Tubefilter News

The only reason Zoolander isn’t the top grossing movie of all-time is because it made its theatrical debut September 28, 2001 and 17 days earlier was September 11, 2001. No one was in the mood to go to a theatre and see Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson play hyperbolic male models battling crazed designers in a candy-colored, industrial fashion world dominated by Tyson Beckford and Billy Zane. America was still recovering. We weren’t ready to laugh.

And with mediocre box office receipts, Paramount Pictures wasn’t ready to greenlight any future Zoolander productions. At least until now. Thanks to a loyal cult following and the general movie going public’s nostalgia for a time when it didn’t realize Will Ferrell didn’t know he could turn down movie roles, a Zoolander sequel is in the works. So is a Zoolander web series.

David Itzkoof at the New York Times reports Stiller will create an animated Zoolander web series for Paramount Digital Entertainment. The man with a face of blue steel hopes to bring Wilson, Ferrell, and other actors from the film on board to voice their animated counterparts.

The program will be one of two internet entertainment properties Stiller’s Red Hour Films is developing for Paramount Digital Entertainment. The other is Billy Glimmer, a live-action comedy with a cartoonish reality. Jason Woliner is set to direct and Stiller will star as “a mid-level voice impersonator out of Las Vegas.”

Paramount will likely show the web series on “‘one of the big aggregators,’ like MSN, AOL, Yahoo! or Hulu.” It’s worth noting that The LXD, an uber-popular, dance-centric web series collaboration between Jon M. Chu, Agility Studios, and Paramount Digital – is set to release its second season on Hulu later this month.

Itzkoff asked Stiller what drew him to the web. Stiller, who’s currently directing his parents for the Yahoo web series Stiller and Meara, answered,”It’s just a way to say, ‘Hey, let’s go do a couple of little five-minute episodes’…as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, let’s pitch it to the studio and then let’s have a fight over the budget for six months.’”

Imagine a cross between TechCrunch50 and American Idol. That’s essentially how this will go down. Tomorrow morning at 9:00 am sharp, (Oct. 20) at the Digital Hollywood Content Summit, we’re hosting a web series pitch camp session, where four teams of creators will have 5 minutes to dazzle a panel of digital entertainment execs before facing their unfiltered grilling.

After last week’s call for entries, we had over 50 web video projects submitted, some of which blew our minds. Many very creative ideas were in there, and sadly we couldn’t feature them all. To make this most useful to the audience we wanted to showcase a variety of formats, genres and styles.

The best thing about professional football used to be John Madden. Now it’s Hard Knocks.

HBO’s pre-season, documentary mini-series takes viewers deep into the NFL training camps and practice games of probable Super Bowl contenders. For the past six years, voyeuristic football have laid witness to a part of the game that doesn’t make it out on the field on Sunday or Monday nights. Hard Knocks gives viewers another angle by which to view the competitiveness and raw athleticism inherent to the sport, but the program also lets one see the mental, physical, and emotional pressure which hours of drills, watching tape, memorizing playbooks, and dealing with contract negotiations and roster cuts can levy on both players and coaches alike.

It’s great. The only bad part is it’s only three to six episodes long. Its brevity leaves an opening for another behind-the-scenes NFL program to kick off the regular season where Hard Knocks ends.

Enter NFL.com’s The Season: A 2010 NFL Biography. The 12-part original web series is another behind-the-scenes football documentary focused on what you can’t find in between the sidelines, presented by business management software solutions provider, SAP. In histrionic tones, the voice over promises to take viewers where none have been before, “from the first kickoff to the final whistle; the fifty-yard line to the upper deck; and the training room to the board room.”

The first stop for The Season is at Arrowhead Stadium, home of the Kansas City Chiefs. The NFL cameras capture the energy of 80,000 fans dressed in red and make a compelling argument for how body paint, beer, and noise and lead a team to victory. But what makes Chiefs fans and their stadium so unique as to warrant them the subject matter for the program’s premiere? Showing off Kansas City’s recent $375 million stadium renovation probably figured into the NFL’s calculus.

The Season isn’t the first NFL web series to debut this season. Canon and the NFL women’s apparel department launched Beyond the Sidelines earlier this year. The web series showcases the women behind some of football’s most famous men, how they stay happy, active, and fit, and how they do it all while wearing NFL licensed merchandise.

The Guru community on YouTube is one of the video sharing site’s oldest and most established content niches. Engaging individuals with legit knowhow and consistent programming have moved up the Most Subscribed Guru ranks to become some of YouTube’s most popular personalities. Brands and other businesses are starting to take note.

Michellephan, the YouTuber at the top of the Guru charts, signed a deal with Lancome earlier this year to become the beauty brand’s “official video makeup artist.” And now the Guru in the #2 position, Household Hacker is headed to Revision3.

Dylan Hart, one half of the Household Hacker duo, will add his Scientific Tuesdays series to the new media studio’s programming lineup. Every week, Hart channels his best Bill Nye and showcases the wonders of homegrown science by way of chemical compounds, Bunsen burners, the metric system, and family friendly edutainment. Previous installments (from the series’ initial run on YouTube) include awesome dry ice experiments, homemade rockets, and fun with magnet guns.

Hart and his Household Hacker partner, Spencer accumulated over 100 million video views on YouTube. Hart brings an audience of nearly 800,000 YouTube subscribers along with him to Revision3.

This isn’t the first YouTube sensation tapped by Revision3. In August, the internet TV network and Dan Brown (of YouTube Rubik’s Cube fame) launched the top 100 YouTuber’s year-long, crowd-controlled adventure, Dan 3.0.

Online ad network Specific Media, the world’s largest independent media platform, announced yesterday that it has acquired premier online video provider Broadband Enterprises (BBE) for an undisclosed amount.

Kids are always good for a laugh in online video, as proven by the widly popular Kids Reenact series from Landline TV. But what happens when they sti down and watch a few of the more circulated viral videos like Double Rainbow and Obama Podium Fail?

That’s the premise of Kids React to Viral Videos, a new web series out from Benny and Rafi Fine (The Fine Brothers) this weekend. Already the first episode is over 100,000 views.

For the most of it, it was pleasantly surprising how astute these youngsters are, casting a critical eye on some of the more inane videos to strike viral gold. But things descend into the more familiar terrifying zone when topical questions about what the President actually does or what we should do about terrorism.

Out here in California there has been a lot of commotion as we head into our General Election on Tuesday, November 2, 2010. In addition to electing a new U.S. Senator and Governor, we Californians get to exercise our little piece of direct democracy: the referendum known as Propositions, where voters can change the laws or constitution with a simple majority.

Unskippable is Mystery Science Theater 3000 for the Xbox generation.

In each installment of this weekly web series, the comedy crew at Loading Ready Run riff on bad video game cinematics as animated action sequences unfold on screen. Just like MST300 doesn’t only appeal to B movie buffs, Unskippable’s allure transcends the gamer crowd. You don’t have have to own a PS3 to be entertained by people making fun of visually engaging video game vignettes with poorly constructed storylines.

Since it’s debut in January 2009, Unskippable has been one of the most successful web series for the online gaming destination, The Escapist. Russ Pitts, Editor-in-Chief at The Escapist, told me over e-mail the success of the series led to the launch of another Loading Ready Run program with The Escpaist, Daily Drop. The series also helped the crew at Loading Ready Run transition from working “part-time jobs and making videos on the side to working full-time as a web TV production studio.”

So, how’d Unskippable get its start? By winning The Escapist Film Festival.

The Escapist does its best to produce “award-winning video content that game enthusiasts find entertaining, humorous, and insightful,” but the online magazine knows some of the best talent in the business has yet to be tapped. So, every year The Escapist puts on a film festival, which is essentially a “talent search where the world’s best web video producers compete for the Grand Prize, an exclusive paid contract with The Escapist.”

Previous winners include Chris Slack with de-rez in 2007, the aforementioned Loading Ready Run with Unskippable in 2008, Michael Shanks and Michael Lunds with Doomsday Arcade also in 2008, and Brett Register, Rick Rey, and Paula Rhodes with A Good Knight’s Quest in 2009.

If I was a web series creator, I’d definitely consider submitting to the festival, especially given the success of Loading Ready Run and other previous winners. As Pitts notes, “This opportunity that the Film Festival presents, for video makers to step into a production contract and become an overnight web TV star, is unprecedented.”

This year’s Fourth Annual Escapist Film Festival will accept submissions until 11:59PM EST on October 29. For a full list of rules and regulations, click here.