Matt Kirsch, who plays Glen on the show, has been writing the sitcom Duder since it began in August 2006. It’s his motley crew of New York friends who make the show possible from the director and the musician down to the acting and web design.

This show about Ricky, Zev, and Glen, three guys (dudes, if you weren’t catching on) living and screwing up in Brooklyn is a rollicking good time. Full-length episodes run about 10 minutes long, while the Duder-logues last only 2-3 minutes. Duder-logues are short-form testimonials where the characters describe themselves in a revealing monologue, sometimes about coming out of the closet, sometimes about God and bowel movements, and sometimes while watching neighbors have sex. Duder’s humor can best be described as Seinfeldian, but with pro bono acting rather than $10 million-per-episode paychecks. (If you don’t believe me, watch the third episode, where a girl rejects Ricky because he didn’t say “Bless you” the third time she sneezed, which is followed by a discussion by the three duders about “sneezers,” “sneezees,” and whether diarrhea is an act or a material product.)

The show has some really funny moments. Kirsch’s writing is at its funniest in a shorter, punchier format, so the Duder-logues are my personal favorites. What works so well in this brief moment where Glen’s roommate Judy watches, psychoanalyzes, and all-around judges their neighbors while they have get it on is its perfect brevity.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Zach Jones
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Steve Garfield has done so much towards the promotion and technological advancement of video blogging, that he has been called the “The Paul Revere of the Blogosphere.” Between being a correspondent for Rocketboom and creating content for both a personal vlog and a vlog about pop culture and technology, Steve somehow finds time to host Vlog Soup. Broadcasting straight from his Boston abode since August 2005, he provides viewers with details and links to clips from his frequented and newfound favorite vlogs to help his fellow vlog watchers separate the milk from the cream.

Steve introduces short clips from sites with a brief overview of the site’s background and what you’re likely to see there before sharing his verdict, imparting advice for the vloggers (“Backlighting de-saturates the color!”) and giving links to his favorite episodes for interested viewers. Steve isn’t afraid to share his opinion when a site fails to meet his standards. When sites do meet them, though, he lavishes praise (“Nice job, guys, at producing a regular comedy show. You had me watching the whole way through and laughing”). He also has a good feel for what will keep his viewers entertained, so humor is always a major component of the show.

Steve has an ability to find some truly eccentric material.  Check out his clip of Mooki TV in Episode 12 and see the first cat to have her own vlog.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Rebecca Halpin
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Swedish-born and Massachusetts-based artist Ravi Jain has developed several websites and is not shy when it comes to uploading his life to the blogosphere. In addition to his more traditional text blog and another dedicated entirely to his exploits as a marathon hopeful, DriveTime came about in October 2005 as a way of varying the otherwise lost time of his daily commute in and around Boston. Jain has turned his various automobiles into low-budget studios (his Nissan is known as “Studio N,” his Audi is “Studio A,” and so on) in which he hosts this informative talk show with local artists and personalities.

None of the episodes on DriveTime run longer than a few minutes and almost all feature Ravi’s wife and co-host, Sonia. She was introduced in the second episode and sits in the backseat while Jain mans the wheel and their cavalcade of guests ride shotgun.

The pair are laidback, funny, and engaging hosts, working their magic on artists, collective creators, organization directors, people who wear wigs, and anyone else interesting enough to sit in a car and chat about their work and lives for a while. Before the hosts pick up their guests, there’s always time for a quick update on their own lives, professional and personal. (At one point, Ravi and Sonia announced they had a mouse problem, so a longtime viewer let them borrow his two cats for two days to remedy the problem, with little success.) Writers and humorists are popular, as the car provides limited space for props. Viewers can watch as Jain settles into his role of talk-show host, grows a beard, and practices safe driving techniques.

There is some natural talent on display here, and that’s buttressed by Jain’s determination to vary the program as much as its limited nature allows. Check out RideTime, in which he and Sonia ride a tandem bike, following the camera, with their guests on the left, maintaining the car-like feeling while avoiding gas prices. It’s a great twist.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Nicholas Mosquera
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Back in September 2005, Veoh Networks launched its fast-loading, user-friendly site to mounting praise. Within six weeks, Veoh had approved 10,000 videos for release on its network, spurring CEO Dmitry Shapiro to pronounce, “I believe that in the future, people will quit their jobs and start making a living by showing their videos on Veoh.” The video-hosting service has made a niche for itself subjecting all content to approval and allowing users to create somewhat personalized channels for regular series. And with people like Vuguru owner and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner on its board of directors, Veoh is bound to be a longstanding new media giant. Naturally, the next step for the site was to produce original content. And in November 2006, Veoh released Viral, a series about internet television. Producer and host Sunny Gault, formerly of Anchor in PJs, dishes out news, features, and interviews with some of the biggest and brightest in online video.

The weekly episodes, 5- to 10-minutes each, are shot in seasons. Each one finds Sunny, the show’s personable and knowledgeable host, interviewing video mavens behind shows like Ask a Ninja and The Strand. Above all else, the interviews are the main drive behind the show. Sunny gets involved with her guests, whether she’s animated alongside them or appearing with them in a ninja suit, and she has a knack for picking some of the most interesting and innovative sites in the industry to feature. Other segments include 5 Things You Don’t Know About (video creators divulge five surprising factoids about themselves), In-Focus (internet television news), and the occasional instructional lesson with tips and advice on creating online video programming. Most of the shows featured are ones that appear on Veoh, but that shouldn’t be a surprise since most shows appear on Veoh anyway. The professional quality and high production value of each brief, well-edited, and informative show make Viral must-see-online TV for any fan of entertainment on the web.

What could have been a normal interview with Jerry Zucker (writer, voice, and semiautobiographical star of It’s Jerrytime!) in Viral’s seventh episode turns into a full-blown animated visit into Jerry’s hallucinogenic world. Host Sunny Gault brings Jerry some Christmas cheer, sends him on a ridiculous grocery store quest for egg nog, and interviews him through the mouth of her own bobblehead caricature in Jerry’s living room. Not only is it a fun interview, but it’s also a great example of the potential innovations that online news shows can generate if they’re willing to experiment.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Zach Jones
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Bob Thompson is a middle-aged, middle-class would-be comedian who lives in Queens, New York, who according to various MySpace “friends,” used to be a elementary school substitute teacher. In 2001, he started a television show called “Drinking with Bob,” which airs late nights on Queens Public Access. It gained so much popularity that in May 2005, Bob decided to take his rants to the internet, posting them almost daily on his blog, Drinking with Bob. Since the sites launch, Bob’s posting pace has slowed, but his rants are as energetic as ever.

The mostly one-minute segments feature Bob ranting about a specific topic, often plucked from the week’s headlines. Descriptive titles accompany each posting, followed by a screen shot of Bob, open-mouthed and mid-rant. The segments aren’t exactly relaxing to watch, what with the non-stop yelling and flushed face way too close to the camera, but Bob has good points.

He begins each video with the same opening, “What’s next? I’ll tell you what’s next,” and then he does. His rants are loud, monotone, fast (but not that fast) and about everything from his neighbor who takes 5-minutes to parallel park, to American Idol, to why New York City would think closing bars at 3am would keep innocent young women from being killed, to the various idiots he runs into on a regular basis. Usually, he’s naming the elephant in the room, acknowledging what most Americans are thinking, but won’t say.

In addition to rants, he also posts a few simple, 2-chord songs, in which he elaborates on his hates, particularly his loathing of Rosie O’Donnell. Besides a MySpace page, he also has another website associated with his show on QPTV, on which you can find longer “Skits” found only on television. 

Although I like me some Susan Sarandon and it seems as though Bob took her comment on building schools in Mexico a little out of context, he does have some good points.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Rebecca Halpin
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Snowmen Hunters is the first production to come out of Zanzibar 19, a northern California-based production company focusing on online television series and video podcasting. The primary creative partners (who are also cousins), Ryan Neisz (playing Sherman) and Christopher Allen Smith (playing Evertt) premiered the first episode on September 6, 2006 on their website. Neisz has a background in television, having worked on Spin City, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and the WB’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is currently a digital filmmaker and a creative consultant at Delfino Entertainment in Burbank California. Smith is an experienced entertainment journalist, writing film reviews for The Chico News and Review, If Magazine, and Eon Magazine, as well as interviewing a variety of Hollywood celebrities.   He currently owns the production company Musselman Picture, Story and Sound in Northern California.

Sherman and Evertt are hilarious caricatures of two outlaw yokel racists that have taken on the systematic destruction of all snowmen as their sole purpose in life. And they are completely out of their minds. They live in the kind of unreal world-without-consequences that one is used to seeing in Wes Anderson films. The show is filmed and edited in a documentary style, in which clips of Sherman being interviewed about his hatred of snowmen are mixed with clips of he and Everett shooting snowmen with shotguns and other images of mutilation. The five to ten-minute episodes first reveal why snowmen are evil, and then continue on to reveal the intricacies of Everett’s unlikely past, how he and Sherman go undercover, and what happens when Mentos and Diet Coke meet snowmen. Check out the blog and forum for further musings on snow-related violence and Zanzibar19 news. 

One of my favorite episodes of Snowmen Hunters is 19, in which Everett has a serious discussion with his wife Meika, a stick that Sherman has lovely pet names for, who was stolen away from him by a snowman in episode 11. He decides to leave her and proceeds to make out with something of greater arboreal substance, Mary Kathryn Gallagher-style.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Kate Dundon
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Frustrated with office politics and universal workplace interactions, Brian Hogg started dotBoom as an amusing hobby in his spare time. Now his basement has become a full-fledged Jim Henson-like studio. Back in March 2006, he began the show as its creator, writer, puppet-maker, set builder, set decorator, prop manager, lighting assistant, camera operator, and editor. This isn’t to say that dotBoom is a one man show, but aside from web design and the actual puppeteering, Brian does do most of the work himself.

Episodes (which are sometimes broken into brief segments and sometimes available full-length up to a half hour) of this hilarious Toronto-based puppet sitcom appear roughly once a month. Each episode takes place in the dotBoom office building, where the puppet worker bees flit about their days ineptly trying to design computer games. With characters like David, who is a lead client manager, an extraordinarily oblivious individual, and a crocodile with dreads, and Brian, who is Kermit’s vulgar, self-effacing, yellow cousin who spends his workday designing Flash animation and mocking his fellow employees and the pathetic company that made the mistake of hiring them all, the show is wry, cynical, and very, very good.   All of the puppets, sets, and productions look astounding when you consider that this is a low-budget show without advertisements run out of one man’s basement.

Watch everything. It’s one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen online. The best episodes are the not the ones with outlandishly ridiculous plotlines, instead they’re the ones with the prosaic, labored conversations that often take place in the workplace. “A well-planned design is the best thing for us right now, Beho. Why can’t you see that? If we don’t have infinite extensibility, the project will fail!” is terribly hilarious when spoken by a puppet.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Zach Jones
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While listening to This American Life on NPR, VidLit founder Liz Dubelman thought it’d be interesting to watch video alongside the stories. With that notion in mind, she went to work on an animation for her own short story, “Craziest.” The popularity that ensued gave her the idea to produce flash animations for literary works on a larger scale along with sound designer Paca Thomas. Vidlit was born in September 2004. It might seem intuitively counterproductive to use videos to sell books, but it’s entertaining and it works.

Usually around two to four minutes long, Vidlits can best be explained as music videos for books. All genres are featured from a number of different publishers. There’s everything from The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit and Bill Maher’s New Rules to When Love Calls You Better Answer and Bone, each one adding an exciting new element to traditional reading. The animation style varies from book to book, but most videos incorporate text and have a certain slideshow quality that works well with the stories they enliven by not distracting too much from the author’s words. Each story’s animation is more of an accent to than a reimagining of the text. There are also interviews with authors and a dedicated kid’s section. If you like the VidLit you’re watching and want to purchase the book, just click on the link below the video.

Parodying the idyllic childhood characters and their original cookie-cutter world, Yiddish with Dick and Jane provides a great look at the complications of modern-day life and how Yiddish fits in.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Joshua Cohen
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Ze Frank, Brown graduate with a degree in neuroscience, comedian, and Brooklyn resident, has had an enormous online presence since a short video of his dance moves made the rounds in 2001.

On March 17, 2006, Frank began The Show with Ze Frank, a project in interactive video content involving 3-minute clips posted every weekday for one year. Users were invited to take part in tasks, send in acts for Frank to perform, and play long-distance games with the comedian. “We have this incredible ability to communicate with each other. I want to play around with it, see what this mass audience is really capable of,” he explained to the LA Times. (He’s something of a media darling.) At its height, the show pulled in tens of thousands of viewers on a daily basis.

When not praising the web like a vlogging pundit, Ze mocked targets like George Bush, government surveillance, Republicanism, and unethical business practices. News and current events, scripted plays, featured introductions from fans, and bizarre experiments like asking viewers to help him turn Earth into a sandwich abound on the site, one of the most popular vlogging experiments to date.

Videos are manic, with heavy editing, repeated takes, vocal effects, a ton of inside jokes, and tight shots of Ze’s face, which has more than a passing resemblance to actor Greg Kinnear. There are also frequent references to rubber duckies and giant babies. Naturally. If all the random jokes, oblique references to nonexistent organizations, and continuous vlogging storylines begin to confuse you (and it’s bound to do that), the site’s Wiki is a welcome, comprehensive, and often necessary resource.

Though quite original on his own, what earned Ze some notoriety was his “Fabuloso Friday” scheme. After receiving some rather harsh comments on his comedy, he decided that Friday broadcasts would consist of reading a script written and edited by the audience members via Wiki. It only lasted for three Fridays, but they were sadistic delights, where interactive viewers could watch Ze say or do whatever had been demanded of him.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Nicholas Mosquera
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In October 2006, Daniel McVicar of McVlog fame began The Late Nite Mash to harness all the power of creative professionals, whether they be sculptors, comedians, musicians, dancers, or mimes. McVicar found a sizeable fanbase with McVlog, a popular vlog about vlogging, and a good deal of fame from starring on “The Bold and the Beautiful” for two decades as fashion magnate Clarke Garrison Sr. Now, his foray into new media sites has resulted in a showcase intended to encourage collaboration and community.

The Late Night Mash Show showcases moments of nightlife captured by McVicar’s camera. The sporadically posted videos contain anything that strikes McVicar’s fancy. Sometimes it’s an interview with a fellow performer like Joey Altruda, sometimes it’s a Bad Santa raining on your holiday parade, and sometimes its an interview ith dominatrices discussing the merits of tasers, and they all benefit from McVicar’s casual attitude and genuine likeability. Once you register, you can also gain access to the other video section, which has content like the rest of the site (meaning that it ranges from good, bad, odd, and mildly pornographic). There are also spaces for members to blog about their lives and their crafts, classifieds to find work, and a search feature that allows you to search for users by whether or not they’re single or like to smoke.

The interviews on The Late Nite Mash Show are easily the best part of the whole site. It’s not necessarily that McVicar’s talents as an interviewer rival those of Larry King. It’s his selection of interview subjects that make the interviews so enjoyable. His interview with Maria Bramford, for example, is really great because she’s really funny. His interview with Andy Garcia is really great because, well, he’s really Andy Garcia.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Zach Jones
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Flamenco guitarist, photographer and cutting edge documentarian, Tao Ruspoli, founded the Los Angeles Filmmakers’ Cooperative (LAFCO) in 2000. In 1999, Tao purchased a 1985 school bus on eBay, replaced the seats with professional video editing equipment, and spray-painted the side with a quote from Jean Cocteau: “Film will only become art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.” Tao began collecting people with similar beliefs and the collective embarked on a cross-country journey in August 2006, filming and editing out of their bus, which by then contained several HD video cameras, three editing stations, a screening room, and rooftop boarding for five. Over the years, their mix of documentaries, music videos, and narrative films has produced a remarkable amount of press and an impressive list of clients for their commercial projects, including Sony, Talib Kweli, and Yellowcard.

Film projects (commercial and personal) and behind-the-scenes videos showing the bus experience (which they refer to as a “Cine Circus”) vary in length, but they’re always top quality. Whether it’s a candid moment caught on film, or a finely-polished music video, their editing is superb. Divided into films, music videos, and interviews, LAFCO rarely fails to impress. One of their best interviews, for example, is a brief moment the group snagged with Oliver Stone, where Tao picks the legendary director’s brain about art and politics. And an experiment in the music video section finds all the members of the LAFCO troupe contributing their individual skills; playing with travel and motion images, the group pits a collection of old and found footage together with an original electro-pop soundtrack to make a cumulative travelogue. There’s also a photo blog and a space for fans to donate money to supply the adventurers with gas and food.

At first, I was unimpressed with a Slick and Rose music video for their song “Chemical.” But after watching a four-minute excerpt from Tao’s Just Say Know, an award-winning documentary about his family’s battle with heroin and opium additions, the video struck me as nuanced and expressive.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Rebecca Halpin
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Along with a team of experienced producers, writers, and internet entrepreneurs, David Tabizel founded UK-based Videojug in the fall of 2006 as a kind of ‘’wisdom project,” a modernized alternative to how-to books that allows users to access specified information without the hassle of going through a whole book or website. Tabizel is famous for his involvement in the development of several extremely profitable technology-focused companies including the Durlacher Corporation, a highly successful investment consulting company, Autonomy Corporation, a leader in knowledge management technology, and Demon Internet, one of the largest ISPs in the UK.

Along with a team of experienced producers, writers, and internet entrepreneurs, David Tabizel founded UK-based Videojug in the fall of 2006 as a kind of ‘’wisdom project,” a modernized alternative to how-to books that allows users to access specified information without the hassle of going through a whole book or website. Tabizel is famous for his involvement in the development of several extremely profitable technology-focused companies including the Durlacher Corporation, a highly successful investment consulting company, Autonomy Corporation, a leader in knowledge management technology, and Demon Internet, one of the largest ISPs in the UK.

Videojug provides instructional videos for pretty much everything you could possibly think of through way of clever writing, over-the-top amateur acting (in a good way), and British voiceover. Each short video begins with an introduction of the task at hand a list of necessary ingredients or before going onto clearly explain the desired goal and exactly what steps are necessary to achieve said goal. The how-tos are straight forward, to the point, arguably offer very good advice, and can be very entertaining. Learn how to install a door, how to make a sex on the beach cocktail, how to avoid buying a stolen car, or how to ask a woman on a date (eye contact is key). Videos are organized into categories such as house and garden (how to clean your house the eco friendly way), relationships and family (I recommend how to remember people’s names), food (how to cook chicken curry in ten minutes is excellent), or work and careers (see how to be the laziest person in the office and get away with it.) The dating marriage section contains more risqué titles, such as how to kiss someone passionately or how to undo her bra with one hand. Not sure how to do something and can’t find out how on Videojug? You can suggest an idea for a video or even upload your own (which goes into the “made by you” section) as well as create an account for yourself.

Ever feel like the bartender is purposely ignoring you? Watch “how to get served quickly at a bar,” and say goodbye to your sobriety. Just snake your timid little hand into the crowd and plant it on the bar, that’s the first and most important part, then follow steps two through four. 

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Kate Dundon
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