AUSTIN — The purpose of most music videos is to simply showcase the artist and the song that they’re singing. They’re marketing tools, essentially.

Josephine Decker didn’t want to make that kind of video. Sure, she was interested in promoting her friend, Brooklyn singer Charlie Hewson and his song, “Where Are You Going, Elena.” But she also wanted a chance to be creative in her own right while digging into the song’s themes.

Decker, a Highland Park High School graduate who lives in Brooklyn, came to SXSW last year with her documentary Bi the Way, which explores the trend of bisexuality among young people. After traveling the country documenting these stories, it was time to put a little more of herself into her next project.

“I had been making docs since college and it can be creative, but I like making things up and creating a fantastical world,” she said.

“Elena” provided the perfect avenue for that. It’s sung from the perspective of a diner regular who is saddened when his favorite waitress suddenly quits her job. In the video, Elena sets down her tray and literally runs out the door.

The theme of female unhappiness struck a chord with Decker. She started a women’s organization while at Princeton called Organization of Women Leaders (OWL), and she says she’s long been interested in the struggles that women face in their professional lives. Elena’s dissatisfaction resonated.

“The thing isn’t that she doesn’t like her job. It’s that she doesn’t feel appreciated.”

You’ll be happy to know that ultimately, Elena does feel appreciated – by the utensils in the diner. When they run out the door after her, begging her to come back, things start to look up.

She’s currently shopping the video to Web sites; when she has a deal, we’ll be sure to post a link to it. Until then, she’s hard at work on a Web series about an 8-year-old with imaginary friends (The John Show) and developing a narrative feature about a girl who holds funerals for friends who cross her (An Emily and the Darkness).

And, oh yeah – she’s formed an accordion/banjo band with Hewson that plays everything from oldies to Justin Timberlake covers.

It looks like that creative itch from making all those docs is being scratched nicely.

The creators of TileStack, Joshua Gertzen (left) and Ted C. Howard.

Remember when I mentioned yesterday that apps would start becoming more available to consumers on mobile devices? What if you could create your own?

I ran into Dallas-based company TileStack at the SXSW Interactive Tradeshow, and they are leading the way when it comes to consumer app development.

Based off Apple’s old Hypercard application, the community-oriented Web site allows non-programmers to create their own widgets and apps and publish them as a Facebook or iPhone application that others can embed or download from the App Store.

“You can create your own interactive content, such as promotional materials for indie bands and movies or games,” said Joshua Gertzen, co-founder and CEO of TileStack. “There’s an educational component to it, as well. It’s really good at teaching kids the basics of programming.”

To use TileStack, Gertzen said, you take a picture or different icons or images and lay them out on a surface, called a tile. When you specify an area to click, interact or hover over these images, it animates or transitions to another tile.

The company launched in January and first previewed their product at MacWorld 2009. Gertzen’s TileStack partner, Ted C. Howard, said they are very happy with the reception they are getting at SXSW.

“Everybody’s excited by what we’re doing,” Howard said. “I’ve talked to a lot of people who are not computer programmers, and we’re bascially telling them that they can go create widgets. They can create iPhone games and apps. And that’s exciting to a lot of people.”

I meant to end the night at Andy’s Bar, but this NX35 thing demands spontaneity. Every venue is a few blocks away from all the others. You will pass coffee houses along the way with workers (I refuse to call anyone in Denton a barista) who will advise you on that night’s bands. Oh Denton, Texas, College Town, you are a revelation to someone who matriculated through two degrees on the mean streets of suburban Richardson.

The basement of J&J’s Pizza necessarily sacrifices 25 percent of its floor space to the band because the space is that tiny. Once the music starts, you feel like you’re at a great party at somebody’s house. Even the pool players were attentive to musician Dan Montgomery, visiting from Memphis and using amps on his acoustic guitar and his bandmates’ electric guitar and bass (overkill, guys).  A white bowl of spaghetti and meatballs partnered with a one dollar can of Schlitz sat on the table next to me; somehow comfort food and canned beer seemed ideal symbols of the scene’s welcoming vibe.

Meanwhile,  A.M. Ramblers were sitting outside of J&J’s nursing one dollar cans of beer (the impact of this price upon my psyche cannot be overstated). Suddenly I’m hanging out with a band right before their gig – does that sort of thing happen in Austin anymore? All six members – Andy, Brandyn, Cory, Jordan, Mark and Will – were telling stories of Denton band life and hugging passers by. Some have known each other since childhood, some worked jobs together, and of course, some met during college days. Will once fell asleep on stage. Brandyn drives the tour bus. Jordan is the comforter (“I give them cookies”). There were confessions of watching Sex and the City and Gilmore Girls. You know, band stuff.

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Digital dating pro, Ryan McMinn. Photo courtesy of SXSW.

There’s no doubt the digital world has transformed how we form relationships with other people. More people are meeting online and building lasting partnerships. Others, however, haven’t quite grasped how to make it work for them.

Ryan McMinn was one of those who struggled after ending a six-year relationship a few years ago. At a recent panel discussion, titled “Brave New Dating,” McMinn of Microsoft opened up the conversation about forming relationships online. And people had plenty of horror stories and online dating advice to share. Here are the top five pieces of advice from McMinn and others who joined the conversation.

1. First impressions: If you’re looking for a serious relationship, don’t put the photo of you doing a keg stand at your buddy’s party as your profile picture. “Always have your friends pick the photo for you,” McMinn said. “They’ll pick the photo that’s a more honest representation of who you are.”

2. The beginning stages: Meeting a person on Facebook or other social networking site can be a great thing. Reading a person’s blog posts, movie interests and seeing what their friends are saying about them is like cramming six months of dating into two weeks. The flip side? You tend to manifest a close relationship in your head that isn’t actually there yet. “Like a long distance relationship, it amplifies things,” McMinn said. “You start thinking you have a relationship, but it’s not real at that point.”

3. No spam please: Guys, this one’s directed at you. Nothing is more annoying than having a “Hey what’s up, hotness?” posting on your MySpace page from some guy you’ve never met before. Even more annoying? Finding out from six of your girlfriends the creep posted the same exact message on their pages, too. “I guess they think the laws of averages will play to their benefit,” McMinn said. Bottom line: People hate email spam. It’s no different in the dating world.

4. Breaking up is hard to do: We all want to try and make the “Let’s just be friends” scenario work when you break up with someone. But with Web sites like Facebook, it becomes extremely difficult. When an ex posts status updates about tropical vacations with her new boyfriend, it’s not the healthiest way to move on from the relationship, McMinn said. “You may just have to delete them as a friend,” he said.

5. Just be honest: When it comes down to it, just be honest about who you are as a person from the beginning. And if you lie, you’re more likely to get caught in the online dating world. For example, if you lie to a potential love interest about being out of town for the weekend, they’ll find out when they see photos of you on Facebook partying at a mutual friend’s house. “You’re forced to be more honest in online dating, anyway,” McMinn said. “So why not be honest from the beginning?”

AUSTIN — Film festivals will often have surprise screenings that aren’t listed in the official program. They’re designed to create a little buzz, though I’ve often wondered if part of the surprise revolves around questions as to whether or not the film would be ready to show in time.

Either way, the job of any good festivalgoer is to sniff out these screenings, which is what I’ve been doing of late. And from what I can tell, there are two of them: Bruno and Me and Orson Welles.

Bruno is Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat. Fans of HBO’s Da Ali G Show will remember Bruno as the gay fashion designer. The new film is supposed to take a similar approach as Borat in that you can expect Bruno to ambush any number of homophobic folks across middle America, filming their disgust along the way. Rumors have swirled for a while now that part of it was filmed in Carrollton; whether or not any of that footage made it into the final cut is anyone’s best guess. I’m going to try and hit the 11 p.m. screening of it tonight, but methinks that only a lucky few will get in as it is playing at one of the smaller theaters down here.

The other sneak preview is Austin director Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles. That film stars Zach Effron and Claire Danes and centers on a 1937 Broadway production of Julius Caesar directed by Welles. It showed previously at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival and shows Monday at 11 a.m. at the Paramount.

Both of these films will open around the country later this year. But there’s a certain pride in being able to say you saw it first. So I’ll give Bruno my best shot tonight.

Brave Combo’s Jeffrey Barnes and Harvey Pekar at NX35

Before we get to anything else, a you-read-it-here-first bit of news: At the beginning of his Saturday afternoon, onstage conversation about jazz, the graphic novelist and music critic Harvey Pekar praised the performance of Brave Combo the night before at the Boiler Room. He expressed a wish that Jeffrey Barnes, the band’s saxophonist and its trumpeter Danny O’Brien should get together and just cut loose — “and record it someplace.”

Barnes later said, almost as an afterthought, that Pekar could get something close to his wish on Sunday at 2 p.m.at the Loophole. Barnes, Don Bell, Combo’s drummer Arjuna Contreras and jazz bassist Drew Phelps would be trying on a little “free jazz.” It’s not on the official NX35 schedule.

So there you go.

Anyway, back to Harvey.  In his onstage conversation with Barnes at Denton’s Fine Arts Theater, Pekar expressed a wish that more people would support experimental or free jazz because, otherwise, “things won’t evolve. People play the same thing, decade after decade, and it becomes — stagnant.” Rather than his famous curmudgeonly self, Pekar was rather affable. In particular, he extolled three musicians and played tracks by each: reed player Joe Maneri, saxophonist Josh Smith and trumpeter Nate Wooley.

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AUSTIN – My Big Fat Greek Wedding and The Passion of the Christ are two of the most financially successful independent films of all time. Wedding grossed more than $300 million worldwide, while Passion earned an astounding $600 million.

Those two films have two things in common. They were both thought to be difficult to distribute (Wedding needed an older audience to buy tickets while Passion needed a religious one). And Bob Berney figured out ways to make them work.

Until Warner Bros. closed it this fall, Berney ran Picturehouse, the indie studio responsible for Pan’s Labyrinth. But before he got into the distribution business, he built the Inwood Theatre in Dallas in 1984 and ran it until 1989.

“I literally helped build it as I was one of the carpenters,” Berney told me after the panel.

He credits his success as a distributor with his time spent as an exhibitor at the Inwood. Before other theaters jumped on the idea, the Inwood was the only theater in town that had a bar. That communal space for people to hang out in and discuss what they had seen helped Berney fine tune his sense of what audiences like.

“We really had a relationship with the audience and could ask them what they wanted to see, and it worked similarly to how Netflix [recommendations] works now,” he said.

Since Picturehouse closed, he’s been doing some consulting and working on other projects. But he says he ultimately wants to come back to independent film distribution. Watch for something on that front in the next few months, he says.

AUSTIN – SXSW has turned into a launching pad for big Hollywood comedies over the past few years. Knocked Up (2007) and Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) had their debuts here, and this year Observe and Report and I Love You Man are on the bill.

The cast of I Love You Man gathered Saturday afternoon to discuss the film, which served as the opening night feature. The movie stars Paul Rudd, who is about to marry Zooey (Rashida Jones) but needs to find someone to be his best man since he is low on guy friends. Jason Segel stars as is potential buddy while Jamie Pressly and Jon Favreau play a bickering couple who provide a bit of a preview of what marriage could be like.

A large portion of Saturday’s discussion centered on improvisation during filming.

“I feel like I wrote the script, but everybody wrote the movie,” said the film’s director, John Hamburg. “Everyone got the tone of what we were trying to do, and then we just went and played around all day.”

Apparently, though, freedom to try new things has its limits, according to Segel.

“One time John screamed at me from off camera, ‘Oh, come on Segel! Just do it like a normal human being!’”

Fittingly, improv was the order of the day as the panel began. Technical problems were getting in the way of showing the trailer for the film to the audience. As the computer was being attended to, Rudd suggested that since everyone in the trailer was in the room, “We can just get up and do it if that makes sense.”

When the video finally played, the audio was somehow missing. But being the improvisers that they are, the cast filled in their voices, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style. The trailer might have been funny, but I’m happier that I got to see the live-audio version.

I just got out of the “Emerging Trends of Mobile Technology” panel discussion and am really excited about the possibilities coming to mobile device consumers over the next few years. Below is a list of some of the standouts from the meeting.

1. T-Mobile’s Android Phone: Released in September of last year, the Android is seen by some as iPhone’s main competitor. It’s the first phone to offer Google’s Android operating system, an open-source system that allows developers to create their own apps for the phone. Apple, on the other hand, controls which apps are available to its iPhone users. Panelists predicted that we’ll begin seeing more users of the Android over the next few years.

2. Flash on mobile devices: “Flash on phones is going to change the way everything works,” said Rob Gonda, a panelist at the discussion and director of marketing strategy and analysis for Sapient. With more Flash applications available on mobile devices, the user experience will become more equal to what you would experience with a desktop computer.

3. App stores galore: Currently, there are around 20,000 apps available to consumers. The iPhone has 500 million apps downloaded a year, with $1 billion dollars in sales worldwide. Needless to say, the trend is catching on. Panelists predicted that app stores will soon be everywhere and with open environments like Google, we’ll start seeing hundreds of thousands of apps being built in the near future.

4. Mobile Augmented Reality: According to Wikipedia, augmented reality “deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.” The panelists focused specifically on location-based augmented reality. Imagine you’re on vacation and come across a beautiful sculpture. With location-based augmented reality, you could snap a picture of that sculpture and historical information and other data would pop up about that sculpture on your phone. Pretty exciting stuff.

5. Image/logo recognition: With image/logo recognition, for example, you can snap a photo of your favorite store’s logo, and its Web site will pop up. Panelists even discussed being able to take a picture of someone with your phone and obtaining data about what kind of mood they’re in. Information on just about anything will be available everywhere.

Photo: Matt Lankes

AUSTIN – Typically at SXSW, the Interactive crowd spends time at panels while the filmgoers congregate in the theaters. On Friday night, the two groups got together for a common interest: The Two Bobs. The film is the latest from Austin director Tim McCanlies and focuses on pair of video game developers who design a killer game, only to have it stolen soon after it’s completed. The bulk of the movie is spent following the title characters as they try to hunt down their game while also learning what life is like outside of the office.

It’s funny in parts and profane throughout – a film about gaming culture that Kevin Smith might have made. Which is interesting, because McCanlies is known primarily for making family fare like Secondhand Lions and Dancer, Texas Pop. 81.

He told the audience after the screening at the Austin Convention Center that even the actors were caught off-guard.

“They kept coming up to my wife saying, ‘Your husband did Secondhand Lions?!?’,” he said. “I guess with all those family films, the language was just pent up.”

The Two Bobs is coming to AFI Dallas and will screen April 1 and 2. If you are one of those gamers who celebrates the nerdier aspects of that culture, be sure to check it out.