It's Summer at Smoke Break Pictures

By Garrett Strpko

Folks,
Summer is well upon us by now. You may have noticed there's been a lot less communication coming from Smoke Break Pictures since we won the Audience Choice Award at Adrian International Film Festival, an honor from which we are still reeling. This is because this summer has already been keeping all of us busy.
Jacob just came back from the trip of a lifetime to Europe through MSU where he has been studying media and mass communication through the form of video, photography, and travel blogging. Ben is working hard as a Program Counselor at Camp Roger, a Christian summer camp outside of Grand Rapids. As for myself, me and several friends from Calvin just moved into a new house in Grand Rapids, and we have been busy putting our home together and getting to know the greater Grand Rapids community even better.
For all of us at Smoke Break, it's been a fun and exciting time where we've already learned a lot of new things, things that will likely make their way into our work in beautiful and creative ways looking forward. And what lies ahead, exactly? Well, we're working on figuring some of that out for our ourselves. Winning the Audience Choice Award was surely an unexpected jolt we needed to begin thinking bigger about our projects, and a lot of that thinking honestly still needs to be done. But, we are looking forward to both continuing what we've started and ramping up that which we've envisioned.
Among these things is the SBPodcast, which you can expect to start back up at the beginning of July when Jacob and I will be joined by local Grand Rapids musician and fellow Calvin College student Luke Enders. We will also become more committed to regular blog posts about movies, music, culture, and anything else we find interesting. Expect to see some new blog posts within the next week even from yours truly. As far as film projects, keep your eyes and ears open for some surprise announcements and new projects that we'll be posting throughout the summer.
We look forward to sharing more stories with you through our various projects and are excited to get back at it this summer.
Sincerely,
Garrett and the SBP Team

P.S.
If you'd like to read Jacob's blog from his trip, you can find it here: https://msumassmediaintheuk.com/tag/mcdowell/

I'm also trying my hand at songwriting and recording music recently. I won't try and make you think it's actually any good, but I would appreciate it if you gave me a listen. My new song 'Perfect Crush' is now available on Soundcloud here: https://soundcloud.com/user-853574273-346371206

Also be sure to follow Jacob on Soundcloud; we often post stuff we do together or that he does himself on there. It's that good LoFi cover trash:
​https://soundcloud.com/jacob-mcdowell-7