The Internet has been known to host anything and everything, but did you ever think there would be a musical exclusive to the web? Okay, maybe youdid. But what about a musical exclusive to the web by the brilliance behindBuffy the Vampire Slayer? Didn’t think so.
Whedon wrote this script with his brothers during the writers strike, and then produced it and made it in six days, sans the help of major studios (I guess writing best selling comics wasn’t enough of a distraction). The show, which will premiere on July 15, already has its own fansite, and will consist of three episodes of about ten minutes each.
I have high hopes for this series. The web’s a great venue for a small scale musical revue, which doesn’t have the length for TV or a feature film, and is probably more offbeat than you could get away with in those formats. The trailer has the look and feel of internet short, but the production value of a theatrical release and comes ready made with star power, including the resuscitated Neil Patrick Harris and The Guild‘s Felicia Day, who knows Whedon from her work in Buffy.
Sales Guy: “Our website was at the very tip of the penis… and now I don’t know where anything is. I need the [desktop] icons back the way they were.”
Web Dude: “Well I can’t go back. There’s no way to go back. You can’t arrange them by penis.”
This exchange is the perfect example of what makes “Sales Guy vs Web Dude,” the first episode in the screencasting series The Website is Down, so brilliant. The hilarious show, which follows the sarcastic “web dude” as he deals with technically challenged corporate dimwits, has catapulted itself from a simple vid shared among friends into a full-blown viral hit.
Josh Weinberg, the creator of The Website is Down, who is well-versed in the computer industry, said that his video is based on an experiences as a tech consultant, a job he has done for about 10 years. “That exact scenario was happening to me,” he recounts. “I was playing Halo and the system was having a problem, and I was dealing with that… It wasn’t like we really had to act. It’s exaggerated, but not a lot of research went into it.”
When Weinberg says “we,” he’s referring to the cast, a group of friends who came together to make the video. A fair amount of it was either ad-libbed or based on previous experiences. Said Weinberg, “Most of it was scripted, except for Jesse Johnson (Trevor from Arvada)’s stuff. We just said, ‘We’re going to call you, and you tell us that the website is down.’ We did 3 takes, and each one was different. And Casey Cochran (Sales Guy) has worked in tech for so long… we had experienced these situations before.”
After recording the dialogue, Weinberg spent about a month working on and off before he was satisfied with the video. He also worked extensively on the interface of the site, including the sarcastic Unix-like command line that shows up when you click “Desktop” on the top right corner of the site. Once he was ready to debut the video, he mailed it to 50 people he thought would find it funny, and posted it to StumbleUpon, the social website ranking network. From there, the video blew up in popularity. According to Weinberg, “Immediately in the first couple of hours it had about a thousand hits, but it kept growing. Here and there people would post it on their blogs, or we’d get an email saying, “We just emailed this to our whole IT staff.” It grew and grew to the point where it took down my server. I put it on blip.tv, which is cool, since they don’t brand it and you can embed the FLV… I started getting these crazy [view] numbers. I don’t even know how many, because people keep reposting it.” Weinberg says that except for blip.tv, he never reposted his creation on video sharing sites , which is a surprise because his video has collected 360,000 views on Youtube, and over 1.2 million on Break.
Looking ahead, Weinberg says we can expect more episodes in the future. In the meantime, he and his friends are going to recoup from the explosion in popularity of the video, and plan their future release schedule. As Weinberg explained, “I don’t know if I could release videos like Homestar Runner, week after week. Maybe like once a month. Or maybe we could just do a whole bunch at once, and release it piece by piece.”
Whichever route they take, we look forward to watching this series develop; from the reaction to the pilot, we expect The Website is Down to be a big hit.
The Internet loves cats. We like to see them looking both cute and essentially contextualized to look, well, retarded. So it should come as no surprise that Garfield, the wisecrackin’ calico made famous by cartoonist Jim Davis, has found new popularity online in alternately bizarre, existential forms.
Garfield Minus Garfield, a web comic in which Dan Walsh, a technology programmer in Dublin, subtracts the title character from Davis’ original panels, has left the Internet (and Jim Davis) in awe of what is either a brilliant Tumblr-powered parody of stale punchlines or an existential meditation on slouching towards the single life.
At about the same time that G-G found popularity online, our perennial favorites at Fatal Farm broadcast an equally clever and subversive series about Garfield (this time in video form) called Lasagna Cat.
Viral video. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Those sexy “v” sounds and the sense of something unstoppable, un-killable. No wonder the term has become so popular. It has also become a sort of Holy Grail for content producers, ad execs and brand managers across the world.
And, like the Holy Grail, viral video is at best an ancient legend and at worst a pipe dream. Thousands will seek it only to go down in flames, confused and lost.
Over the past week or so I have been bookmarking posts on the various advertising and new media blogs that have had something to say about “viral” video and I’m left a wondering just who is blowing all this smoke up who’s ass and why it’s continuing with no end in sight.
First, NTV takes a look at a WSJ article about the BMW “viral” video called RAMPENFEST. Both NTV and WSJ make it seem like BMW was trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes by not directly claiming responsibility. The fact is, as I actually posted a few months ago:
“BMW never tries to truly fool us into believing this is real, they are just allowing us to suspend our disbelief and join in the fun.”
What bothers me about both the NTV and the WSJ articles is that they are lumping arguably smart, fun innovative marketing with viral video. Let’s get something straight: the “viral” in viral video refers to the fact that it spreads like a virus, exponentially expanding outward until it infects a large segment of a population. It has nothing to do with whether or not people know who created the video.
The line comes from a Town Hall Meeting in Merrimack, New Hampshire on December 29, 2007. The recording comes from YouTuber IssueAlliance, whose account has over 700 soundbytes from the Republican presidential hopeful, taped at public appearances along his campaign trail.
Not all are insidiously edited like the above. Most break down McCain’s speeches into digestible chunks, aimed to elucidate the candidate’s stance on major issues. It’s a resourceful database, but it’d be better if it didn’t have a partisan agenda, or at least admitted its biases.
You can argue the merits or demerits of American imperialism, but there’s no questioning that the efforts of the American military throughout the world do, to some degree, enable the prosperity and freedom that’s often taken for granted in this country.
I, for one, don’t often enough consider the tremendous sacrifices made by military families nor the profound impact that the the experiences of war have on our society in general. In Their Boots, which launched yesterday, tells complicated stories with refreshing simplicity.
The website, funded by a grant from the Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact fund (IADIF) and produced by Brave New Foundation, is centered around a weekly series called “Real Story” which describes “dramatic and emotional” moments in the lives of Iraq and Afghanistan service men and women. The website also includes live discussion with the people featured in “Real Story” as well as issues and analysis for service men an women.
It’s a community and place of healing for those that have endured the hardships of war, but it’s also humbling media for those of us that reap the benefits of their sacrifices.
In the 100 Days last Winter the Writer’s Guild of America carried signs of indignation against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, PeterHyoguchi got an idea.
The director and card-carrying member of the WGA created Who’s On The Line? – a compelling short profiling strikers in their homes and on the Hollywood picket lines – uploaded it to YouTube, posted it on United Hollywood – a writer-run blog that served as a WGA soap box and message board during the strike – and was amazed by how fast it, and other shorts made possible by the strike, spread across the web.
So, Variety reports, Hyoguchi got together with a handful of other writers who thought the internet was really something special and came up with the idea for Strike.tv.
Sites like Break.com and eBaum’s World may have lots of publicity, but few comedy sites have more high quality, original content than CollegeHumor. Started in 1999 by two Baltimore-area high school friends, the site has grown rapidly, with 6 million unique users and 200 million unique page views per month. In between the articles, fake commercials, and viral videos sits the Hardly Working series, showing us the strange day-to-day lives of CH employees.
The show, which is released about twice a week (although it follows no definite schedule), is a loosely scripted, bare bones production, quite different from the intricately produced sketches and viral videos that CH is best known for. Said Dan Gurewitch, a senior writer for CH, “Hardly Workings are a different animal… They allow us to indulge our absurdist side, since we’re not necessarily aiming for them to be big viral hits.”
Tubefilter News had a chance to talk to Gurewitch and fellow senior writer Amir Blumenfeld, the latter famous for his “Prank War” with CH editor Streeter Seidell, and ask them a few questions about Hardly Working.
Tubefilter: How did the idea for Hardly Working come about? Why did you decide to make it into a series?
Amir: I’m not exactly sure. We’ve always been making short little videos around the office — just to amuse ourselves and our friends. I think it was a decision made by our boss to put some of these videos on CollegeHumor just to see how people would react to it.
Dan: Yeah, the first couple of Hardly Workings were under ten seconds long, just a quick visual joke. We realized pretty quickly that people saw the different, casual approach as a breath of fresh air, and also enjoyed “getting to know” the CH staff.
Amir: If people like the video I’ll go out and get dinner with them.
Dan: Incidentally, Amir hasn’t eaten in weeks.
Amir: ZING!
TF: Is the response from viewers different for episodic content than for one-off videos and viral content?
Dan: It depends. Street Fighter: The Later Years was able to garner a pretty big, consistent audience, and I chalk that up to the relatable concept. Most series aren’t nearly as viral, Hardly Workings included, but HWs help our audience connect to us as people. Thanks to them, CH doesn’t feel like an anonymous brand.
Amir: It’s tough for episodic content to be viral as well because a lot of its appeal has to do with the series as a whole, rather than a singular quick hitting concept. I think the audience for series is more dedicated, but not as large as the audience for viral one-offs. It’s almost a quality vs. quantity thing and I think Dan would 100% agree with that broad generalization.
Dan: I’m working with Amir on not making assumptions about things he knows nothing about. Two steps forward, one step back.
Amir: Are you saying I know nothing about Hardly Working videos?
Dan: You were laid off three months ago.
Amir: So?
TF: What is in store for Hardly Working in the future? Are the rumors that you’re working on something for MTV true?
Amir: We’re not at liberty to talk about that really, other than the show is going to be called “Viva La Dan.”
Dan: It’s a shot-by-shot, episode-by-episode remake of “The Grind.”
TF: Do you think that episodic web content will be big in the future, or do you think that it’s limited by the way we use the internet?
Amir: I think people’s internet attention span is increasing. We are seeing some semi popular videos that are longer than 2 minutes long, which is a good sign for web series over single viral hits.
Dan: Agreed. I think right now, series work best when they’re not serial — they have a consistent concept, but can stand alone. Most people don’t yet have patience to follow a continuing storyline on the web, but I think that will change as TV and the internet inevitably merge.
Amir: Ladies and gentlemen: WebTV! The internet ON YOUR TELEVISION!
ChannelFlip launched last week as the self-proclaimed “first video magazine for men” in the UK (Inquisitr coverage via textually tv).
The site divides its three minute videos into tech, film, and games (it’s true, guys are that simple), and 200 installments are already in its archives. A trial run earlier this year attracted 150,000 viewers and 1 million views in a month, which likely prompted Intel to sponsor the launch.
So, this is no fly-by-night operation, not to mention the “six figure backing” that the company claims to have raised.
That makes sense given the experiences of ChannelFlip’s two co-founders. Wil Harris is a tech writer and entrepreneur who’s a regular on TWiT and has started successful websites like bit-tech.net, and Justin Gayner is an experienced journalist and television executive, having served as Commercial Director of QI Ltd, the producer of the BBC TV show QI. On top of it all, the pair are also capable hosts of ChannelFlip’s tech and film sections, respectively.
This is actually more of a relaunch for ChannelFlip; there’s coverage of a fall 2007 launch on Harris’s blog and Techcrunch UK. The relaunch also helps explain the large amount of content, which the team seems to be cycling back through as they ramp up their production of new videos. This especially makes sense for the mostly-evergreen tech and games archives, but film will need to keep updating or relying on trusty lists like Top 10 Film Fatties:
Things seem be off to a flying start for ChannelFlip, and for good reason. Read On…
The evolution (pun intended) of science programming has come a long way.
Mr. Wizard,3-2-1 Contact!, Beakman’s World, and Bill Nye focused on conducting experiments using everyday household items and simple animations to simplify scientific phenomena. Then came more experience-based broadcasts like the old school PBS documentary Voyage of the Mimi (giving Ben Affleck’s career a kick-start), that lasted fifteen minutes an episode and tracked the migration of hump back whales. Nowadays, the saturated on-demand market allows instant access to topic-specific shows a la Shark Week and Survivor Man.
In it’s jump to the web, science programs like Robert Krampf‘s Experiment of the Week, though informative, haven’t made any evolutionary leaps in the way scientific experiments or information is delivered. The Monitor, however, takes the genre to a whole new genus.
Created by John Pavlus (a Brooklyn-based writer/director for National Geographic, NOVA, Wired, etc. ) and Christopher Mims (a science buff with lab experience and a degree in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology) of Small Mammal Productions, The Monitor is a weekly video news show stemming from Scientific American. It aims to be the “curator of the kind of need-to-know information that doesn’t show up on other sites until [they’ve] reported it first.”
Pavlus and Christine Nicholson trade off hosting duties and capture their audience with a sarcastic, but forthright tone, using commonplace explanations supported by correlating web images and video clips in a sweet use of screencast. Animated graphs, videos, and pictures, synchronized with the hosts’ commentary, appear in a computer monitor (yeah, now you get the show’s name?) to deliver accessible and informative information on scientific findings.
It’s science info for the curious and computer literate delivered in a format that’s as innovative as it is familiar.
Immigration reform. We keep meaning to do something about that is this country. We really have, but you know we’ve got this whole big thing with Iraq, four dollar gas, and this important election which hinges on who can wear the most flag lapel pins and supply dehydrated babies with bottled hot water. We just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Both McCain and Obama have a record firmly in favor of a path to citizenship for America’s twelve million illegal immigrants, so maybe we’ll eventually cross it off the to-do-list but, until then, a lot of people’s futures hang in the balance.
VBS.tv‘s latest offering, Illegal LA, puts the politicians, the pundits, and all the hot air aside and follows citizens who are at the forefront of the immigration debate in Los Angeles.
On one side you’ve got two men who helped found two very sketchy, very different organizations.
“Their creative ventures begin with sponsorship of the Glow in the Dark Tour 2008 Ignited By ABSOLUT 100, and will continue as West works with the brand to bring his signature style into nightlife arenas and marketing campaigns in a daring and provocative fashion.”
Below is what “daring and provocative” means in PR speak, from Videogum:
It’s the second viral video campaign in recent months from Absolut using pop culture icons in retro-absurd awesomeness. The first featured two “undeniably insane, eye-popping videos that come exclusively from the minds of some of today’s most entertaining, hyper-creative, and especially bizarre minds of progressive comedy,” Zach Galifianakis, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim.
For the Be Kanye ad, Kanye picks up where they left off, concocting an entertaining mix derived from those Bacardi and Cola ads, Ron Popeil, and Kanye West. But while Galifianakis and co. enlisted over-sized martini glasses to show how much they enjoyed Absolut, alcohol is conspicuously absent from Kanye’s video.
At about the same time that G-G found popularity online, our 
In the 100 Days last Winter the 
Immigration reform. We keep meaning to do something about that is this country. We really have, but you know we’ve got this whole big thing with Iraq, four dollar gas, and this important election which hinges on who can wear the most flag lapel pins and supply dehydrated babies with 
