Stephen Robinson’s hard work is paying off with the unveiling of the second season of the web series How to Learn Anything.
Celebrating the launch with hundreds of supporters and contributors at the Metro Cinema in Edmonton Nov. 19, the Westlock-born filmmaker noted he needed to find something as eye-grabbing as his big event for Season 1, where he solved a Rubix’s Cube while skydiving. To watch it go to YouTube and search: How to Learn Anything: Season 2.
“The shows are about combining two different skills to make it more entertaining,” he said.
“When we were speaking to big production companies like Discovery Channel one of the first questions they would ask us is how long did this take, so this season we tried to film the show in the amount of time they would typically film it in a larger production, just to say we can do this.”
This time around, Robinson has a number of fun combinations that he teaches himself on-camera, ranging from learning survival skills while regularly applying clown makeup to learning to make pasta from scratch and then crafting a video game about it.
So preoccupied with whether he could do it or not to consider if he should, Robinson even went ahead and taught a cat how to launch a rocket that he built.
“It’s probably forgotten to do that by now,” he laughs, albeit nervously. “Though it might just be pretending until the day it gets its paws on some real rockets.
“It was about two months of training the cat every day to hit the button when I say ‘Engage.’ A lot of people don’t think you can train a cat as well as a dog, so we decided to take that idea and prove people wrong in the silliest way possible.”
Probably his most outrageous stunt this year was shot in Clyde, where he constructed a multi-step catapult (trébuchet), to pitch himself a baseball and hit a home run off it.
“It was releasing the balls at about 36 feet in the air, so hitting them was pretty difficult.
“The original idea was to get it to throw it down and straight, but it was very difficult to tune it to throw a fast ball perfectly straight, so I found lobbing the ball gave me more time to run to where it was going to hit it.”
Now he’s hoping to turn his attention more to promotion and growing his audience. He also noted he’s looking into public speaking to help inspire others to discover the fun of learning anything.
With the season ready for viewing, Robinson said he’s taking a mental break before planning Season 3 — it takes hundreds of hours to put together each 10-minute video.
“We probably spent five months of filming for season one and four months of editing. For Season 2, we had a larger budget but the time was much shorter — we only had three months to film and two months for post-production,” he said.
“It was a grind to get it done in that amount of time.”
