Tubefilter News

Riese is finally coming back online next week and the early promos (above) are getting us fired up again. Fans rumbled a bit when sci-fi Riese was abruptly taken offline during its first release last fall. In the puzzling game of online distribution, it’s something many series creators have come to accept as part of the web series territory. Having just signed an international distribution and sales deal with Fireworks, creators Ryan Copple and Kaleena Kiff had to pull it down to allow for a deal with SyFy to go through.

Now the 10-episode steampunk inspired drama heads to SyFy.com as Riese: Kingdom Falling starting Tuesday October 26, with new episodes out every Tuesday and Thursday.

SyFy was a natural fit for Riese, with its cast of Sanctuary and Battlestar Galactica vets like Amanda Tapping (Sanctuary), Christine Chatelain (The Bone Collector); Sharon Taylor (Stargate Universe); Ben Cotton (Harper’s Island), Allison Mack (Smallville); Ryan Robbins (Caprica); Patrick Gilmore (Stargate Universe); Alessandro Juliani (Battlestar Galactica) and Emilie Ullerup (Sanctuary).

Every year there’s a celebrity interviewer who makes a name for him/herself by being awesome during a celebrity interview.

Last year it was comic Matt Zeller. Johnny Simmons and Megan Fox sat down for your average press junket to promote Jennifer’s Body. Zeller wanted to talk to Simmons about the young actor’s role in Hotel for Dogs instead. At that point, Fox was just in the way, so Zeller had her wear a paper bag over her head so she wouldn’t be a distraction. Trust me, it’s funny when you watch it.

This year it’s Texas FM radio host and local television personality Gordon Keith. Zach Galifianakis was in the Good Morning Texas studio to promote his new movie It’s Kind of a Funny Story. Keith, who’s no stranger to the awkward interview, Between Two Ferns-ed the socks off his interviewee. Galifianakis appears taken aback when Keith asks him to compare and contrast his latest release to every other movie ever made, but eventually starts playing along.

Between Two Ferns is one of the web’s most popular series and Galifianakis is quickly transitioning from a popular name in the alt comedy scene to an A-list celebrity. My guess is it’ll be a long time before he sits down across from an interviewer who plays it straight. Everyone with the opportunity to ask this guy questions will want to try his or her best faux-celebrity interview with the genre’s master.

If you visit Dorkly and get the sense it’s a College Humor for video game enthusiasts, that’s because it is.

College Humor spun off the site as a stand-alone destination for subversive geek humor earlier this year and put College Humorer Brian Murphy at the helm. It’s an answer to the kind of straight-up nerd and gamer news offered by sites like IGN, GameTrailers, and Kotaku. Instead, Dorkly delivers funny, online ephemera focused on Star Wars Facebook feeds, the aging lives of Pokemons, pwning lives, and all other kinds of articles you dream about forwarding to your fantasy girlfriend, Mila Kunis.

And while College Humor recently upped its slate of online original episodic programming, so too did Dorkly.

Last week the site debuted its first web series, Dorkly Bits. It’s equal parts comedy and children-of-the-80s nostalgia packed into fast-paced, 45 to 60-second 8-bit episodes parodying video game classics from Super Mario Bros. to Halo. The installments are written and voiced by familiar faces of the College Humor cast (Pat Cassels, Streeter Seidell, Josh Ruben, et al.) and will be re released every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at Dorkly.com.

Dorkly’s seen great traffic from its written content since the site’s launch in June. The College Humor crew hopes the “addition of original video will bring Dorkly to an even wider audience of video game fans.”

In a week of Apple announcements, Digital Hollywood and other new media events, it’s worth taking note of a rather heavy week of web series premieres. Some went seasonal for Halloween while others went a little racy trying to crack through the crowded web series field this fall.

New series premieres this week:

Suck and Moan

Timed for the Halloween season of darker fare, this Vampire vs. Zombies comedy from creator director Brendan Fong in his scripted web series directing debut. It’s produced by Streamy-nominee Joel Bryant from After Judgment along with iBallz founder Danny Ohman. The creators are billing this one as: “1 part Zombieland, 1 part Shaun of the Dead, and 2 parts Clerks, this satirical web series follows a group of overly analytical vampires who find themselves knee deep in a race to preserve a newly dwindling food source.”

Yesterday Revision3′s Diggnation teamed up with high dynamic range video (HDR) outfit Soviet Montage Productions to produce the first ever episode of web television (or any type of television, for that matter) shot in HDR video.

I have a friend who’s a professional paparazzo.

Dude makes his living by tailing Hugh Jackman on the Aussie actor’s way up to family ski vacations in Vermont and being able to spot celebrities on the streets of New York like he was bit by a radioactive spider spawned by the Gawker Stalker. He can make tens of thousands of dollars off of one pic of Jay-Z and Beyonce and then won’t get a decent photo for months. Sienna Miller once kicked him in the shins because Jude Law was camera shy, in a bloody awful mood and is British, and therefore can’t throw punches unless he’s in a bad movie.

I’ve learned a lot about the business from hanging out with this guy. How the vast majority of photo ops are orchestrated by the celebrities themselves, how some attention starved starlets will change outfits three or four times a day so the photogs can get more usable shots, how some celebrities will pay the way for paparazzi to go on their vacations and take pictures, and how following around rock and movie stars has the unintended consequence of causing one to act like a rock and movie star. That means lots of late nights, alcohol, drugs, and sex.

My paparazzo friend always said the life of him and his fellow paparazzi would make for a great reality series. Unfortunately, Tuan Pham beat him to the punch.

Pham’s paparazzi outfit, Phamous Fotos has teamed up with director Brad Blondehim, digital broadcast network Babelgum, and sponsor Wonderful Pistachios for the original, docu-drama web series, Big Shots LA. Camera crews will follow Pham’s team of photographers with “larger-than-life” personalities on their “daily quest to photograph celebrities for fame, glory, and loads of cash.”

Karol Martesko-Fenster, SVP and General Manager of Babelgum’s Film and Animation Division, has this to say about the series:

“We’re thrilled to launch this behind-the-scenes look at one of the most misunderstood professions in the world. The paparazzi team that Brad profiles is chock full of big personalities, and it’s fascinating getting to know the stories, dreams, and surprising ambitions of the people behind the flash bulb. They are as much a part of Hollywood culture as the celebs themselves, something that, until now, only insiders could fully appreciate.”

See if you agree. Catch installments of Big Shots LA every Monday and Wednesday through January 29 on Babelgum.

In the comedy world there are few institutions that have defied the fickle tastes of fans and tragically cut short careers of top stars. The Upright Citizens Brigade, or UCB as everyone says these days, is arguably the leader of a pack that counts outfits like Groundlings, ACME and ImprovOlympic amongst its peers.

Its humble beginnings out of Chicago’s improv scene with young comedians—Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, Matt Walsh and Amy Poehler—deciding in 1990 to form a sketch comedy and improv theater, turned into a multi-city institution that would have its own TV show, comedy school and nightly sold-out shows.

Eventually the rise of internet video have a profound effect on rising comedians, and UCB started encouraging more of its rising talent to create short one-off sketches and eventually full web series through its video hub at UCBcomedy.com. We took note of a number of their early web series like The Jeannie Tate Show, Another Kind of Monster, Roommating and Mister Glasses, all of which help establish UCB as a creative force in online comedy, readily tapping its rising comedy stars like Bill Hader, Matt Walsh and Aziz Ansari.

Annie Leonard, the creator of The Story of Stuff (one of the most widely viewed environmental-themed short films of all time), has collaborated with Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and WGBH to release Loop Scoops, a new animated series which aims to get children “thinking about the STUFF in your life.”