Funny or Die and Amazon Video Direct have launched the next phase of their partnership. Three short films produced by the former company have arrived exclusively through the latter company’s platform.

The films, which were financed by Amazon Video Direct, represent a range of comedic styles. Soojung Dreams of Fiji, from writer SJ Son and director Hye Yun Park, is a mockumentary; creator Anna Kerrigan’s The Jury is set in a courtroom; and Ahamed Weinberg‘s Lovebirds is an a sitcom centered on an amateur ornithologist. To watch any of these projects, you’ll need an Amazon Prime account, which costs $99 per year.

Funny or Die announced its pact with Amazon Video Direct last month. The decade-old digital comedy brand previously released a project called The Real Stephen Blatt through Amazon’s year-old hub.

The two companies celebrated their latest union with a premiere event from Los Angeles, with the creators of all three projects (pictured above) in attendance.

Photo credit: Apple Ridge Films

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Funny Or Die, News by Sam Gutelle
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U.K. YouTube duo Daniel Howell and Phil Lester, who count a combined 17.6 million subscribers across a handful of channels, are set to embark on their second-ever international tour dubbed Interactive Introverts.

The outing succeeds Howell and Lester’s first tour, The Amazing Tour Is Not On Fire, which ran last year and subsequently aired in documentary form on YouTube Red. And while the initial 75-date tour spanned just six countries, Interactive Introverts will be a a slightly more expansive affair covering 80 dates across 18 different countries, including the the Netherlands, Russia, Germany, Poland, Finland, Sweden, and the Philippines.

According to a release, the show will see the two internet nerds engaging in rants, roasts, battles, stories, and other surprises. Tickets go on sale on Nov. 14. The show kicks off on April 28 in the U.K., and concludes in the Philippines on Sept. 13.

“We can’t wait to visit so many countries that we haven’t been to before, and perform this really unique, exciting show for our audience that hopefully everyone will love and never forget,” Howell and Lester — who just launched a board game called Truth Bombs — said in a statement. Other ventures that the duo have pursued in recent years include The 7 Second Challenge — a mobile game — as well as a book called The Amazing Book Is Not On Fire.

Filed under: News by Geoff Weiss
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Cheddar is expanding beyond its business news origins to tackle national and international issues with a forthcoming channel appropriately dubbed Cheddar Big News.

The brand will be modeled after CNN Headline News, focusing on the day’s biggest political stories as well as noteworthy local events — including weather phenomena and animals on the loose, Cheddar founder and CEO Jon Steinberg tells Digiday of the venture. “We’re going to tell you what Trump did, but we’re not going to have a panel debate about it for five hours,” he said. “We want to do news that tells you all of the stuff that you need to know, but then also offers a bit of a relief from the news.”

Cheddar Big News is expected to launch next year in the first quarter, per Steinberg, who is in current conversations with distribution partners. The channel will broadcast daily between 6 am and 10 pm, with reruns and other prepackaged programming filling the overnight hours, according to Digiday.

At the same time, Cheddar — which officially launched last year — announced that it expects to rake in $11 million in revenues this year. Steinberg told Digiday he hopes to grow annual revenues to $100 million “in a few years,” and that the company is planning to aggressively expand distribution to “every OTT bundle available in the U.S.” by the middle of next year.

Cheddar currently clocks 200 million monthly views across all  distribution platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Sling TV, and Pluto TV.

Check out a sizzle reel for Cheddar’s latest venture below:

Filed under: News by Geoff Weiss
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Amazon is expanding its efforts to woo high-profile personalities across the social media landscape. The retailer has announced that its seven-month-old Influencer Program, which offers commissions and vanity URLs to creators who link to Amazon product pages, is now open to Instagram and Twitter users in addition to those on YouTube.

Unlike Amazon’s Affiliate Program, which is open to creators of all stripes, the Influencer Program is specifically targeted at social media stars with large followings. Applicants who are accepted into it gain access to a vanity Amazon URL on which they can sell the items they reference in their posts, and they are eligible for a commission on all purchases routed through that landing page. At the Web Summit conference, YouTube star Dan Markham said that one of his videos led to more than $160,000 in Amazon sales revenue, of which he received an 8% cut.

Now, Instagram and Twitter stars will gain those same privileges. In particular, the integration of the former platform is a big win for Amazon, since Instagram is a popular choice for branded content. A recent study said the Facebook-owned platform will account for a $2.4 billion influencer marketing business by 2019. At the same time, the FTC has criticized some Instagram creators for failing to properly disclose branded posts.

For that latter group, the Amazon Influencer Program can be a useful tool, since it does not count as a sponsorship. “Promoting authenticity is important to us and to our program,” said Amazon exec Navid Hadzaad. “You don’t have to have an affiliation with a brand to be able to promote a product and monetize it. You can actually showcase your favorite products.”

Applications for the Amazon Influencer Program can be found on the initiative’s homepage.

Filed under: Amazon, Articles, Featured, News by Sam Gutelle
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Insights is a weekly series featuring entertainment industry veteran David Bloom. It represents an experiment of sorts in digital-age journalism and audience engagement with a focus on the intersection of entertainment and technology, an area that David has written about and thought about and been part of in various career incarnations for much of the past 25 years. David welcomes your thoughts, perspectives, calumnies, and kudos at david@tubefilter.com, or on Twitter @DavidBloom.

This past week’s release of the iPhone X brought with it the typical Apple ad tsunami, touting that, among other talents, “Augmented Reality. Is a reality.”

True enough. This is probably the first time we’ve seen a snarling Tyrannosaurus Rex stalking around a basketball court, as it does in the iPhone X ad. Rex was probably just mad they wouldn’t pass the ball to his tiny little baby hands for the open three. Apple can indeed take some credit for supercharging augmented reality right now, and not just with the powerful, highly capable iPhone X (never mind the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, the X’s also capable if less powerful brethren, released to an indifferent market a month ago).

Back in June, Apple gave developers ARKit, its set of tools to make AR app creation easier. This fall, Google followed suit, announcing its version, AR Core. And Facebook is offering AR Studios.

So, we’re here, in AR World Version 1.2. I say v. 1.2, because AR has been around a while in various guises. Notably, Snapchat has been teaching the kids about AR the past couple of years. And Snapchat is doing so well with AR advertising that Business Insider just said it is “blowing past Facebook, Google and others when it comes to augmented-reality ads.” Last week’s cool 3D World Lens put users in the living room of Netflix hit “Stranger Things.”

Now, stuff like that will become routinely available to millions of people who couldn’t figure out the befuddling interface of their 12-year-old nephew’s favorite app. But beyond Snapchat lenses that send Alaska Air planes flying around your head, or hot dogs dancing a jig, or end you up in the Stranger Things living room, there’s a big ol’ world out there to be augmented by other folks. And now it’s time to figure out how the entertainment business will do it.

The truth is, though, I’m not sure how much the entertainment business is ready to do, at least for a while.

Game developers have been among the first to release cool apps such as The Machines, extending the mobile experience beyond small flat screens onto your tabletop and far beyond (AR Dungeons & Dragons, anyone?).

But most other initial AR apps have been rather prosaic: measure a room; see how furniture might fit your place; check the fit of a piece of clothing. Useful, yes, and practical, with huge implications for e-commerce, blah, blah, blah.

Long-time tech journalist/sensei Steven Levy, in fact, suggested the best feature right now to show off iPhone X capabilities was Animojis, which use the phones sophisticate facial-recognition technologies to map your expressions and speech to animated emojis. The animoji that Levy preferred for his demos is, I do not kid, a talking, smiling pile of feces. That’s sort of amusing, even kinda entertaining. And I expect it will spark no end of nasty messages from abusive bosses and bitter exes in years to come. O joy.

But much of this stuff is also, let’s face it, kinda boring. As long as AR is trapped in the phone, insiders have told me, it may be unrealistic to expect too much more in terms of AR entertainment.

For more significant kinds of entertainment to thrive in this universe, creators will have to figure out the cool things and killer experiences/apps that take AR, and AR users, beyond the phone and to a very different place, even as they remain in the place where they already are. It won’t happen overnight. Members of an AR/VR panel I moderated at the recent Digital Hollywood conference suggest that all those prosaic business uses will drive AR for the next few years while technology catches up, perhaps with smaller, cooler, more powerful glasses than those we’ve seen from Snap and Google.

In fact, said Shannon Norrell, a virtual-reality evangelist for HP, creative types should focus on enterprise-focused AR projects while the enterprise market develops. The production skills are the same, he said, and eventually entertainment AR will Become a Thing. When it does, AR should be a far, far bigger opportunity than VR.

Jay Samit, vice chairman of business-consulting giant Deloitte Digital, said sports AR is an area of huge opportunity right now. Team-branded AR eyewear, the 21st-Century equivalent of opera glasses, are coming soon that will bring the in-home experience to the stadium.

“Right now, the in-game experience is not as good as your home experience,” Samit said. “There are no statistics, no replays, you don’t know what’s happening with your fantasy teams, the team doesn’t know who buys what at the concessions.” But coming very soon, Samit said, are AR “glasses that you just wear to your sporting events. Parts of this are coming in 2018 and they’re killer apps, because they have to be.”

What about entertainment beyond sports and videogames?

Even now, getting into AR can cost as little as $10,000 to get going, I’m told by a close personal relative who has researched this. That brings it comfortably within reach of even many online creators. Will some of those big-name creators – on YouTube, Instagram or or other platforms – begin to make new kinds of AR entertainment and other programming, bringing along their million-plus followings? Apple must think so. It snubbed many traditional tech product reviewers and gave YouTube stars much earlier access to the iPhone X, a marketing-savvy approach that a miffed VentureBeat writer nonetheless deemed “bizarre.”

Snapchat, with so much riding on AR v.1.2 (or perhaps, v. 1.5 or even 2.0) might/should create its own version of AR Kit for its users and brand partners. It also could convert or expand its Discover section into a haven for cool AR experiences from news, feature and entertainment brands, as well as from emergent native stars.

What happens with Musical.ly and Live.ly, two thriving sites whose tweener audiences will certainly embrace cool AR content if it’s offered? Will they construct AR karaoke//singalong/live performances opportunities for their users? Virtual rooms filled with other fans singing along could take the notion on digital tipping to a whole new level.

And out on the broader web, what might we see?

Will AR entertainment be Shakespeare performed live in your living room, or, given T. Rex’s basketball ambitions, maybe dodging some velociraptors in a Jurassic Park transposed into your den. Could a future Ellen be perched on your own sofa for her next show? One of the challenges, of course, will be figuring out whether AR will end up contained inside the walled gardens – Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram. Or can creators find ways to thrive in the wild, across the rest of the Web. And to do that, it needs to make money.

At the AR/VR Society’s On the Lot conference, I talked with Vince Cacace, founder and CEO of Vertebrae.io, which provides ad tools for what he calls “immersive media:” VR, 360-degree video and now, AR.

Snapchat, especially its Lenses, have taught a budding generation of users to enjoy AR v. 1.1, Cacace said. Now it’s time to create AR experiences that can live everywhere else, and not just in apps, but on browsers that require the least effort by users to have a cool and entertaining experience, even if it’s one created by a brand.

“There’s a lot of people building interesting things with AR Kit and AR Core,” Cacace said. “But it’s hard to create a sticky AR experience because nobody has really figured out the user experience of what AR is and what AR can be best for. To move forward, it’s not just about these one-off showpieces. How do you build a sustainable business?”

And that will be the key to creating transformative entertainment in the world of AR v. 2.0.

Filed under: Apple, Articles, Industry, Insights, News by David Bloom
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YouTube is celebrating Veterans Day tomorrow with a compilation of heartwarming clips of service members returning home from duty. Additionally, YouTube has created a video honoring veterans for their service — which also seeks to help citizens who haven’t served understand the sacrifices that military personnel make on our behalf, the video giant says.

“From heartwarming homecoming videos to personal vlogs about their service experiences, veterans turn to YouTube to help share their stories and form community,” chief marketing officer Danielle Tiedt wrote in a blog post, which also calls out notable veteran creators like beauty and fashion vlogger Missy Lynn (530,000 subscribers) and fitness star Nick Bare (160,000 subscribers).

Surprise reunions and homecoming videos are a particularly popular genre on YouTube, writes Tiedt, and these types of videos see a resurgence around Veterans Day. The most-viewed such video on all of YouTube features a German Shepherd fetching a ball — only to bring it back to his long-gone dad, just back from deployment (21 million views). In second place is a scuba-diving soldier who surprises his family in the ocean (19 million views), followed by a deaf rescue pitbull welcoming home his father after a drill weekend (15 million views).

You can check out YouTube’s list of the 20 most popular homecoming videos right here — which count a combined 180 million views to date — as well as its Thank You For Everything Veterans Day video below:

Filed under: YouTube by Geoff Weiss
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After a pair of articles revealed the presence of insidious videos within the community of children’s content on YouTube, the video platform is promising additional strides to protect its youngest users. It has promised to age-restrict content that gets flagged by users.

YouTube said it is relying on a team of volunteers called Contributors, as well as the scruples of ordinary viewers, to hunt down and flag content that needs to be age-restricted. Before a flagged video is assigned that status, it will be reviewed by a team of “thousands” of YouTube moderators. Should that process confirm a video’s inappropriate nature, the offending clip will be made unavailable to child users, will be stripped of monetization options, and will not show up on YouTube Kids.

Handwringing over the presence of dark, weird, and violent content on YouTube Kids reached a fever pitch this week after a New York Times report and a Medium post from author James Bridle brought attention to the disturbing horrors visible on the purportedly family-friendly app. According to The Verge, YouTube has been planning its policy shift for a while and did not enact it in response to recent coverage. “We’re in the process of implementing a new policy that age restricts this content in the YouTube main app when flagged,” said Juniper Downs, YouTube’s director of policy. “Age-restricted content is automatically not allowed in YouTube Kids.”

YouTube also made sure to clarify that the number of inappropriate videos within the YouTube Kids app is very small, with most of those videos claiming the majority of their viewership on the all-ages version of YouTube. In the past 30 days, the platform said, only .005% of videos that made it past automated filters were then flagged by users.

While YouTube does its part to regulate the presence of sinister content aimed at children, parents can also help weed those clips out by keeping close tabs on the online video habits of their kids. As I wrote in response to Bridle’s piece, it may be possible to use viewership decisions to retrain the YouTube algorithm, causing it to recommend appropriate videos to youngsters.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, News by Sam Gutelle
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Musical.ly, the popular lip-syncing app favored by Gen Z — which has given birth to a new wave of influencers including ‘Baby Ariel‘ Martin, Jacob Sartorious, and Lisa And Lena — has been acquired for a reported $800 million.

Beijing ByteDance Technology Co. — a Chinese internet giant best known for its news aggregation platform Jinri Toutiao — is Musical.ly’s new proprietor. Bytedance, which is expected to garner $2.5 billion in revenue this year, and which boasts a $20 billion valuation, beat out rival bidder Kuaishou — a Chinese viral video streaming service — to make its biggest-ever foray into the American market, Bloomberg reports. Musical.ly has 100 million users, while Toutiao counts 120 million readers and viewers.

Musical.ly was founded in Shanghai in 2014 by the entrepreneurs Louis Yang and Alex Zhu, and subsequently became a massive hit among American teens. In addition to the flagship app, which enables users to record short videos of themselves lip-syncing to popular songs — which can then be edited with a variety of effects — Musical.ly also launched a livestreaming platform called Live.ly last June. The company also inked pacts earlier this year to host original shows from the likes of Hearst Magazines Digital Media, NBCUniversal, and Viacom.

Bytedance also operates an overseas news app called TopBuzz, it acquired video platform Flipagram in February, and most recently purchased a content aggregation platform called News Republic from Cheetah Mobile this week. At Bytedance, Musical.ly will continue to operate as a standalone entity, according to Bloomberg.

Filed under: Musical.ly by Geoff Weiss
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The Sundance Institute and YouTube are looking for their next class of talented young creators. The two companies have opened up submissions for the 2018 New Voices Lab, which will offer workshops, meetings, residencies, and other tools to a select group of up-and-comers. In addition, the Lab’s 2017 fellows have been announced, and that list includes YouTube star and 2017 Streamy Awards host Jon Cozart.

The New Voices Lab, first announced at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, has spent the past two years connecting aspiring creators to well-known producers, writers, and showrunners. In the past, the initiative’s roster of mentors has included Family Guy showrunner Rich Appel and The Office writer Jennifer Celotta, among others.

In 2018, the New Voices Lab will expand to a two-part structure that will include a residency in April in New York and a workshop in June in Los Angeles. During both legs, selected fellows will be able to take meetings with advisors to hone their storytelling, directing, and post-production abilities.

The application for the New Voices Lab can be found here. Submissions will be open from November 15 to December 14.

As the 2018 New Voices Lab applicants send out their resumes, the 2017 class will experience a three-day workshop series in Los Angeles. Cozart, who makes YouTube videos under the name Paint, is the most recognizable name among the current fellows. The project he is workshopping through the New Voices Lab is an “untitled music love story.” Seasoned online video viewers will also note that Kit Williamson, creator and co-star of the web series EastSiders, is workshopping a project called Trying at the Lab.

Here, via a press release, are details on all of the current fellows and the projects they are working on:

GOING PLACES

Flora Birnbaum is a writer and director based in New York. Her short films include “Couples Who Run Together” and “Bedtime”. Most recently, Flora co-created, wrote, and directed the digital comedy series Cleansed, about a jaded LA chick who goes on a magical juice cleanse to fix her life. The series was executive produced by filmmaker Leslye Headland and features 2016 Tony Award Winning actor Reed Birney. Flora’s humor essays have also appeared in McSweeney’s.

Logline: A socially-awkward Brooklynite’s attempts to fight her inner anxieties are sabotaged when they manifest in a real-life monster named KAREN.

DR. PORK RINDS

Mehret Mandefro & Lacey Schwartz are award-winning writers/directors/producers who draw on a shared interdisciplinary background to create compelling stories that span documentary and fiction. They produced and co-wrote the documentary feature Little White Lie, the top-rated broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens, and produced the feature narrative Difret which won the Audience Awards at Sundance and Berlin International Film Festival. Mandefro and Schwartz are currently developing a slate of film and television projects for Truth Aid, the production company they cofounded; additionally, Mandefro is a writer/producer for Kana Television in Ethiopia and Schwartz is is heavily involved in her husband Antonio Delgado’s run for Congress in NY in 2019.

Logline: Six upwardly-mobile black Harvard classmates reunite for a weekend on Martha’s Vineyard.  But things take a dark turn when one of them winds up dead after announcing his plans to go through a “deracialization” procedure to become white.

FERNANDA

Mary Angélica Molina is a writer and director who creates dark, funny, queer, intersectional stories about Latinxs that grapple with unanswerable questions like: Who am I? Where do I belong? Should I have the sweet plantains or the salty ones? She is a thrice-recognized Sundance Institute Fellow; a participant in IFP’s No Borders Market; and a recipient of grants from the Latino Film Fund and the Brooklyn Arts Council. Her most recent short film, “Valentina” (2017), ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised over $15,000, and is currently playing sold-out screenings on the festival circuit. Her second short, “Oh Baby, I Love You!” (2009), has half-a-million hits on YouTube. Molina was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, and gives props to any non-Spanish speaker who can say that three times fast.

Logline: Fernanda is a queer, Latinx butch with a complicated question: are people fundamentally good or are they fundamentally racist, self-interested homophobes who coast on their white privilege? In her absurdly adversarial imagination everyone is suspect and no one can be trusted. Yet, in real life, Fernanda continuously battles her biggest opponent: herself.  

KIDNAPPING​ ​BRIHANNA

​Chell​ ​Stephen, writer/director, was raised in Toronto on healthy doses of music videos, The X-Files and teen dance movies – influences which shaped her debut short film “Crystal” (SXSW, 2014) a dark comedy about a be-spandexed 17-year-old jerk. Its follow up, “Shauna is a Liar”, is based on a true story from Chell’s youth and features poppy camp visuals, a dash of the surreal, plus an earnest beating heart at the center. She also directs fashion and music content for global brands with production family Think/Feel, and presently reps the motherland from the “fourth-largest Canadian city”: Los Angeles.

Logline: A high school valedictorian turned college dropout kidnaps the world’s biggest pop star, convinced that only she can restore her spiraling idol to glory.

KROPOTKIN & WOLF

Drew Christie & Thomas Kohnstamm

Drew Christie makes award-winning animation and film for The New York Times Op-Docs, Vanity Fair, SF MOMA, Showtime, The Criterion Collection and more. His series Drawn & Recorded (co-created with T Bone Burnett) animates forgotten tales from the history of music. He lives and runs his animation studio on an island in Washington State.

Thomas Kohnstamm is a Seattle-based writer and multimedia producer. His book Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? was translated into numerous languages and is in development as a feature at Vice Films. He’s completing a new novel and owns a digital content studio where he writes and produces a variety of live-action, VR and animation for Microsoft Story Labs and Xbox.

Logline: Kropotkin & Wolf is a comedic animated series that cuts between a famous Soviet animator in a gulag and the jingoistic children’s cartoon he’s forced to write about a valiant robot boy and his vodka-swilling wolf sidekick.

MELVIN – THE VIDEO GAME

William D. Caballero is a multimedia filmmaker who tells big stories using small figures. His recent directorial work, featuring 3D printed characters, can be seen on HBO, PBS, World Channel, and Univision. His recent short film “Victor and Isolina” premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Caballero is a recipient of the Gates Millennium Scholarship, and graduate of Pratt Institute and NYU.

Logline: After getting kicked out of his house by his overbearing mother, the inner thoughts and outer actions of socially-awkward and reclusive Melvin, are depicted as a role-playing video game, jointly played by the left and right sides of Melvin’s brain.

TASTY

Veronica Rodriguez and Sherry Cola

Veronica Rodriguez is a writer, director and producer. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Santa Clara University with a Bachelor’s Degree in English and Communications and received her M.F.A. in Producing for Film, Television, and New Media from The Peter Stark Producing Program at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Since graduating, she has focused on developing her own film and TV projects as a writer/director, including her original feature His Own Where, based on the book by June Jordan, with Janet and Jerry Zucker attached to produce. Veronica recently transitioned from Funny or Die’s scripted television team (working on shows including IFC’s Brockmire and Hulu’s I Love You, America! with Sarah Silverman) into a full-time producing/directing role with the company.

Sherry Cola is a rising stand-up comedian, actress, and host based in Los Angeles. She has performed at iconic venues such as The Comedy Store, The Hollywood Improv and The Ice House while training with the Upright Citizens Brigade and The Groundlings. You can see her in Jill Soloway’s I Love Dick and Transparent on Amazon as well as MTV’s SafeWord.

Logline: Tasty is a heartfelt comedy about Lil’ Tasty, a Chinese-American, Kobe Bryant-loving rapper, as she pursues her dreams of becoming the female 2 Chainz.

TRYING

Kit Williamson is an actor, writer, director and Internet person, best known for playing Ed Gifford on the final two seasons of AMC’s Mad Men. He is also the creator and star of the Emmy-nominated LGBT series EastSiders, which is now available on Netflix. Season three recently made its festival premiere at Outfest in Los Angeles, and will be released on DVD and digital platforms through Wolfe Video on November 28. Originally from Jackson, Mississippi, Kit began his career as an actor on Broadway while studying acting at Fordham University, and went on to receive his MFA in playwriting from UCLA.

Logline: Trying is a queer dark comedy about a gay brother, his lesbian sister and their significant others, who are all doing their part to bring a baby into the world without tearing their unconventional family apart.

WITNESS PROTECTION

Timothy Hautekiet is a writer/director whose career began in sketch comedy and short films on YouTube. His channel “youtube.com/timh” has 166,000 subscribers and his videos have over 9.3 million views, collectively. He is a graduate of USC’s Peter Stark Producing Program. His work has screened at the BFI Future Film Festival, the US Student BAFTAs, the LA International Short Film Festival and has been featured on HBO and Funny or Die.

Logline: A dysfunctional couple from New York is sent to rural Texas under the witness protection program, where they continually ruin their cover while trying to save their relationship.

UNTITLED MUSICAL LOVE STORY

Jon Cozart is a filmmaker and musical comedian, having spent a decade in the online video space and graduating middle of his class from The University of Texas’ film program. With an emphasis on high-concept, high-quality, highly offensive a capella comedy, Cozart has garnered 4 million YouTube subscribers on his channel, Paint, with only forty videos to his name, a rarity in the space. Cozart now has his sights set on TV writing, gay Tinder, and furthering his comedic sensibilities, whatever that means.

Logline: During their final concert together, two codependent musicians recall their shitshow of a relationship through the love songs they’ve written for each other.  

Filed under: Articles, Featured, News, Sundance Film Festival by Sam Gutelle
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Add Gizmodo Media Group to the list of companies that are seeking larger footholds in the online video world. The Univision-owned collection of category-specific outlets has hired Ben Reininga to be its Head of Video.

Reininga, whose work experience includes roles at Vocativ, Refinery29, NowThis News, and the Huffington Post, arrives at Gizmodo at a time when its brands are becoming more active in video production. A representative for the company told Variety that this trend is not indicative of a coming “pivot to video.” Instead, Gizmodo will continue to rely on its editorial voices while layering in more video content.

Gizmodo has had an eye on digital video for years. Back in 2015, when it was still known as Gawker Media, its execs expressed interest in making more videos, and a YouTube channel for the car brand Jalopnik arrived later that year. Two years later, after a lawsuit forced Gawker to sell off its properties to Univision, Jalopnik got its own TV show via the Fusion channel.

“I’ve been a huge fan of these sites since I was watching Pot Psychology videos with my roommates about a decade ago,” said Reininega in a blog post. “A lot has changed since then—at this company and everywhere else. What hasn’t is that the GMG sites are still a collection of some of the strongest and most unique voices out there. I couldn’t be more excited to be part of the next stage of their evolution.”

Beyond the tech-focused Gizmodo and Jalopnik, other brands under the GMG umbrella include feminist hub Jezebel and sports publication Deadspin.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, News by Sam Gutelle
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A couple known for their memorable one-day stint in the Windy City are expanding their relationship with their fans. Jaelin and Brianna White, whose ‘Chicago Story‘ drew a polarizing response last year, have launched an apparel line called 4AMOR.

The line includes hoodies, t-shirts, and tote bags, most of which are emblazoned with the phrase “we plan God laughs.” Prices range between $10 and $40. The target audience for the apparel line are the 587,000 people who subscribe to Brianna’s channel to watch her makeup tutorials, her haul videos, and her vlogs with Jaelin. “I’ve always been really shy, so it’s been hard for me to make friends,” Brianna White told Tubefilter. “I look at my fans as my best friends! They are always there to give me advice, and pick me up when I am down. I am inspired by every single one of them, and hope to meet them all in my lifetime!”

In ‘Chicago Story,’ which Brianna posted on her channel last August, she and Jaelin described the story of their attempted move from Arizona to the City of Broad Shoulders. On their first day in their new digs, they had an encounter with a man outside a Subway restaurant, which ultimately led informed their decision to leave the city. The tale drew ridicule from Chicagoans, but Brianna and Jaelin faced their critics and continued on with their channel.

Now, they’re hoping to spread a positive message. “Our biggest hope is that this brand will inspire people to spread love and positivity in the world in a time where that’s hard to come by,” the couple told Tubefilter. “The name 4AMOR translates to “for love”, and that is 100% what we stand for.”

Filed under: Articles, Featured, News by Sam Gutelle
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Lifestyle-centric digital network Kin Community is joining Facebook’s nascent Watch video venture with a brand new series that tackles paper crafting — or the art of using paper to form three-dimension objects (as well as illustrations achieved through cutting).

Paper Tigers — which Kin likens to Netflix’s Chef’s Table, but for paper crafting — will offer audiences a glimpse inside the studios of five of the world’s top artists working in paper. While a relatively niche subject matter, Kin is hoping that meticulous art form may have viral appeal. The series was produced in-house at Kin exclusively for Watch and bows today, with new episodes airing every Thursday through the end of the year.

Episode one features Beth Johnson, renowned for her origami animal creations (see below). Other artists slated to be featured include Mia Pearlman, who creates large paper sculpture installations, cut paper artist Kako Ueda, dimensional paper illustrator Belinda Rodriguez, and Emily Brown, who is renowned for her cut paper illustrations of animals.

“Paper Tigers is about incredibly talented artists doing amazing work that is visually stunning,” said Michael Wayne, CEO of Kin — which counts roughly 5.6 million Facebook followers. “Kin’s work with exceptional creators, data from our Facebook audience, and award-winning production studio combined to create this ground-breaking franchise.”

Filed under: Facebook, Kin Community by Geoff Weiss
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