Independent filmmaker Ryan Gielen recently screened his first feature film, The Graduates, a coming-of-age comedy about four high school grads and beach week in Ocean City. “It’s a perfect summer film: funny, beachy, uplifting…it’s like Boogie Nights or Superbad set at the beach,” shares Gielen, who shot the film with his brother on a tight budget of $96,000. The pair plans to continue screenings throughout the Northeast and then do the festival circuit in the fall. “Our ideal situation is that a distributor sees the film with an audience, feels the incredible response, scoops it up and puts it in theaters next spring or summer.”

Given the tight budget, Ryan and team had to be creative: “We begged for deals on equipment, we borrowed props and wardrobe, and we stole…a lot. Just kidding, we never stole anything, but we were always able to beg our way into borrowing.” He found that the best way to succeed was to be honest about their vision. “We told people how few resources we had and how badly we wanted to make our project. If you can articulate why you’re so passionate, people will line up to help in whatever way they can, because people genuinely want to help others reach their dreams.”

To get a taste of The Graduates, visit their website to view the trailer; also be sure to check out their feature in the Washington Post.

Alex Wilkins recently released his first full album, “Good Boy Charm” with Tripp, a band he helped found in 2004 while working in Admissions at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina. Over the past few years, Tripp has steadily built up a strong fan base and portfolio of original material, so when Alex finalized a new line-up of band members at the end of last year, Alex jumped right into the studio. “While the various incarnations of Tripp had self-recorded demos, we decided late last year to head into an actual studio and put down some of our original songs. Starting in December, we began recording at Warrior Sound in Chapel Hill and ultimately finished ten tracks in March for a May release,” shared Alex, who has been performing in front of audiences from an early age.

“Our primary audience in Chapel Hill has to date been students, but this has recently expanded thanks to shows with other local and regional bands. Our goal with Good Boy Charm is to expand our audience beyond Chapel Hill and North Carolina.” As Alex prepares to head out of town for a variety of gigs around the southeast, he realizes that there may be some tough times ahead. “It will be difficult balancing part-time jobs with touring, but we love the music so much, especially playing in front of new audiences, that the exhaustion won’t be so bad.” To learn more about the band and to listen to some of their newly released songs, check out their website.

Joung Lee is a Senior Analyst for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. He’s also a 28-year-old in a field that skews toward older demographics. Because transportation professionals are spread across the country, Joung started Young Professionals in Transportation (YPT) in April 2008 to connect his peers and grow interest in his field of work. YPT already has over 200 members, and Joung hopes to grow the organization over the coming months.

“There are existing groups that cater to women in transportation and to young urban planners, among others, but this is the first group to cater specifically to the young transportation element,” said Joung. “Many young professionals starting out in transportation seek peers with whom they can better relate in addition to their older colleagues, but because the field is so scattered, it magnifies the difficulty of seeking your cohorts. YPT aims to act as a catalyst and a gathering point that had been missing.”

Joung sees YPT both as a forum for networking among professionals already in the transportation field, and as a way of raising awareness about the field’s critical role in society. “Transportation infrastructure plays an underpinning role in our economy and our quality of life,” Joung said. “Right now, the U.S. is lagging far behind in terms of infrastructure investment in general. I hope YPT can help to raise awareness among the general public that transportation can’t be taken for granted.”

Freelance photographer and world traveler, Mia Baxter, recently completed a book tour with friend and co-author Jenna Bush for Ana’s Story, a book they worked on together about a 17 year old single mother in Latin America. “Jenna and I were documenting the lives of children living in exclusion in Latin America for U.S. Fund for UNICEF – her writing with my photographs. We were documenting Ana’s life and story this way, when it grew in to a book proposal. We met with publishers in NY during our holiday break last January, and Harper Collins gave us a chance. They believed in this project and I think it has been an incredibly positive experience for everyone. The proceeds of the book go to UNICEF and an education fund for Ana (who is now back in school).” Mia’s photographs play a key role in telling Ana’s story. “I am a strong believer in photography as a powerful tool in visual communication. Words tell truth as photographs display truth–they enhance the reality of a given truth. In Ana’s Story, one can see that Ana’s face is never fully disclosed. If people in her community found out that she is HIV positive she would face severe discrimination, be kicked out of school, or possibly even hurt. This protection of her identity, in combination with the detailed environmental photographs in the book, should enhance the fact that HIV/AIDS is real, that poverty and abuse are real, that the awful stigmas and injustices faced by far too many young people like Ana are real and are serious problems.”

To view more of Mia’s work, visit her website. She is currently living in New York but continues to work with aid organizations as a freelance photographer. “In this industry I have learned that each project inspires the next and I am often pleasantly surprised by what I get myself into.”

Brett Kirwan, a Navy Lieutenant stationed in Lemoore, California, recently took home $36,600 in winnings from the TV quiz show Jeopardy!. Brett studied Politics and East Asian Studies at Washington & Lee University. His diverse interests paid off when he won two shows and led the third show going into the Final Jeopardy round.

Though Kirwan has always been a Jeopardy! fan, he didn’t start watching regularly until fall of 2006. “That’s when I got a DVR,” Brett said. “Who’s at home watching TV at 7:30 anyway? After I took the contestant exam, I made a concerted effort to watch every episode just in case I got ‘The Call.’”

Getting on Jeopardy! required smarts as well as a little luck. “I started by taking the online contestant exam in January 2007,” shared Brett, “which I’ve read that about 200,000 people took. In October, I unexpectedly received an e-mail inviting me to audition for the show and again, I was lucky enough to get ‘The Call’ inviting me to appear on the show. There are only 400 spots a year for new contestants, but they audition thousands. The producers said they were looking for an interesting, diverse pool of contestants, so the fact that I was a 25-year-old Naval Officer from Cleveland must have helped.”

Brett remained poised and confident in his Navy uniform throughout the shows. But was there anything Brett was embarrassed to know? “A lot of people have given me a hard time for knowing the answers in the Fashion category. But being in the Navy, I’m also embarrassed to have missed the question about the USS Constitution. That, and the last Final Jeopardy question I missed.”

Andrew Grimes is a Lexington, Kentucky based entrepreneur and wildlife and travel photographer currently working to develop a photography website, InTheRestOfTheWorld.com. “I want people to look at the images on ITROTW and want to travel to the over 100 countries that are represented, to want to see the animals in their natural habitats, and to want to see the sunset from across the world.”

During the day Andrew works with the Social Marketing and Digital PR Team at New Media Strategies (NMS). NMS is a pioneer and leader in the online intelligence, brand promotion and brand protection industry has been one of Inc. 500’s Fastest Growing Companies in America for three years running. Andrew is also currently juggling his MBA coursework at the University of Kentucky. Sharing images of the world is at the heart of Andrew’s work. “I want people to look at In The Rest Of The World and feel emotion that would hopefully lead them to experience the vast beauty that lies beyond the US.’”

New-media renaissance man Bill Bowles, best known for his round-the-world vidcasts at MyNameIsBill.com, today launched a new project at MeetThePlayGroup.com. “Unlike my last project, this one will follow the same people over the course of six weeks. Its the behind-the-scenes story of a struggling theater company in San Francisco. I will follow the many adventures and misadventures of “The Play Group” as they try to get ahead in the fast paced world of independent theater production,” shared Bill, who is pleased to be keeping his vidcasting skills in top shape while he finalizes plans for his next project. MTPG episodes will air three times a week; click here to view the first episode.

Communications specialist and newly-minted microfinance guru Lindsay Clinton recently started a new position as the lead editor of Microfinance Insights, a Mumbai-based publication through Intellecap. “Last fall, I read Muhammed Yunus’ book, Banker to the Poor, which piqued my interest in microfinance as a tool to empower women and develop emerging economies,” shares Clinton, who then began a wide search for a position linked to this field. She came across the Intellecap position soon later and flew to India to meet with them. “The position appealed to me for multiple reasons: I can use my current skill set to write, edit, and direct content; I will develop a brand and manage a small business; and I’ll have the chance to learn the insides of a new sector.”

Lindsay will be moving to India this week, after three years working with The White House Project, a NY-based advocacy nonprofit. “The White House Project has reached new heights. We just finished our most substantial undertaking, a summit through brought together women presidents and prime ministers to talk about global security. It’s hard to leave this organization, after seeing what incredible work we can do, but it’s good to go out on a high note.” You can follow along with Lindsay’s work in India through microfinanceinsights.com

Cambridge Ph.D. graduate Rob Perrons recently began work as a Smart Fields Consultant for Shell Internationall, his employer since early 1997. He has traveled along an interesting path to get there. This is his story: “My area of expertise in the oil industry is called Production Engineering, which basically entails getting the stuff from the reservoir to the surface and then making sure that it gets distributed to some kind of useful end via a boat or pipeline. My first posting with Shell in 1997 happened to be in the UK, and pretty much all of the UK’s non-trivial oil & gas reserves are offshore. Thus, what might sound like an exotic adventure to some is actually pretty standard fare in the North Sea. Thousands of guys suit up and fly off to those platforms every week. Talking about the industry all day from an ivory tower in London doesn’t teach you about what’s really going on out there. You really have to get the dirt under your fingernails for a while to understand that end of the business.”

In 2001, Rob was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at Cambridge University. “My PhD focused on technology management and, when I was investigating the possibility of returning to Shell upon graduating, this new experience opened up a neat opportunity for me. A fascinating job popped up: ‘Executive Coordinator of R&D’. In a nutshell, this job entailed keeping things ticking over within and among the executive-level people in Shell’s upstream R&D program. If a foreign government official was coming to visit Shell to see what we were capable of with regards to technological savvy, I would organize the speech/presentation. I wasn’t an executive; rather, I was the guy behind the scenes who made sure that the executives’ jobs looked easy. When a decision was required from the team, I would coalesce all the relevant facts into bite-size options that the management team could choose from.” This ultimately led to his current position working with Smart Fields.

“‘Smart Fields’ is essentially Shell’s attempt to drag the oil patch into the information age. The oil & gas industry has historically pivoted on people making extremely imperfect guesses with extremely imperfect data (a predictable consequence of trying to engineer something a few miles below the earth’s surface via a hole a few inches wide). By adding an appropriate amount and kind of sensors, and then putting the resulting data into the right hands, we’re trying to do a better job of real-time optimization than has been the case in the past. Example: natural gas sits on top of the oil within a hydrocarbon reservoir. As the reservoir is depleted, the oil and gas contact line—that is, the interface between the two phases—shifts around. But how? Knowing precisely how the reservoir is changing would allow us to manage it much more intelligently, thereby making it possible to optimize the overall recovery. In years gone by, a reservoir engineer would make an educated guess and then live with it for decades. Many years after the original assumption, it might be revealed that he/she grossly misunderstood the situation—but by then it’s too late. Smart Fields, by stark contrast, involves putting sensors at strategic points throughout the reservoir so that we can “see” in real-time what’s going on down there. And once we have this information, we then make sure that the right people are receiving it so that they can stay on top of the situation and modify how they’re managing the field. This basic concept of capturing the most salient bits of data and then using them for continuous optimization is at the heart of Smart Fields, and it can be applied in everything we do.”

“The whole industry is now galloping in this direction, and I knew two years ago that I could carve out a fascinating niche for myself if I got in on the ground level of this. I’ve done some writing about this stuff, incidentally. I’ve discovered that, for all its money, this industry doesn’t see patterns in how technologies evolve. I’m trying to help it see these situations a little more clearly—and I seem to be earning a surprising amount of “street cred” by doing so.” Rob also wanted to impart some advice to prospective applicants to Shell: “Good news: you can help to deliver energy to a world that is desperately screaming for more of the stuff, and you can make sure that it’s delivered in as environmentally friendly and socially responsible a way as possible. Bad news: brace yourself for one helluva wait, as nothing happens quickly in this business.” For more on Rob’s work, check out his homepage.

Jenny Magill is an Americorps VISTA volunteer, working with the Nashville area CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates). CASA provides trained advocates to children who have been victims of abuse or neglect, and Jenny focuses on recruiting volunteers, raising money, and increasing public awareness of child abuse and CASA’s program. She recently designed and is now implementing a comprehensive volunteer recruitment plan, targeting the need for more male and minority volunteers; she also organized the Red Shoe Party benefit which was held this past weekend.

“My job is never boring! I give presentations to community groups, contact and talk with media outlets about publicity opportunities, host info tables at local events and conferences, meet with potential volunteers, and seek out new partnerships with community groups and businesses,” shared Jenny. CASA is the only organization providing advocates to abused and neglected children in the Nashville area. CASA is only able to serve about 1/3 of the children in need currently, so more volunteers are needed to increase capacity. “The best thing about my job is the knowledge that putting in my best effort will truly make a difference to the children and families we serve, and to the community as a whole.”

“The 9th annual Red Shoe Party, our biggest fundraiser event, was held Saturday, April 12th. In honor of the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s ‘ruby red’ slippers, and the theme that ‘there’s no place like home’ for the children we serve, the Red Shoe Party is an opportunity to celebrate the dedication and generosity of our incredible volunteers and to raise needed funds for the continued success of our program.”