Tubefilter News

The guys at Team Tiger Awesome are regular standouts on Atom.com, dreaming up clever spoofage to pass the days away. And with the finale of ABC’s mind bender LOST fast approaching on May 23rd, they sought fit to create 11 possible endings for the hit series. They borrow heavily from other famous endings—like the most watched episode in the history of television, the M*A*S*H finale.

So here they are, all eleven of them, for your enjoyment. They made eleven of these alternate endings, with the last one a not so subtle shout out to Atom sponsor Burger King.

There is a comedic convention I have always been a fan of. It’s the mixing of very high concept with very low action. For those of you 30 and under it’s a familiar conceit. One you were practically raised on. It’s two hitmen chatting about what to call a quarter-pounder with cheese in France. It’s every episode of Robot Chicken.

Doraleous and Associates, a delightful animation comedy from The Escapist, is of this mold. The story is about a guild of warriors in an ancient medieval kingdom who band together to protect people living in fear (for a small fee). The concepts are high: for example, in episode eleven Doraleous leads his men on a journey to protect a place known as the Mad Kingdom from attack. The action, however, is wonderfully mundane. On their way there the wizard insists on stopping at a de facto outlet mall named Digger Town to buy a Simbodian crystal. The once brave quest turns into a shopping nightmare.

Comprising the Associates is a wisecracking archer with a southern drawl named Neebs, the aforementioned wizard Mirdon, a high-pitched troll named Drak who sounds a little like Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the eponymous Doraleous, and a mysterious knight named Sir Walken who possesses a very familiar way of speech. Together they contend with ogres, witches, and evil kingdoms, but the real tension is far less fantastical. It’s in the verbal jousts about whether or not it’s a good idea for Mirdon the wizard to resurrect a dead cat in the middle of a dining table.

Celebrity gossip has always held a strange fascination for people…anyone picking up groceries has been witness to that. And with the advent of Twitter, celebrities have found ways to harness this drama into 140 characters or less. Celebrity entertainment site Wonderwall is seeking to harness the hilarity behind this phenomenon with it’s series Celebritweets Theater, which is an animated series that reimagines the actual stories behind strange Tweets posted by celebrities. Tubefilter corresponded with Wonderwall editor Saryn Chorney, who shared with us what she felt is behind the strange appeal we have to consume celebrity drama as well as giving us more information about the Wonderwall site in general.

Tubefilter: How much do you know about the inspiration of this series? What stimulated the idea of crossing Celebrity Tweets with animation?

Saryn Chorney: We had been toying with the idea of a celebrity-driven parody of Masterpiece Theater as a video series for a while. Upon discovering KCSCougar on Buzzfeed, Wonderwall reached out to him to see if he’d be interested in working with us on bringing celebrity Twitter messages to life. The pilot episode featured John Mayer (posted above). We all loved it, and hence, Celebritweets Theater was born.

When a branded web series comes back around for a second season, you know something is working. We weren’t sure what to make of Haute & Bothered when it first bowed to Teen.com’s faithful over a year ago, with lead sponsor LG Mobile on board the project from Alloy Media + Marketing.

Now with the premiere today of the fashion drama’s second season—and LG Mobile once again leading the charge—it’s worth looking deeper at Alloy’s first web original to come back for more.

Watching the opening episode, it’s clear that Haute is making no apologies for being essentially a scripted version of Project Runway. Swap out the 30 year-old designers with high schoolers attending the fictional Manhattan Fashion Institute’s (MFI) exclusive Design Studio program. There’s no Tim Gunn, but master fashion teacher Marie Helen is a passable Heidi Klum, even nailing the German supermodel’s deliberate reality TV diction. The top student in the design studio even gets to show their collection at, surprise, NY Fashion Week.

The drama that unfolds is your typical Mean Girls fare, only at MFI it’s not just the girls that team up and get caddy. “Clander” is a sharp tongued duo of Clay and Alexander, who think they run to the roost. Taylor Gildersleeve plays the new girl Clare, an import from LA completely green to the NY fashion scene.

Created by young writers Amanda Harlib and Laura Sandler, the 11-ep second season rolls out new episodes every Tuesday, though there’s also a slew of “True MFI Stories” that serve to set up the characters—and give them some hands-on time with LG’s phones. Samantha, the dim but adorable fashionista, even digresses into showing off an interactive music app on one of LG’s touch phones in middle of her interview.

What would the old-time soap manufacturers who created the soap opera think of this newfangled thing called “the internet”? ABC is going to try to answer that question by airing a 10-episode web series that asks the question “what if characters from the three ABC Daytime series; General Hospital, All My Children, and One Live to Live; crossed over into each others series and interacted with one another?”

Beginning this July, this is exactly what is going to happen. Directed by One Life to Live executive producer Frank Valentini and airing on Soapnet.com and ABC.com, shorter versions of the episodes will also air on ABC and SOAPnet. This will be an interesting experiment on whether this will promote click-through to the longer episodes online.

The soap opera fan community has traditionally been extremely open to web series. The 1st Annual Indie Soap Awards honored several web dramas including Compulsions, Anyone But Me, and Buppies. Web series that feature soap stars end up with voraciously loyal fans, such as Poor Paul has experienced with having Kevin G. Schmidt (Noah Newman on The Young & The Restless) a part of the series, not only as an actor, but as a writer, producer, and director.

The sadist is alive and well in web series drama. Maybe he wasn’t getting enough love on other screens—crowded out by brooding teen vamps? But online is where his dark games seem to run wild.

Compulsions went right for it, wasting no time in cutting to office drone Mark’s sadistic side. And the recently launched Dice had no problem with its merciless hero watching someone blow his head off in front of him. So with the premiere of Goon, the latest indie web drama to venture to the dark side, comes what feels like a trend brewing.

Just two episodes in, this one is a mystery. Not in the traditional sense, more in the LOST sense where it’s not clear what exactly is going on yet or who we’re going to see. Even the show’s site is deliberately vague in its dishing of the synopsis and cast for the 18-episode drama. The only credited cast on the site so far is Ryan Schwartzman who plays Brian, our apparent protag. All we know is he has just killed someone—it was his first—and he’s trapped waiting for some sort of vengeance. That, and some unnamed British guy ties him up for a familiar interrogation and beat down.

SYNOPSIS: Following a smoothly executed job, small time crook Brian discovers the real heist has just begun. Eight Goons. One Score. No Honor Among Thieves.

When I asked creator Marc Hampson what inspired him to set up camp on the internet, I was half expecting a nod to Fall of Kaden, Pink, or perhaps some early web drama lonelygirl15. Instead it was We Need Girlfriends, he says, that lured him into the web series waters.

“A few years back I got hooked on a show called We Need Girlfriends around the same time that I was already enamored with an online podcast series, Four-Eyed Monsters,” said Hampson. “I wanted to create some kind of series for the web and carried that idea, but my partners and I were really focused on making independent features.” And to be sure, Goon was indeed originally shot as an indie feature that he and his partners at Brotherhood Pictures made for the festival circuit.

John Cabrera is best known as playing Hep Alien band member Brian Fuller: “In 2002 I was cast on a TV show called Gilmore Girls, in a role I thought would only last one episode. I returned for 31 more over the next five years”, according to his blog. Last week, he announced he’s joining the web series world by creating an indie-rock musical.

Obviously the concept of a web series musical isn’t a new one and many of them have found great success, from the fan-created Horrible Turn that went on to become nominated for a Streamy Award for original music, I Kissed a Vampire, which is now going on to become a feature film. Oh, and that little series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which, you know, did okay.

What is original about this series is the way in which it is being cast…in a completely open, full-scale internet search. Cabrera posted a simple yet engaging video blog (posted above) calling out for help in scouring the entire country for talent to fill the five major roles of his series. With humor and graciousness he explained that actors needed to be above the age of 18 but look like they could fill roles of a younger age and that sadly, international submissions cannot be accepted. With submitters being asked to give confirmation that they can be in Los Angeles starting June 1st through July 15th, the search will be quick and the commitments ambitious.

Web series + dark theater + popcorn. There is really nothing like a little screening of web series with a few hundred fellow online junkies in one of Hollywood’s best theaters. Tonight is your chance to laugh (and possibly cry) together with a sampler of some of the best web series on the internet right now.

Sure, there are heaps of pretty amazing work out there, and for obvious reasons, we can’t screen them all. So this sampler of shows has some standouts from the Streamys, some newer releases that just hit the web, and some series even diehard viewers may have missed. Special guests like Kevin Pollak, Sandeep Parikh, Bernie Su, Illeana Douglas, Mark Gantt and more will be on hand to follow the screening with a brief Q&A with the audience.

Since October 2009, American Cinematheque’s Blows Up the Internet series has been taking the biggest and best in the world of online entertainment—like Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Funny or Die, Strike.tv, and Crackle.com, and blowing it up on the glorious big screen to sold out crowds at Cinematheque’s world famous historic Egyptian Theater. Join us after the show at Musso and Frank Grill for a drink and mingle with the stars and creators of your favorite web series.

Screening lineup for tonight includes, (subject to some last minute changes):

Between Two Ferns
College Humor: Hardly Working (Animated Episode)
Compulsions
Easy to Assemble: Flying Solo
Eli’s Dirty Jokes
Fear Clinic
How It Should Have Ended
INST MSGS
Mountain Man
Safety Geeks: SVI
Suitemates
The Bannen Way
The Bitter End
The Goob
The Legend of Neil
The Webventures of Justin & Alden
Urban Wolf
Vamped Out
Wreck and Salvage