Tubefilter News

It wouldn’t be bad advice if someone told you to play to your strengths, to work with what you know best. For actress Jesse Draper, who is most known for playing the ditzy nanny on Nickelodeon’s The Naked Brother’s Band, that meant mixing a little Hollywood flare with her Valley roots for her indie web series. Oh, and by Valley, I don’t mean the other side of Mulholland. I’m talking about California’s other illustrious hotbed, Silicon Valley.

Draper’s web series, The Valley Girl Show, pits Draper in character as a quirky pink-obsessed host sitting down to chat with some of the world’s top business leaders and entrepreneurs. You can’t help but be reminded of a Reese Witherspoon’s Elle in Legally Blonde, juxtaposing academic bland with more ‘colorful’ smarts.

For Draper, this is her wheelhouse. Draper, the daughter of venture capitalist Tim Draper (of Draper Fisher Jurvetson), literally grew up around the titans of tech, giving her both a level of ease and access to the Valley’s elite.

Last season she landed top execs Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy. This season she says they are stepping it up a notch, if that’s even possible. Draper tells me that she looked at last season as a “pilot season,” testing out the concept and honing the character. This season she says they have upped the production quality, bringing on production company OnPoint Productions and even consulting help from the team at EQAL.

Amid signs that the Hollywood celebrity-blockbuster model has hit a snag, Yuri Baranovsky and his team at the web series sitcom Break A Leg have signed an “odd” network deal.  Is there a new entertainment model emerging?  More on that soon.

Did you know CNN has a web series? I didn’t. It’s called Freshman Year and while it might sound like a coming-of-age college romp, it is far from it. Here’s the gist: two Congress n00bs, Jared Polis (D) and Jason Chaffetz (R) carry around Flip cams and chronicle their first terms in the House.

Polis is an openly gay man and former Internet entrepreneur elected to represent Colorado’s second district. Chaffetz is a conservative, “former chief-of-staff to Utah’s governor and married father of three who sleeps on a cot in his congressional office to save money,” according to the Freshman Year website.

In jest, Richard Galant, Sr. Producer for CNN.com, said “[Chaffetz] doesn’t mind sleeping on a cot in his office —except when the Zamboni-like cleaning machine comes down the hallway in the middle of the night, beeping loudly, or when the sirens for the emergency alert system are tested overnight.”

Gritty, gooey and gore galore gives the original post-apocalyptic web series, Lady Wasteland a strapping gun-toting formula suited for sci-fi fans. The series runs rampant with zombies, cannibals and human targets who struggle to stay alive by a new set of rules.

We got an early teaser (above) of new thriller web series Compulsions, which is still in post-production. This one piqued our interest early, with a few notable web series names in the mix. Stars Craig Frank (The Crew, Private High Musical) and Annemarie Pazmino (Sorority Forever) are recognizable to web fans. And as of now, the only other announced cast member is Janna Bossier. A few other recognizable faces make an appearance but are being kept under wraps.

The basic setup is that even completely normal people have hidden and often dark desires, or compulsions, that are kept inside and never acted upon. Of course it would be a lot more interesting to find out what would happen if they did act upon them. And that’s where this series picks up. Three leads, three different compulsions. One of them is sadism.

Writer-creator Bernie Su said they are “trying to push the level of web drama to another level, one that is sophisticated and thematic with different levels of character development.” He went on to tell me that much of the dramatic series out there online aren’t clicking with viewers because they often drop the ball in some key pieces of the puzzle.

Su and producers Michael Tohl tapped an experienced crew to help pull this off. One of their first scores was veteran producer Robert Grand, who had line produced big-budget films like The Fugitive and Star Trek: Generations. Also brought on was AFI-trained director Nathan Atkinson and DP Jason Raswant.

I’m a little over halfway through an advanced copy of Anthony E. Zuiker’s novel Level 26 that was given out at Comic-Con last month. And I can honestly say that this latex wearing contortionist killer (“Sqweegel”) has officially creeped me out. It’s one thing when you read a crime novel and are limited to your own mind’s imagery of the twisted killings. But when you mix that with interstitial video episodes, you get those perverse contorting images burned into your retinas. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Zuiker, most known for creating the megahit procedural crime drama franchise CSI, has made the move into two mediums he hasn’t touched—publishing and web television. Ok, it’s really three if you count his surprisingly formidable start to his blogging career on the Level 26 site. It’s everything you don’t normally get from Hollywood players—refreshingly candid and actively updated by the man himself.

His attention to the web series’ production shows, and Zuiker’s TV background is not lost on the 20-episode series. He shot on the RED camera and cast professionals, recognizable faces like Michael Ironside, Daniel Buran, Kevin Weisman and Bill Duke. And to really sell the creepiness of his uber-killer, he found actor (and world record holding contortionist) Daniel Browning Smith to play Sqweegel. He even brought on fashion designer Marc Ecko to go the book cover art and even a special edition t-shirt.

The Swedish, commercial superstore that offers “affordable solutions for better living” is continuing to coast towards pop cultural immortality, via this Jonathan Coulton song, comedian Mark Malkoff, and numerous other send-ups. Ikea Heights takes more of an exploitative route, where the store unwittingly becomes the set for a web series about murder and cracking wise.

Quick update on The Guild’s promo music video, “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar,” which has been creating quite the buzz before the hit comedy web series returns for Season 3 next week. Today the video broke the 1 million views mark on YouTube, and has taken the #1 spot on as the top music video on iTunes.

The video hit YouTube on Monday, taking just two days to reach the million view mark. The $0.99 MP3 is also selling well on Amazon, currently the #6 best selling MP3 album on the site.

Guild creator and star Felicia Day wrote the lyrics to the song and Jed Whedon composed the music and directed the video.