Tubefilter News

Sunday night for me always means a chunk of time blocked out for HBO. It’s one of the few networks worth shelling out a couple extra bucks a month. It pretty much built its brand on groundbreaking drama—The Wire, The Sopranos, Sex and the City. And for what it’s worth, there is no HBO of web series. No one network of premium content that owns drama.

The creators of The Fall of Kaden, which premiered online this week, have said they are trying to break that mold. Matt Doubler and Adam Leiphart have a thing for drama and noticed the void of web series drama sites. Through their Tape 6 production company, Doubler and Leiphart said they are looking to stand out as a go-to shop for premium drama.

The first episode is mostly setup and lets us meet protagonist Kaden (Leiphart), who is in the midst of a Leaving Las Vegas-style downward spiral. Of course he doesn’t exactly have that far to fall since he’s a low-level loan shark dishing out cash to deadbeat gamblers. He’s also faced with the moral struggle of helping out his worthless brother (Joe Andalaro) who is along for the ride.

Encoding and uploading problems? Seems even the pros have their share of them. Back on Tuesday we ran the news that Lindsay Campbell is back in the web series world with her new series out of Next New Networks called Small Business Rules. the show was supposed to go live that day but a set of uploading issues with the AMEX Open Forum site, where the show is exclusively distributed for now, caused the release to be delayed until late last night. So today people are finally getting a look at the series, though for some reason there are no embeddable versions of it. Um, just a hunch, but there are probably more people that would dig this show than the handful that hang out on AMEX site. Their sponsor branding, after all, is built into the episodes. Kind of a launch fail if you ask us.

In other web series news of this Labor Day-shorted week, we had a two-part well worth reading interview with Streamy-winning director Blake Calhoun (Pink) on what he’s learned so far and some info on his upcoming series Exposed for TheWB.com. There’s was also news that long-running office comedy The Temp Life is gearing up for new episodes with renewal from lead sponsor Spherion and adding some new behind-the-camera talent. Also popular, especially amongst PS3 gamers, was our look at the groundbreaking machinima tools that are being built in to the upcoming PlayStation 3 game, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. We’ll be waiting for the first machinima web series to come out of that engine. Who’s it going to be?

We all know the music business gets a lot of flack for being virtually decimated by the internet’s rampant obsession with file sharing lately. Major music labels faced quite possibly the largest re-sizing of an industry in recent history at the hands of eager mouse clickers. But for smaller indie labels like LA-based Dangerbird Records, with MySpace faves like Silversun Pickups, Sea Wolf, Division Day and The Dears on its roster, the internet is much more intrinsic to their businesses.

Sea Wolf has released a web series dubbed White Water, White Bloom to promote the band’s forthcoming album of the same name which drops September 22. ‘Vol 1′ (above), otherwise known as episode 1, flows like an arty doc piece, telling the story of lead signer Alex Brown Church and the origins of lead single “Wicked Blood.”

The Temp Life has kind of flown under the radar in terms of branded web series successes, but ever since it first convinced a blue-chip sponsor to back the web comedy back in mid 2006, it has trekked on steadily delivering for both audience and sponsor.

At first glance it portends to be another blah-blah office comedy, but the concept is actually pretty novel, given the show’s sponsor, real-life recruiting and staffing company Spherion. Take a comical look at small off-brand temp agencies, well known to job-hopping New Yorkers, and show what could happen if you don’t end up with one of the big boys like Spherion. The fictional agency, Commodity Staffing, carves out its niche as the dredges of temp jobs—think changing crusty urinal cakes and 24/7 lifecasting of a stuck-up socialite.

Streamy-nominated writer Yuri Baranovsky (Break a Leg) has been hired to write the new episodes and The Hayley Project’s creators Andrew Park and Jato Smith will be at the helm. There’s even word that Hayley Project star Rachel Risen (also Streamy-nominated) will guest star in the new season.

There’s nothing like a decent product giveaway to light up Twitter screens. Seriously, search for #LEVEL26 on Twitter lately and it’s a near constant stream of entries into a daily drawing for custom Level 26 HD Flip cams. Apparently despite all the backlash over so-called sponsored tweets, that eager young tweeters are still pushovers when it comes to giving away a decent gadget.

The 7-day contest, which runs through the 15th, is a promotion tied into the launch of Level 26: Dark Origins this week. The crime novel hit shelves on Tuesday and the eighteen corresponding 3-5 minute “cyberbridges” went live on the Level26.com site. From the mind of CSI creator Anthony Zuiker, the whole project is being called the world’s first Digi-Novel, essentially a combination of novel and web series woven together.

I had a chance to dive into this earlier this summer after a sneak preview release of the book and series at Comic-Con, and this isn’t your parents’ CSI in book form. Squeegel, the salacious killer on which the story centers, only becomes creepier when firing up the cyberbridge episodes and seeing human contortion you didn’t know was possible.

Veronica Belmont is a self-proclaimed ‘newbie foodie’. Kudos to VendrTV host Daniel Delaney for getting the venerable web series host of TekZilla and Qore to branch out and eat some weird food. We on the other hand, are repressed a bunch food snobs and Tubefilter may very well spin off a food blog to deal with this problem.

The latest episode of the street food stalking web series has the NY-based Delaney heading to San Francisco, arguably the country’s foodie mecca, to meet up with ‘Spencer on the Go’, a french restaurant’s mobile noms truck. Being French that means plenty of weird ‘delicacies’—paté de foie gras (fattened goose liver), escargot (snails) and some fungus pastry. Belmont was a champ, sucked it up and downed the escargot-on-a-stick for our entertainment.

This is the second part of our interview with Streamy-winning creator-director Blake Calhoun (Pink, 88 Hits, Exposed). Be sure to read Part 1 of the interview first, it’s that good.

Tubefilter: What can you tell us about your next web series project, Exposed? What has it been like working with McG?

Calhoun: Pink really opened a lot of doors for Mike and I. We sold the show to Generate and subsequently got to produce 25 more episodes (Seasons 2 and 3) and right now we’re in talks to do a new Season 4. We’ll hopefully have news about this soon. We also got to go around town and pitch several other ideas and sold one to Warner Bros. and TheWB.com. We’ve had the great opportunity to work with the studio along with McG’s company Wonderland Sound and Vision on this new project (McG is the Exec Producer). We’re currently finishing it up right now and will be able to speak more about it in the near future. But I think fans of Pink and our “dark-thriller” brand will enjoy the show.

Tubefilter: Anything else coming up for you?

Calhoun: I just wrapped (in June) directing my fourth feature film called Spilt Milk. It’s a wry comedy about a disgruntled grocery store manager whose life gets forever changed one fateful evening when his store gets robbed. It stars Jake Johnson from the Drunk History YouTube videos and this summer’s indie hit Paper Heart (with Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera) and also Chase Jeffery who is the lead in Exposed. The film already has distribution and will be released sometime in 2010.

In a recent post here on Tilzy.TV, I wasted too many letters whining about young actors‘ obsessive compulsion to share the tedium of their lives as though it were legitimately entertaining. Not long before that I complained about infatuation with superheroes. Last night, as I watched the new series Junior League of Superheroes (or JLoSH), [...]