We want to feature different crew members on our home page, and are doing a little contest to find a crew member to feature.

There are 2 ways to enter:

1. On Twitter: simply follow @1secondfilm on twitter and RT this tweet: http://twitter.com/#!/1secondfilm/status/51303933972459521

Two big pieces of news to share. First, we received a Google Grant. This will mean up to $120,000 in free Google Adwords for our non-profit ($10k/month). This is something I've been working toward for awhile- first with getting our 501(c)3 status for the Collaboration Foundation, and then applying 7 months ago (the review process takes awhile). The Google Grant is a really great program, and I am excited to put it to use to drive more targeted traffic to our site.

So much has been evolving, both in my life and with this project. I wanted to share what has been going on, and how it is shaping our production.

First, I've started working on some freelance jobs, while continuing to work on The 1 Second Film part-time.

This week, we finally got Varnish installed on our servers. Varnish helps our Drupal site performance by making better use of cache to serve up content (instead of the database), and will allow our site to handle a lot more anonymous visitors (hopefully!).

We are still making other site improvements. The site is still pretty slow, and we also need to improve performance for logged in users. Basically, there is a lot of tech to do. We don't have the resources to do everything, but we want to make  sure we make the most of what we have.

Actor and environmentalist Ed Begley Jr. is now our Executive Producer, thanks to the help of our twitter crew!

Back in April, @julicrockett tweeted us a wish that we get @edbegleyjr to join our crew:

We're looking for a few interns for the summer. For details, download this flier. Thanks!

The last few weeks we've been putting in a ton of work fixing up our bus to get it ready to go back on the road. Our bus, originally created for our Road to Oprah tour, was covered in graffiti during the time we were building our new website. Here is a look back at that:

We did our best to clean off the graffiti, but it was clear the bus would need a repaint. Here is what it looked like when we started:

Time to design a new flier. I haven't made a new flier in 2 years. But with the launch of the new site, and our bus getting ready to hit the road, it was time for a refresh. You can see the evolution of our fliers here.

We're also trying out a new tag line: "It's funny. But it's not a joke."

I wanted to share what has been happening.

We have had an awesome new volunteer in the office last week, Hayden Ramsey. Hayden has been helping with data entry, which has been super helpful. We've been creating profiles for all the crew members who helped with the original animation painting event, as well as adding various credits to existing crew member profiles. It's a tedious task that will help us keep track of the thousands of people we have to thank moving forward. Logistics.

When Michael Cera donated $1 at the coffee shop last week, I asked  if he would like to open his credit up to allow others to donate toward him.