The morning after his first short film was screened at the Austin Film Festival, a showcase for both famous and indie filmmakers, Shane Ware is alert and eager to speak about his recent successes. One of the youngest short-filmmakers presented at the film fest this year, the recent University of Texas at Austin radio-television-film graduate says he is honored to be part of a group of such talented people.

Imagine a house with rooms full of squids, snakes and frogs floating in odd-shaped bottles. One room has a six-foot-tall rack of tarantulas, a tank full of beetles or an industrial-sized box of lizard corpses, bones or tortoise shells. Horror movie posters from the 1980s cover the walls. Masks of zombies, mummies, aliens and other monsters watch you with an eerie life-likeness. Behind the house, skeletons of boars, rabbits and goats lay decomposing in rows like an unearthed animal graveyard. To some, this may sound like the lab of a mad scientist, or a scene from the creepy intro sequence of the FX television show “American Horror Story: Murder House.” A nightmare. To Emma Campbell, however, it’s the dream art studio.

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This warehouse turned gymnasium is changing the way Austinites are moving.

Music booms out of the speakers while he peddles through the streets of Austin. As the day progresses, he adjusts his music choice to the reflect the energy of the downtown crowd — MGMT for day rides and Calvin Harris at night. A variety of customers hop in, from a couple who just finished a romantic dinner to a young man on Sixth Street who had a little too much to drink. At the end of the night, Joseph Garcia is relieved to call it a day but proud to be a pedicab driver.

Deep in the heart of West Campus, among a bundle of multi-colored apartment complexes, you will find Pearl Street Co-op, one of the many collaborative housing units near campus that provides students with an alternative to dorm living. We talked to some "Pearlies" about the non-traditional dwelling they call home.

I grew up hating Texas football with a passion. My mom attended the University of Nebraska and raised me as a diehard Nebraska Cornhusker fan. However, once I set foot in Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium, that all changed. It was as if I, a Montague, married into the Capulet family.

It was a bumpy ride down the washed-out dirt road to the little house in Dripping Springs. The home sat in the midst of the greenery that I would soon find to be filled from floor to ceiling with hundreds of books - ranging in subject from gardening to Darrell K. Royal - and knick-knacks that could have only been collected over a lifetime.

Sean Morgan’s mind wanders while he drives a flashy Lamborghini around the block of the tallest residential building in Texas. The 23-year-old University of Texas at Austin art student works as a valet for the sky-blue glass “behemoth” of a building, which looks out across Austin’s hills from the heart of downtown. Morgan is imagining a vivid party scene awaiting his return to the tower’s base, where “a fire hydrant is wrenched open and people are running through the torrent of water, hugging, slipping and swapping swigs of aged scotch and malt liquor.”

As the minutes ticked closer to 8 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 20, hundreds of motorcycles, pick-up trucks, Fiats and one MetroRapid bus lined up on San Jacinto Boulevard. In one block, a police Hummer sat idle only feet away from a life-sized Fleshlight dancing atop a parade float. Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” blared from a pair of speakers as a group of young women sprayed hair products into each other’s pink and purple wigs.