Tubefilter News

Paramount Digital’s Circle of Ei8ht just released a trailer on MySpace, setting up for the online premiere of the series on October 27. We took an in-depth look at the myriad of moving pieces that brought this project together in our Anatomy of a Deal feature on Circle of Ei8ht back in August.

The supernatural series stars stars Austin Highsmith as Jessica, a newcomer to the City of Angels, who just moved into a loft on the eighth floor of a spooky downtown building called The Dante. It sounds something like a haunted Melrose Place, with her neighbors all being twenty-something good looking bohemians. Naturally, there are some gruesome deaths going down in this place and for some reason Jessica takes it upon herself, and her beefy neighbor Evan (Ryan Doom) to solve them. Joining her on the cast are Road Trip’s skinny man DJ Quall, Katie Lowes, Natashia Williams, Josh Kelly and John Bishop.

The show’s site on MySpace is custom built, and promises several levels of interaction with the story—hidden clues, mobile content, an online game and, most interestingly, a whole subplot where the audience directly controls the fate of the characters. “Find the clues, unlock the mystery and choose wisely… or people will die,” says the show’s tag line.

The meetup is only four days away — and we’re getting excited. We can’t tell you all of the reasons why we’re jazzed, but we can tell you that we’ve got four of the coolest sponsors in Web Television helping us to make the meetup a night to remember. Not only are they throwing their support behind the content community, but they’re also giving away tons of really cool stuff! So, acquaint yourself with the sponsors who are making all of this possible, find out more about the cool stuff you could could walk away with at the end of the night, and discover a little more about our mystery Monday announcement.

A couple weeks back we asked the rather obvious question, Where are all the fantasy football web series? We had found a few, some scripted, some not. It was right around then that we came across a fantasy football goldmine, Fantasy Football Live!, a weekly, hour-and-a-half live web show all about NFL for us armchair GMs.

It’s the latest of Asthon Kutcher’s web originals, and somehow has me way more hooked than KataylstHQ or the on-hiatus Blah Girls. In full disclosure, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m a fantasy football nut and this show is right up my alley. But even if debating the likelihood of LT’s return to glory or the durability of Willie Parker’s turf toe isn’t your thing, you still have to appreciate the fact that this live show pulls in an average of 10,000 simultaneous viewers.

Now, it doesn’t hurt that @aplusk himself is on the show, and he tweets out weekly about the series to his 3.6 million followers. The series airs live on UStream and Facebook, under Kutcher’s channel and the live chatrooms and Twitter are a key part of the fan interaction. So if you’re trying to figure out why Willis Magahee is worth a start after he laid down a 0-pt stinker last week, you can tweet like this fan to @aplusk to (possibly) have it answered by the hosts. Speaking of hosts, Kutcher isn’t just there for vanity. He knows a thing or two about fantasy, holding his own with his resident FFB expert Nate Zegura.

Regular readers will remember back in July when we spelled out 4 Ways to Make the Most of the Tubefilter Web TV Meetup. It’s worth dusting off and reading again if you’re even thinking about attending. (And if you’re in LA next week, you better have a good excuse if we don’t see you there.) Number 1 on that list was “Do Your Homework!” and that means finding out more about our stellar panelists. Today we’re taking a closer look at Coin-Op TV Live, who’s co-host Hailey Bright will be on the Going LIVE! panel. (RSVP here)

Coin-Op TV Live

The hour-long live video gamer series, hosted and created by Robert Welkner dates all the way back to 2004 when it launched as a video podcast. In fall of 2006 the series became one of the first shows on the all-live web TV network, TheStream.tv which gave it a new home and larger set.

Like most live shows on TheStream.tv, including Streamy-nominated Monkey News Source, the hosts interview guests and make heavy use of the live chatroom audience that accompanies the live stream. For Coin-Op TV, it’s all about interviewing top game creators, luminaries, designers and yes, even some hardcore gamers like Project Lore host Alex Albrecht, The Guild’s Sandeep Parikh and Legend of Neil star Tony Janning. Not all of their guests can make it to their LA-based studio, so Welkner and Bright are known to setup live video interviews across the world via Skype, working in real-time trivia with viewers using Twitter and the chatrooms.

US Army recruiting ads have been hit or miss for years, trying to sell the adventure and badass side of Army life while leaving out the shifty politics and grim warzones. We’re usually shown brief vignettes of the poster boys and girls, carefully weeded up the ladder through Army PR and their ad agency. So it’s somewhat refreshing to seen a longer-form dive into web series out of the Army with its 12-episode Pushing the Limits series.

The series is broken out into 4-minute episodes covering the grueling three-day Best Ranger Competition at Fort Benning in Georgia. “It’s the best of the best,” said Ranger Training Brigade’s Col. Douglas Flohr in the opening episode (above). “This really is our Super Bowl.” Apparently less than half the field of Rangers, that’s those who already are Rangers, don’t finish the epic 59-hour competition. With 49 teams in the hunt, there’s only 1 winner. Interesting, you could say that this piqued our reality-series interests.

The 2nd Annual Streamy Awards are April 11, 2010. That’s 180 days until the winners are announced live on stage, and we thought it’s never too early to start handicapping the field. So it’s nice to see that The Mercury Men posted a behind the scenes look at the pulp sci-fi web series’ production design.

Mercury Men creator Christopher Preksta released the documentary video (above) as part of his “Mercury Mondays” weekly production journals. “Design is really important to me,” said Preksta in the video, “It’s another tool that I as a filmmaker have to support my story and set the tone, the world and bring a unique vision to the story.”

In the video we learn that Mercury Men design pulls from three separate themes—the 30′s/40′s sci-fi pulp (Buck Rodgers, Flash Gordon), 1950′s sci-fi movie’s noir, and the early 60′s US Space program. Costumer Ricky Lyle, who also worked on Preksta’s Streamy-nominated Captain Blasto, gets credit from Preksta for nailing that uber-researched style that he was looking for.

There’s something to be said about creating presentation materials, or in this case a video, that profiles elements of the production. Last year’s Streamy winner for Art Direction, Kim Bailey for Tiki Bar TV, put together an impressive “for your consideration” page on his site that detailed the before-during-after of his impressive SS Tiki set. No doubt that Academy voters had it fresh on their minds when casting votes last winter.

James Gunn seems to be digging the web series world these days. The Scooby-Doo screenwriter is following up on his successful porn flick satire series PG Porn, with the release today of an even racier series, Humanzee! The offbeat scripted comedy was shot back in 2008 and was planned to head to XBox Live, until someone over at Microsoft pulled the plug due to content concerns. Did they really not know what they signed up for when tapping Gunn?

First off, we have to throw out the NSFW warning on the first episode (above), mostly for f-bombs, not nudity. The show itself feels like a live action cartoon sitcom, complete with a laugh track pushing us through the quick setups and reversals. Gunn’s description of what it’s about is just too good to paraphrase:

HUMANZEE! is the story of myself and my human-chimp hybrid son, appropriately named “Humanzee” (played by my brother, Sean Gunn). In the show, Humanzee is created when I send my sperm in a turkey baster on ice to a secret laboratory in Bratislava, they impregnate a female chimp with it, and they send me back my own Humanzee son! —James Gunn

Besides casting himself (as himself), Gunn brought on his brother Sean along with Sorority Forever star Mikaela Hoover, who is just plain stunning (see right), Valentine Miele and Michael Rooker. There’s also actual porn star Jenna Haze, who’s credits you’ll have to Google for yourselves.

What do you get when you take High School Musical’s Lucas Grabeel and One Tree Hill’s Drew Seely, give them some fangs, and tell them to sing and dance? You get an online musical, I Kissed a Vampire, that would have Joss Whedon rolling in his grave (and that’s not even possble!)…and you might smash your computer in the process.

For instance, you might have the type of frustration I did just trying to watch the episodes. Only available on iTunes, you first have to be willing to pony up the $1.99 an episode, then you need to make sure that your iTunes is running at it’s most current version, and finally, you have to have the latest version of Safari running to order from the online store. Oh and of course, the latest version of Safari only runs on Mac versions 4.0.3 for Tiger or higher, so make sure that is taken care of as well.

Granted, being a Mac user, I don’t know if PC users will have such a hard time and I personally have an odd fear of updating software because of a kernel error that destroyed my world that I got when trying to do a simple software update about 6 months ago. But I’m fairly computer savvy plus I love vampires AND musicals so you can imagine my excitement at a vampire musical! Long story short: if the hoops I had to jump through were coming to a point where even I was tempted to give up and not watch, that is saying something.

Now, if you are in New York, you can avoid the computer issue all together and check out the premiere live at Landmark Sunshine Theatre tonight at 6 PM EST. Grabeel and Seely will be in attendance with co-star Adrian Slade. Tickets are given out on a first-come, first-serve basis so get there early if you do plan on going.