bored and decided to mess with a part of the house to make a new hangout pad for he and his friends.

I was really disappointed to not see the upstairs, especially after they play up how it was Elvis’ private space. And it’s chilling to reach the end of the tour, be standing at the graves of Elvis, both of his parents, and his grandmother, and realize that he was only 42 when he died.

I’m glad that, like the Hollywood sign, I got to see one of those things I always wanted to see through my own eyes.

And I’m glad that a quick stop into the gift shop means that DMC has a homey to kick it with.

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

★

The Sean Ward Show was a series of underground cinema events.  Each edition of The Sean Ward Show was presented as “an episode of a fake TV show.  Original comedy videos are put up on a screen, my latest comic book is the cartoon segment, the musical guest is performing live right in front of you, and the party scene is all around you.”

Here, presented together for the first time, is the entire collection of The Sean Ward Show, Series 1 videos.

The Sean Ward Show Intro:

Feature Presentation:

Sean Ward’s Magic Marker – a meditation on work, creativity, and the Artist’s struggle.  Featuring the motion picture debut of The Ruby Spirit when they had still only played a handful of local shows.

Sean Ward VS. Billy Blackout (SPOILER: at the live event where this movie premiered, we reached the part at the end about “what’s in the bottom of that box”, brought the lights up, and revealed that we had a new CD for sale.  Billy Blackout then crashed the party and shot the place up with silly string)

Comics Convolution – with special guest star Ed the Sock (former national television personality and host of Canada’s all-time #1 rated late night comedy program, Ed’s Night Party).  The audio in this video is a saga unto itself.  This was uploaded when YouTube was still pretty new and there were frequent problems with the audio of the videos you would upload.  I’m sure that it was somehow something to do with a shitty mix on our part, but after several attempts at re-mixing, re-exporting, and re-uploading, there came a point where we had to just accept that this was the best we were going to get it.

Segments:

What Would Sean Ward Do?

What Would Sean Ward Do? pt. 2

Blaxx Raps in the Park

Sean Ward’s Favorite Sport

What Would Sean Ward Do? pt. 3

Sean Ward Goes Lookin’ – Sean Ward Goes Lookin’ for Inspiration

Sean Ward Goes Lookin’ pt. 2 – Sean Ward Goes Lookin’ for The Microphone
photographed live on the convention floor at Toronto Comicon!

Live Performance:

Musical performance was always a vital part of the excitement of The Sean Ward Show. This event series proved to be a launching pad for some of Toronto’s best talent including the genesis of Ubiquitous Synergy Seeker, and some of the earliest performances by The Ruby Spirit.

By the time we’d reach the end of the show we were always well into party mode. We would always close on a massive freestyle session.

The Event

Here’s a look at a few moments from the The Sean Ward Show live events..

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

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!

It was cold out for Nuit blanche this year, but you know we kept it hot.

Nuit Blanche 2010 in two parts:

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PART ONE

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PART TWO

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EDIT: Melissa Smich dropped her own video, complete with an original freestyle rap by yours truly.  And then she drops out of the race!!!  Yeah, some kind of conflict of interest with her new job.

photos by Jonathan Greenwald (@shrued on Twitter)

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And then, just for fun, a blast from the past:

NUIT BLANCHE: THE MOVIE (2007)

Also check out Mike’s blog post of the night (clicky)

Follow me on Twitter and maybe we can go out for Nuit Blanche next year: @seanward

Harvey Pekar was an influential underground comic book creator who paved the way for a lot of what I was able to do with comics from 2002-2007.  His stories were taken straight from real life.  He looked at the comic book as the finished work of art, not any one page or story in it.  He didn’t want to do strips in the newspaper, nor was he able to give you anything less than the ugly truth about everything.

When I was making semi-autobiographical comic books and trying to get a publisher to distribute them, one of the comments I got from them was “we want to see more than just stories about your life”.  I would ask “what about what Harvey Pekar does?”

Maybe I just wasn’t as good as him.

The movie based on Pekar’s art and life – American Splendor, named for the title of his comic book series – is a modern classic and a groundbreaking work that chops up the boundaries between comics and movies in ways that no other comics adaptation has yet attempted.

This past weekend, Toronto was overrun by the North by Northeast music festival and conference. This year was the biggest and best ever with a headlining performance by Iggy & The Stooges that shut down one of the city’s major downtown intersections, and the inaugural edition of the Interactive portion of the festival.

Here is my footage of four days of the festival.

Day One

On Day One of the fest, I got to chat with Andrew Baron (founder of the smash hit online video series Rocketboom) and with Jason Theodor (an advertising executive who had some really insightful things to say about creativity).

Day Two

On Day Two, I got some face time with the Festival’s headlining speaker, Ze Frank as well as some (not-so) serious face time with Erin Bury.

Day Three

On Day Three, the MuchMusic building was the epicentre of a massive blackout that affected many of the venues hosting festival concerts. Preparations for the MMVAs continued, the Muchmusic building apparently running on its own generators, illuminating the darkness of the rest of the neighborhood.

Day Four

On the final day of the festival, headliners Iggy & The Stooges played to a massive crowd in Dundas Square, with one of the city’s most major intersections closed to traffic. The free show went off without incident and the festival closed with a bang.

these videos were produced and edited by me as part of my Daily Vlog

Subscribe to my Youtube channel for a new video every single day

photographed by Zaira Gaudio

special thanks to Bite TV

What was your favorite thing that you saw at this year’s North by Northeast?

The above photo was snapped during one of the best incidences of being recognized of my whole life.

Last week I had been listening to the Snoop Dogg album Malice N Wonderland when my favorite track came on – That’s the Homey.

I tweeted a quote from the song:

When you say my name, they goh’n say “That’s the homey!”

The next day I was hanging out in the window seat of a coffee shop on Bloor Street when a dude passed by.  I had enjoyed a ‘jazz cigarette’ earlier that afternoon so I was a little spacey when he smacked on the window to get my attention, pointed at me, and shouted “That’s the homey!!!”

I was smiling big at that point already, but then he came back to take my picture and just posted it to Twitter just now.  And there it is at the top of this post!

Spread love to Pj – visit thepeej.ca and follow @thepeej on Twitter.  He’s been holding it down since ’99.  He knows what’s up.