Monitored by the Swedish DJ Tobbe, DJ Battle.net dates back to 1997, when it was published only in Swedish, and functioned as an online community and voice for the Swedish DJ scene. In January 2007, DJ Tobbe decided to branch out and translate most of the site into English in order to reach a broader audience. Djbattle.tv has been in effect since late 2005, with its first episode featuring DJ QBert.

DjbattleTV covers mostly live footage of DJ performances in clubs, scratch battles, and interviews with prominent DJs from all over the world like RA the Rugged Man (episode 11), and DJ Maseo (episode 7). Episodes can run anywhere between 20 and 50 minutes long, and must be downloaded (for free) to view. Because they are so long, they can get a bit tedious at times, particularly when there is 15 minutes of scratch battling and little editing. In general, the high quality of the sound and video allows the viewer to genuinely hear and see the intricacies of scratching, and that it’s not just moving a record around on a turntable. Djbattle.net also has a great audio archive to which any DJ who is a member of Djbattle can add his/her sounds, and it appears that anyone who DJs can join. There is a forum, a number of articles: news, reviews, interviews, editorials and tips; as well as a “marketplace” where members can buy and sell turntables, mixers, and other equipment (although much of this section is not written in English).

I recommend checking out Episode 16 with Roc Raida, member of the New York based X-Ecutioners, who focused heavily on beat-juggling, and furthered the turntablist movement in the 1990’s. He tells us about his Gong Battle video and we see a portion of his show in Gothenburg.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Kate Dundon
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Conceived and organized in December 2005 by Aaron Valdez – a member of the evilvlog collective and one of the most talented of the Internet’s mix-up, mash-up, found footage specialists and filmmakers, whose projects dealing with social and media commentary are sprinkled both online and off – Valdezatron Industries is a videoblog that revolves around the re-editing and combination of old cable TV clips and video oddities.  Until April 2007, the site featured a regular output of Valdez‘s short films, at times reminiscent of the incredibly talented Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN) – like 2005’s “Displacement”, 2004’s “Big Screen Version”, and 2003’s “States of the Union”.

Valdez has also begun an assortment of other web video projects, including Blandlands, Lost in Light, and Wreck and Salvage.  The latter he created with creative cohorts Adam Quirk and Erik Nelson and is where he showcases new shorts similar to those seen on Valdezatron Industries.

These video collage portraits of our media saturation are as smart as they are hilarious and trust me, they are truly hilarious. Most last for less than a minute, but the videos’ brevity adds to their quick punch of satirical fun. Some are mash-ups of heavily edited soundbites and video clips and some barely have to be edited at all for their point to come across.

Valdezatron is at its best when the edits are pointed but not too frequent and the clips are given room to breathe and speak for themselves. Check out this frighteningly funny video, “This Week in Mind Control,” which features everything from yoga to Sunday morning evangelicals to the Tyra Banks Show, all combined with a flawless penchant for ridiculousness and cultural criticism.

It’s hard to pick favorites, but “We Built This…” and “Rhapsody for Daytime TV” are at the top of my list.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Zach Jones
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Keen Toons is the Flash animation arm of online entertainment megapage, Keenspot. Founded in February 2000 by comic creators Chris Crosby and Darren Bleuel – who also has a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering – as a host for their own material, the site quickly grew into a portal for independent comic artists. Keenspot has retained the primary position, and is an invitation-only collection of more than 50 comics. The two founders, along with Chris’ mother, Teri Crosby, and Nate Stone maintain that list, but they added Keepspace (now Comic Genesis) as a free, all-inclusive hosting space for web cartoonists worldwide. The group has also published their own collections. More recently, Keen Toons was added as a forum to highlight a handful of artists for whom Flash animation is the preferred medium.  

There is some turnover on the Keen Toons site, but the roster generally has, almost literally, a little bit of everything. “Evil Josh & Billy” – the adventures of a young mad scientist and his delinquent brother and reminiscent of such cult classics as Dexter’s Laboratory and Powerpuff Girls in both sensibility and animation style – is updated on Mondays. Before the “terminator” canceled the show, Tuesdays used to bring new spots from Danny Washington and Educational Egg – an educational television inspired premise, where the live action, nerdy, backwards cap-sporting Washington speaks to the floating, animated Educational Egg. “Robotbox and Cactus” is about just that – the adventures of a surly, square robot and his more timid friend, a talking cactus, updated Wednesdays. Thursdays bring new episodes of “Space Tree,” in which another talking plant species, this one eyeless, is the captain of a space ship. Weekends were the territory of “Bonus Stage,” about a group of video game obsessed friends, featuring music from classic game titles. However, it appears that spot will soon be given over to another toon by the same creator, “The Stupid Adventures of Mark & Tony.” As you can tell by the titles, they all lend themselves to the surreal material so often encountered in Flash animation.  

In one episode of the now-defunct Danny Washington & Educational Egg, Egg is turned into a man-eating robot, in what is later revealed to be a dream sequence. In the last episode, number nine in an unfortunately truncated series, Egg is turned into a zombie, and Washington is forced to slaughter him with a baseball bat, partly to keep his monologue from being interrupted. This isn’t exactly Disney material.  

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Nicholas Mosquera
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In March of 2007, a young man from San Francisco, CA took a webcam, and an idea, and made an immediate impact on the concept of live web content. Coining the phrase ‘lifecasting’, Justin Kan’s life has literally been an open page, generating buzz from blogs like Trendcentral.com and Laughing Squid’s tale of strange technological synchronicity to more traditional reporting like Newsweek. Blending the lines of spectacle, life as art, and life as profit generating endeavor, Justin.tv generates income through advertisements, product placement and donations as he and his ‘cast’ document Justin’s daily routines and nightly adventures.

“I started Justin.tv because I thought it would be awesome for people to see what it was like to be Justin”, says Justin. The site runs on a basic Truman Show-inspired premise: see what someone else is doing at this very moment, 24/7. Justin’s live head-mounted cam gives viewers first-person perspective to someone else’s life. The main site page gets right to the meat of the issue, with live streaming video and a corresponding live chat where viewers can narrate or comment on Justin’s exploits. At the time of this writing, Justin was in a bar conversing with various people, all of whom were obviously well aware of the camera attached to his head, raising the question, are we actually experiencing what it’s like to be Justin, or does the awareness of everyone he interacts with somehow contaminate our observation? It’s like seeing everyone’s performance of themselves. In fact, Laughing Squid has even organized events where people can hang out with Justin, essentially playing a cameo in Justin’s lifecast.

Justin foresees that one day there will be networks of lifecasters on the web, creating a crazy interconnecting series of video streams. Philosophic implications aside, Justin.tv features a daily blog with occasional articles and schedules for Justin’s daily activities, and a surprisingly functional archive where you can browse through previous days 15 minutes at a time.

According to Wikipedia, on March 23, 2007 someone used Justin’s cell number, which he had published on his site, to make a false police report of a stabbing, leading to this police raid being seen live by hundreds online. There’s also this infamous clip where Justin may or may not be gettin’ lucky.  To check out a catalogue of other featured Justin.tv scenes and much more, try this site maintained by various bloggers and fans.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Nathan Bock
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Ben Zelevansky, Alex Bloom, and Scott Harris have been churning out episodes of “Unleashed” since July 2006 with Lucky Birds Media, Zelevansky’s media production company. Originally conceived by Ben, he and Alex write the series and supply the voices while Scott handles the animation and Bluegrazer takes care of the music. Bloom is a copywriter, an improv director, and a fiction writer, while Zelevansky is a web designer, a writer with diverse interests, and a reluctant actor. Neither seems to have anticipated being the producers, writers, and voice actors for two dogs on a weekly online serial, where Swingers meets the Animal Planet.

Most episodes from the first and second seasons are done in three parts that are each about two minutes long and feature a talking dog named Dog as he maneuvers about the Hollywood dog parks as a struggling, out-of-work actor. Drawn in the style and written with the deadpan humor of Adult Swim and “Dr. Katz,” Dog, Polly, and Rex go about their lives in simple backgrounds and squiggly outlined foregrounds. Living in a man’s world is as hard for the animal actors as it is for everyone else. Whether it’s Polly’s offense over being called a bitch by her agent, or Dog hedging after being asked an inappropriate favor by his acting coach, the talking dogs deal with all the same awkward human situations as the characters in “Seinfeld” on an episode-to-episode basis.

The best part of Unleahsed is its random humor. At times, the show’s scripted humor can fall flat, but it’s the Adult Swim-like visual humor in the animation that makes it fun – like having Rex’s director Nige always wear a captain’s hat with a tooth-on-a-string hanging from his neck, or placing fellow “animal actors” in the office of Dog’s agent, like a penguin in a top hat or a bear in a purple suit.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Zach Jones
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Keith King decided to give up his Bar Mitzvah DJ business in 1997 to host Ripped Off with Keith King, his first Twin Cities community television show, which was followed by The Show with Keith King in 2001. With over 6 years of public television experience, Keith, along with his friends, collaborated on Just a Show in 2003 and transferred the group’s community hit to the web in 2005.

Like any late night talk show, Just a Show relies on several recurring characters and sketches to fill its time slot. And like any public access show, its production budget is pretty low, as you can tell from the cheap sets, which are referred to in other circles as “sheets of fabric”. The comic in the crowd does “sit-down” comedy throughout the night, and Keith cops a segment from Jay Leno in “Hits the Pavement” when he interviews passersbys on the street. His interviews are always irreverent and result in mocking imitations of the passerbys during subsequent segments. The episodes can be a little long, but it’s worth flipping through them for comedy group Flapping Crane’s short sketches. You can also skip the whole episode and watch specific segments by scrolling to the bottom of the Watch page and clicking on individual clips and bonus footage. The site also hosts Keith’s personal and uncharacteristically serious blog. Keith often takes the show on the road to places like New York City and Las Vegas, so don’t be surprised if you find an oddly aggressive man standing on your street ready to pounce on you with a microphone.

Flapping Crane’s sketch comedy piece Johnny Green: Cell Phone Photographer is really funny, as is watching Keith whore himself out on the streets of Minneapolis trying to unload signed headshots to a skeptical crowd. Even better is when the group stumbles upon a willing bystander, like Alejandro in Tijuana, and end up with more funny footage than they can air.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Rebecca Halpin
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Launched in May of 2006 by a team of Bay Area real estate and internet entrepreneurs led by Brad Inman – of real estate news site InmanNews and Homegain – TurnHere is attempting to start a revolution in the travel industry. By organizing a network of creative local filmmakers, TurnHere has amassed a collection of semi-professional neighborhood videos. Videographers submit five-minute-or-less tours of tourist traps and tiny locales alike, while attempting to stick to the high standards required by the site’s moderators. The results are indie-flavored short films giving the scoop on neighborhoods around the world.

TurnHere videos run the gamut from high-energy nightlife excursions to peaceful walking tours of quaint villages. Produced, directed, and hosted by knowledgeable locals, the stories told of bargains and shopping meccas (not to mention ghosts), bring the viewers a true sense of the location. While films cover areas in multiple continents, three locations – San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles – contain the most material, with videos showcasing even single streets. Other shorts are searchable by location or by activities, such as “beaches” or “indulgences”, so you can find what you may or may not be looking for. From Hamlet’s castle in Elsinore, to a charming snake-ridden villa in Thailand, the site covers such a range of content because it gives its network of filmmakers a great deal of creative and editorial control. While the videographers wholly intend to sell you on their city, they do so with such imagination and skill, you sometimes forget you’re basically watching a commercial.

Finally! Someone has made a travel film about Wisconsin that isn’t about cheese.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Rebecca Halpin
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Founder Graham Hill started the consumer-oriented site, now edited by lawyer-gone-green Michael Richard, after realizing that changing the way products are made on a large scale—from wasteful and waste-encouraging to sustainable and renewable—would not happen without organizing green innovators and designers like himself. Hill’s original Treehugger site had begun in July 2004 with great success, leading the company to create original video content on a new platform, Treehugger TV, in March 2006. With features, news updates, and podcasts highlighting the ups and downs of living green, Treehugger TV aims directly at the already eco-educated segment of our society while providing a trendy platform for eco-responsible designers to popularize their wares.

With stories on environmentally friendly cities, the merits of organic food production, information on the 2006 film “Who Killed the Electric Car,” and green sex toys, there’s no mistaking this site for one of Dick Cheney’s bookmarks. The site has well over a dozen passionate correspondents around the world and each one is informed and eager to share, ensuring that you’ll have plenty to discuss the next time you hear someone complain about gas prices. Each week, viewers and correspondents send in their two- to three-minute clips, shot with few frills on waste-efficient digital video, on everything sustainable and renewable, whether it’s surprising headlines or how-to videos. Reflecting the nature of the content, Treehugger TV invites audience participation by enlisting viewers to join the production staff (for a small stipend, in fact), submit original content, or even send in a solid story lead.

Check out this piece on hipster LA-based car company Lovecraft Biofuels. They’ll convert any diesel engine to one that runs on vegetable oil.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Nicholas Mosquera
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Since coming to the web in October 2005 from its smalltime beginnings as a open mic and hip hop battle on London’s West End, JumpOff.TV has been a much talked about newcomer in global hip hop culture.   In July 2006, with the creation of the 2on2 World Rap Championship, which pits teams of two against each other for weeks of hip hop street battling in New York and London (unofficial battles also take place in Paris, Dolos, and elsewhere) for a $10,000 grand prize, JumpOff.TV has managed to decentralize hip hop, create a large internet fanbase from the get-go, and become one of the forerunners in competitive hip-hopreality programming.

The main feature here is undoubtedly the Championship. Each round is unedited, low-budget, shot in one take, and contains graphic language (without fail). Sometimes the competitors are riveting and sometimes they let out rhymes so tedious that you have to wonder how they got there. But as the weeks toward the final battle dwindle down and the most amateur of the amateurs are kicked off, the true competitors come out and they’re always fun to watch. The site has three shows: Newscast (hip hop and urban lifestyle news), In the Building (coverage of parties, concerts, dance culture, festivals, and fashion), and Stripes (interviews about fashion and hip hop production). On top of that, JumpOff.TV has hundreds of hip hop videos submitted by users at its Magnify site. (As always, the quality of user submissions varies.) The hip hop news section is updated on an occasional basis, normally highlighting UK hip-hop related events, and the site’s three bloggers (Kymberlee Jay, Scarrs, and Batlow) cover everything hip-hop related that the news blog doesn’t.

The battles are the best thing on the site. Supplemented with standings, a schedule of match-ups with winners and losers, and a listing of the week’s sharpest original one-liners, the international online competition is not only one-of-a-kind, but it’s also ready to meet its inevitable competitors head on with JumpOff’s surplus of innovative material.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Zach Jones
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To quote their FAQ page, Travelistic “is a site that lets you explore the world through video.” Travel videos range from those uploaded by ordinary users to professionally produced clips to tourist board videos. Begun in October 2006, Travelistic comes from Diversion Media, a cutting edge media company founded by MTV, VH1, and SonicNet vet Nick Butterworth.

Travelistic contains an impressive array of options. Its thousands of free travel videos are searchable by location on a Google world map, by most popular producers, or by popular tags. There’s also a frequently updated Travleistic blog for those who’d rather read than see and hear travel information. The videos themselves are varied in tone and style: the eternally bikinied Get Out girls (unsurprisingly the site’s most popular tour guides) offer Wild On!-esque eye candy from hotspots like Jamaica to Hawaii; BCPictures create short, briefly informative segments with airline stewardess voiceovers explaining the perks of Holland hostels and the religious sites of Peru; and unlike most others, The Map, hosted by Liza de Guia, is an original Travelistic program a youth-oriented series featuring everything from an ultramarathon in the Sahara to a recap of Carnival celebrations across the globe. With such a wide selection of series and video’d locales, it’s difficult to not find what you’re looking for.

You’re probably still stuck on the Get Out girls, but Kelly Loudenberg is just as pretty and has a more DIY field reporting approach to showing Travelistic users eccentric and out of the ordinary spots, as in an episode about an artistic community in the middle of Texas or the one giving a New York City lesson in the culture jamming activity known as shopdropping. Loudenberg’s take is more political, and her videos’ ethereal music and focus on the otherworldly make for pleasantly atmospheric viewing.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Michael Joshua Rowin
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The virtual home of avante-garde film icon Jonas Mekas hosts short films produced by Mekas and other prominent filmmakers. Originally from Lithuania, Mekas immigrated to the United States in 1949 and almost immediately found his niche within the culture of underground film. A champion of experimental cinema, he established the now defunct Film Culture Magazine in 1955, as well as the Film Makers Cooperative and Anthology Film Archives. He has also written film reviews for the Village Voice since 1958. Among his many accolades he has been honored by the Albright-Knox Gallery, the Long Warf Theater Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Mekas’ website is a tribute to his legacy as well as a reflection of his constant evolution – he is among the first of the original avante-garde to explore digital video technology.

In keeping with Mekas’ artistic precision, the site opens to a collage of still shots complied from classic films that gently dissolve into one another, offering a brief taste of the impact of the avante-garde. A crisp, contemporary design makes the site both easy to navigate and exudes the kind of clean tranquility that lends its focus to the films and away from any packaging gimmicks. Access to the films are provided to subscribers only or by purchase, but previews are available for curious outsiders.

To begin the avante-garde exploration Mekas offers a Collection of 40 of his films including such greats as: Warhol and Maciunas, Song of Central Park, and Allen Ginsberg Sings Blues. 365 Films is presented in calendar format, designating one film for each day of the year. On Day 130, May 10, 2007, Mekas films his reaction to a Liquid Archecitecture Song, which depicts him raucously chanting “Revolution it never ends!” And on Day 183, July 2, 2007, he documents the consistent fervor of the hard rain fall in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. These films are available free to subscribers on their release date.

The Classics category hosts a series of classic short films by old greats like Kenneth Anger, Hans Richeter, and Marie Menken. Mekas also provides a forum for guest filmmakers Bruce Baillie, Jim Jarmusch, Ken Jacobs, Julius Ziz, Virgine Marchand, and Ben Northcover. He further reserves the Outtakes category for great scenes that, for whatever reason, are relegated to the cutting room floor. Users are also given the chance to talk about filmmaking or the site in general on the open forum.

The site is a true celebration of underground films and Mekas himself, who rightfully owns the title of the “godfather of American avante-garde cinema.”

Mekas’ documentation of the sly and subtle beauty of everyday life in his 365 Films provides both a taste of his genius, and a true opportunity to sit back and reflect.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Anusha Alikhan
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The idea of recut trailers and trailer mash-ups was arguably conceived in 2001 by Kathryn Hempel of Cutters. Having recently joined the board for the Association of Independent Creative Editors (AICE), Kathryn wanted to give Cutters’ assistant editors a new creative outlet, and the Trailer Park competition was born. But it wasn’t until 2003 – when Spencer Sommers’ Passion of the Christ parody was threatened with a lawsuit and Robert Ryang’s 2005 AICE Trailer Park winner “Shining” found a home on video-sharing sites – that the genre entered the mainstream. Created by a few Australian students in Fall 2006 under the auspices of Globecast Network, Trailer Mash sifts through the web and aggregates only the best of the genre to display.

The trailers featured on this site have gone through some major surgeries. Some consist of transplants from other movies, while others move around pieces to create a new kind of story. Still, others have had the ultimate trailer surgery: genre re-assignment. You can browse the trailers by revised genre (including Action, Comedy, Drama, Horror/Thriller, Mash-Up, Parody, Romance, and even Gay Romance), user rating, or movie title. While most of the trailers use clips from the movies themselves, a few create additional footage (like in C for Cookie where Sesame Street characters reenact a world where the consumption of cookies is government-controlled as a spoof of V for Vendetta). Some filmmakers, like Mike and Ari of Smacky Productions, use authentic-sounding movie announcer voiceovers to guide their revised story for spoofs like 10 Things I Hate About Commandments and Must Love Jaws. The site contains a high percentage of well-done creations, so you’ll be able to easily find a few belly laughs with minimal effort.

Personally, my favorite is Crew Cuts’ hilarious “Enter the Dragon, Bitch!” It’s not the best use of editing by any stretch of the imagination, but it does take an overlooked minor character in a legendary Bruce Lee film and turns the character, an unfortunate sidenote in Blaxploitation encyclopedias, into a fully realized protagonist with his very own theme song.

Filed under: Tilzy.TV by Rebecca Halpin
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