Author Archive
Ze Frank Goes to the Movies
It’s hard to believe that Ze Frank’s the show ended well over a year ago. Nothing has filled the void Ze left when his quirky, participatory video show stopped beaming power moves and duckies into our lives daily (though many have tried). Which leaves us wondering, what has Ze Frank been up to? We discovered part of the answer from Frank’s recent appearance on NPR’s radio show, The Sound of Young America (embedded below). Turns out Frank has plied his internet fame into a full blown deal to write a movie for Universal Studios that he’s finishing now.
We knew Frank had signed with United Talent Agency, had pitched a sitcom to CBS that didn’t get picked up, and was working on feature films. As Frank tells the show’s host Jesse Thorn, he flew to Hollywood and made the rounds taking meetings all around town. But half year went by without much progress, Frank says, before he got a deal with Universal. Now the videoblogger is finishing a movie script co-written with South Park writer Erica Rivinoja.
Frank is not alone in jumping from the computer screen to the silver screen. Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, the duo behind Ask A Ninja, are remaking Attack of the Killer Tomatoes for producer M. Dal Walton III, the mastermind behind Day of the Dead and Terror Train remakes. Just this week the Hollywood Reporter reported HomestarRunner co-founder Craig Zobel will re-write and direct Loudermilk starring Napoleon Dynamite star Jon Heder.
But traditional media is still trying to get its head around “new media” and it’s clear that new media stars often have difficulty transitioning the other way. Speaking frankly of his experience trying to get into old media, Frank said “I don’t know if there’s a place for me quite yet, but I really do hope there is.” We hope so too, but if not, we’ll always be here for you on the tubes, Ze.
Whedon’s Web Musical Fanboy-tastic!
The wonderfully nerdy fruits of the writers guild strike are starting to ripen. Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon started writing a three-part musical Internet series during the strike with his brothers and the result, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, is coming to soon to a computer near you. The teaser trailer just “leaked” yesterday and is full of fanboy fodder.
Teaser from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
Dr. Horrible has high production values and an allstar cast including Niel Patrick Harris as the low-budget villain, The Guild’s Felicia Day as my his love interest and Nathan Fillion of Whedon’s Firefly as the “superhero who’s kind of a dick,” as Fillion describes it. The film was one of the last projects shot on NBC Universal’s New York street set, which burned down earlier this month.
TubeMogul’s (Biased) List Shows New Media Kicking A$$ Online
The newteevee world is still ruled by new media stars, according to video distrbutor TubeMogul’s Top 40 list. The list is diverse, but old media types don’t break the the Top 10. New teevee whippersnappers like Next New Networks, Effinfunny.com and MyDamnChannel all scored very high. Moving down the list, old media giants are slowly creeping up, with FOX, CBS, Warner Brothers, HBO and Sony Pictures all grabbing spots. So while old media giants are gaining traction with their massive content libraries in the new media space newer players are still holding their own and building their audiences with fresh, web-specific video.
But you don’t have to be a large content network to make it onto the list. TubeMogul’s list shows that web-savvy personalities can push their personal content out to mass audiences. Chris Pirillo, iJustine, Hayden Black and Nalts all grabbed top spots showing that the mantra of “broadcast yourself” still holds. The fact that an online video buffoon like Nalts can score higher than CBS confirms that the playing field has been significantly leveled. Read more of this story
“Battle at Kruger” Goes Prime-Time
What do you get when you stretch an 8-minute video out into an hour-long nature documentary? Mostly, repeated edited clips of those precious 8-minutes diluted by ho-hum back story and speculative experts voicing their opinions.
My father, who hadn’t seen the original “Battle at Kruger” YouTube safari spectacular, joined me tonight to watch the National Geographic Channel’s hour-long, prime-time adaption, “Caught on Safari: Battle at Kruger.” His take: “This is ridiculous! Stop cutting away!”
The documentary promises an “uncut and digitally enhanced” showing of the epic fight to save the baby buffalo from “the original master copy,” but you don’t get to see it until 50 minutes into the oldteevee special. Indeed, the video is hashed and rehashed, punctuated by a healthy dose of network television commercials. In the end, this hour-long documentary undid everything that was satisfying about the original video: the instant gratification, the unadulterated sequence, and the unexpected twists. The purity of the experience is ruined by all the accouterments television thinks necessary.
Pangea Day Across the World and the Web
While online video has done much to connect the world by allowing us to share our stories with one another, we often enjoy the tales in front of our computer screens, alone. What if the connective and collective experience of enjoying a film could unite people across the world and the web? That is documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim’s goal with this Saturday’s Pangea Day, an event in which 24 different films from all over the world can be viewed in person, online, on TV and on your mobile phone.
Noujaim first presented her idea to Al Gore at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival; in 2006, she was awarded a TED Prize to fulfill her wish of bringing the world together for one day a year through the power of film. It’ll be like a multicultural celebration of the human spirit, akin to Al Gore’s decadent Live Earth concert series, but with fewer self-absorbed rock stars.
Now Nokia and Gore’s own Current have come on board to help collect and disseminate stories. Noujaim spoke to NewTeeVee in New York this week amid last-minute preparations. Read more of this story
Midwest Teen Sex Show’s Nikol Hasler Twitters About Poop
Sex sells, especially on the Internet, but The Midwest Teen Sex Show brand of sex is in a class of its own. Where else can you find syphilis portrayed as a chainsaw-wielding murder or learn about the truth behind towel-snapping in the guys’ locker room?
We got to sit down with the show’s host and one of its creative minds when Nikol Hasler left behind the cow pastures and horny teenagers of Wisconsin to visit San Francisco, land of fewer cow pastures but equally horny teenagers. It was a casual chat, with the conversation swinging from her Twittering habits to her childrearing techniques to the fact that she very much wouldn’t want the show to be part of sex ed curriculum. Here are just a few highlights from the intelligently coquettish and inimitably colloquial Ms. Hasler.
Hasler told us that talks are already underway with television networks about moving the Midwest Teen Sex Show to the mainstream, but stressed that the TV execs all seem to understand that the show’s inherent irreverent edginess is key to its success. While the show is ostensibly aimed at teenagers, the audience is primarily of an older (sketchier?) demographic, but Hasler says they are still making sure that everything in the show is teenager appropriate. Hence their “Abstinence” brand of condoms.
GOOD & MySpace On Skid Row
Online video is perfectly suited for investigative journalism pieces. It’s just as easy to go out into the field with camera in hand as it is with a tape recorder, and now the final product is no longer limited to the written word but can hit viewers with video and audio as well. On Skid Row, a new five-part series from GOOD and MySpace, takes the cameras into the seedy side of Los Angeles, exploring the issue of homelessness among the 9,000 vagrant bodies in L.A.’s 50 square-block Skid Row.
GOOD, a year-old multimedia company with a print magazine, has produced numerous excellent video shorts, which we’ve profiled here, but On Skid Row is the most ambitious and longest video project they’ve undertaken to date. GOOD is quickly supplanting Current as my top pick for an engaged, multimedia source of information and entertainment. This new series shows that GOOD has got the journalistic chops to tackle complicated issues, and the fact that they are devoting five episodes to this single topic says that GOOD is willing to invest in bigger stories. Read more of this story
Anonymous: Cyberspace Meets Meatspace
The Internet has been rife with skirmishes recently. And the battles have run the gamut, from the physical (those mysteriously slashed cables in Middle Eastern seas) to the theoretical (proposed Net Neutrality legislation on Capitol Hill) to the political (viral presidential propaganda). But the most significant example of a cyberspace movement crossing into meatspace was the digitally organized protest known as “Project Chanology” that the group Anonymous put on in front of Scientology churches all over the wired world.
It was just a few months ago that Anonymous was little more than a poorly understood online group of hacktivists. Then the Church of Scientology tried to force web sites to take down a video starring Scientology celebrity spokesperson Tom Cruise. Anonymous initially reacted with a petty distributed denial-of-service attack on Scientology’s official web site, but it wasn’t long before the group issued a digital manifesto promising the dismantling of Scientology altogether. Then last week, Anonymous took to the streets, organizing physical protests in front of Scientology Churches all over the world. Read more of this story
Strange Web Trends: Nazi Re-Subtitles
Viral video mashups often play off of jarring juxtapositions. The Brokeback parodies, the animated Soulja Boy remixes, and even the basic webcam lip-synch videos rely on an internal and intrinsic contrast. But these oddball combinations pale in their scope when held up against numerous videos of the same rancorous scene from the film The Downfall, each with a re-subtitled treatment.
Hitler Gets Banned (His Ultimate Downfall)
The film tells the story of Adolf Hitler’s final hours at the end of World War II in a bunker in Berlin. The scene in the film depicts Hitler’s self-deception as he learns that the German war machine has crumbled and Allied forces are quickly closing in; his cinematic tantrum is on par with “Angry German Kid’s” video game-induced fit.
Why Wasn’t Cloverfield Released Online?
For all of the internet hype J.J. Abrams curried for his latest display of inimitable cinema mystique, Cloverfield remains firmly stuck in twentieth century. The driving voyeuristic shtick of the film — the character-held camera that documents the entire incident — is never developed beyond mere contrivance. Despite its high-tech marketing, the movie itself is decidedly low-tech and consequently out of sync with its audience. The filmmakers do nothing to push the film’s structure beyond its decade-old Blair Witch roots.
Secret Video from Cloverfield - Watch more free videos
The result is that Cloverfield is nothing special. You’ve seen it all before. The novelty is that Mr. Abrams wants you to pay $10.50 to see poorly shot glimpses of a monster too large to be captured on DV tape. Hollywood’s treatment of cinéma-vlog-ité winds up being a hackneyed mode of storytelling that gets in the way of the story and leaves me wondering — did this movie need a theatrical release at all? Could it have instead been released online, available as a mysterious download? This would have made Cloverfield a remarkable piece of twenty-first-century digital filmmaking as opposed to a twentieth-century piece of Hollywood tech-sploitation.
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