Tubefilter News

Startups have been known to pivot all the time, but it isn’t often that you see this from Streamy-nominated web series. GOLD, the tabletop RPG playing comedy series is back today with GOLD: Night of the Zombie King, a mini-series that turns towards the dramatic side of the its gamer characters.

Creator David Nett wrote the new project alongside fellow GOLD stars Rick Robinson and Andrew R. Deutsch. The trio brought on new faces for the offshoot to join GOLD actor James Ellis Lane, scoring indie vets Jonathan Nail (SOLO), Stephanie Thorpe (After Judgment), Brian Majestic (SOLO) and a standout performance from Maxwell Glick (lonelygirl15).

This past fall, a lanky, 6’4″, redheaded, Irish Catholic from Massachusetts named Conan made waves on the web with live broadcasts of variety programs meant to preview his imminent television premiere. Next summer, an inconceivably muscular, towering, long-haired, Cimmerian, also named Conan will star in a web series conceived to promote his rebooted film franchise.

Age of Conan: Hyboria! is a collaboration between Paradox Entertainment (the company that holds the trademark to all things Conan the Barbarian), Funcom (the video game publisher responsible for creating the MMORPG Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures), and a handful of comedy writers hailing from Cartoon Network’s Robot Chicken. The web series will style itself after Red vs. Blue. Hyboria! will use machinima to manipulate in-game characters and environments from the Hyborian Adventures video game, creating a comedic storyline.

Marc Graser at Variety reports Mike Fasolo (writer on Robot Chicken) will pen the first episode, while comedian Harland Williams and fellow Robot Chicken-er Dan Milano will voice the characters. Milano is also on board to direct.

My favorite sentence from On the Road is the one where Sal is thinking to himself after learning everything in the particular stretch of Southern California, where his drug-fueled, cross country trip has currently placed him, gets done tomorrow.

“For the next week that was all I heard — manana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven,” is such a great line because it’s true and because it’s true for so many things. Maybe Jack Kerouac is commenting on Sal’s hippy-Buddhist-amphetamine-abled ability to live in the moment. Or maybe he’s channeling the mind of every single procrastinator on the planet, thinking things will most definitely get finished 24 hours from now. Or maybe he’s commenting on how his own salvation, his own peaceful place is always just a day away.

Or maybe it’s something else. Regardless, it’s a sweet line, one that encapsulates much of the novel’s ethos and could inspire someone to pick up a copy.

That’s the idea behind Single Sentence Animations. The series of 60-or-so-second videos from Electric Literature is a well-balanced mix of art and marketing meant to inspire short-fiction anthology sales by bringing one sentence to life.

Artists with stories in the Electric Literature archive are asked to select a favorite sentence from his or her work. Then an animator creates a short, typography-centric film in response. There’s a visualization of macabre, fratricide in Michael Cunningham’s Olympia, a Miyazaki-inspired interprtation of Stephen O’Connor’s Love, a Western-themed collage of Patrick deWitt’s The Bastard, and many others.

OkCupid is one of the internet’s largest free dating service with over 3.5 million active users. OkTrends is OkCupid’s “original research and insights” division, compiling observations and statistics from literally hundreds of millions of OkCupid user interactions in order to assess, evaluate, and explore the “data side of the online dating world.”

Christian Rudder and the OkTrends crew leverage data collected from their massive userbase to publish amazing reports on everything from what white people actually like to what combination of eye contact, smile, and skin makes for the most engaging profile picture to why younger men should be more open to dating older women.

It’s about time the world’s largest video sharing site did something similar.

YouTube Trends is a brand new YouTube destination devoted to making sense of the 35 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute, as well as the viewing actions of over 146,000,000 unique monthly visitors.

Kevin Allocca (current YouTube Trends Manager and former and former editor of TVNewser and The Huffington Posts’s 236.com) and his YouTube Trends team hope to boil down YouTube’s hulking data set into something pretty and palatable for both pro and casual online video consumers.

That includes a Twitter-style list of trending videos and topics on the YouTube Trends homepage, twice-daily collections (one posted at 4AM EST, the other at 4PM EST) of four videos making big splashes across YouTube and other web destinations, an in-depth OkTrends-like blog with sleek billboards, charts, visualizations and other graphically oriented ways of displaying research findings, and a dashboard that allows users to drill down into specific geographical locations and demographics to see what videos are trending, where, and with whom.

For instance, right now 30 Rock’s diss on Arizona State is on the top 10 list in my hometown of Tucson, Kobe Bryant and Dr. Dre make the cut in Los Angeles’ 65+ crowd, and Justin Bieber is popular with everyone around the globe (except Ozzy Osbourne).

Google Trends and Zeitgeist have long been a staple of YouTube’s parent company. It’s about time the powers that be decided to evaluate video with a similar intensity. As YouTube Trends develops, Allocca says it will “act as a laboratory for our engineers and staff to test out new ways of uncovering, displaying, and providing context for important or interesting video trends.”

Ideally, making all that data digestible will do more than simply make for interesting graphs. It could benefit everything from online advertising revenues, to discovering independent talent, to the dissemination of regional news stories. Not to mention, comparing and contrasting popular videos amongst different localities and age groups makes for a great way to spend an afternoon (seriously).

If you’re like me and get easily sucked into mining the YouTube Trends charts, be sure to let us know what you discover.

Sunday YouTube launched YouTube Rewind, a feature on the new channel theyearinreview, which highlights the Most Watched Videos of the Year, Most Watched Music Videos, and The Moments That Defined YouTube in 2010.

“Relive the videos, people and events that defined YouTube in 2010,” reads the new channel’s page, which features a custom-built calendar that arranges the most popular and influential videos on a scrolling timeline.

YouTube’s accompanying blogpost lists, of the 700 billion YouTube videos watched in 2010, the top ten YouTube Videos (excluding major label music videos) and the most-watched major music videos. These videos “reflect the people, places, and events that captured our collective attention and imagination throughout the year,” reads the YouTube blog. “We met a bunch of new faces, some new words and phrases entered our shared lexicon, and we celebrated as some new YouTube partners hit the big time with millions of views.”

Highlights include Auto-tune the News’ remix of Antoine Dodson’s impassioned news interview, the It Gets Better project from Dan Savage, 13-year old Greyson Chance singing ‘Paparazzi,’ and of course, Paul “Yosemite Bear” Vasquez’s Double Rainbow video.

When the zombie apocalypse comes, and you know it will, will you be prepared? Such is the premise of the new web series, Bite Me from Machinima.

The series centers on three hapless losers, who find themselves in the middle of a full scale zombie attack and must rely upon their expertly honed gamer skills to fend off the unending horde. Machinima partnered with Xbox and video game producer Capcom to create the zombie comedy, which has proven to be a hit with audiences. To date, it’s accumulated nearly 2.5 million views across the first three episodes.

Leading the cast of this weekly, Shaun of the Dead meets World of Warcraft series is former lonelygirl15 star, Yousef Abu-Taleb. His character, Mike (a waiter who likes to urinate in people’s food) along with his two equally unimpressive roommates (a cubicle drone and a sign-spinner), are all that stand in the wake of the on-coming zombie tide.

Apparently, when zombies attack, the military, law enforcement, or anyone with a decent job is unavailable. So far the three have managed to survive with their brains, such as they are, intact. Although, at this point, it is unknown if these particular zombies are even interested in human brains. After all, it’s LA; the zombies are probably all vegans.

Founded in 2000 as a hub for machinima (3D animation using computer game engines) Machinima, Inc has grown to be one of the top providers of video entertainment aimed at a gamer-centered audience. It’s also one of the most popular channels on YouTube.

Saturday afternoons are the best times to spend with a few minutes of celeb parody, and admittedly, we too found ourselves sucked in for a little LoLo schadenfreude.

Thank you Fine Brothers. Their channel is always a fount of celeb spoofing and they seem to have a thing for Lindsay Lohan. Remember the interactive Lohan courtroom drama?

This time it’s a 5-episode narrative series called Lindsay Lohan Needs Real Friends framed as a video diary of Lohan’s return from the edge. Lisa Schwartz stars as the rehabbing Lindsay Lohan trying to find some real friends, like her coughing former judge (Brittani Louise Taylor). The first episode premiered today on their YouTube channel with new ones out later this week.

The pyschological drama genre remains a font for indie filmmakers looking to explore deep character arcs without the expectations of some of the pricier genres. Asylum premiered last night in Hollywood at Cinespace, a venue fast becoming the city’s CBGB’s of web series, to a capacity crowd of supporters. Not a bad foot to start a show off on. The big question however is will this indie have the muster to break through?

A week ago I opined that this might be this year’s Compulsions, with its similar genre, release timing and early indie buzz. Now having watched the full six-episode opening season of Asylum, the comp still holds water, meaning we might see a nom or two come awards season here.

At the onset, we are taken inside St. Dympna Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a tired, state-funded outfit badly overlooked by any sort of authority. It’s a last resort dumping ground for criminals who just plain lost touch with reality. We find ourselves arriving just as some oversight does, in the form of Dr. Patrick Aubert (Dingani Beza) who drops in to make sense of the hospital’s deplorable track record. Naturally, there’s some head butting with acting chief Dr. Suli Urban (Sophie King) who’s hiding something.

Scott Brown (the Blue Movies director not the Senator) has stepped up his game with this one, proving he’s not a one-genre wonder. He brings alive the stark hospital location—the oft-used Linda Vista Hospital—with active shots, the TV-staple walk-and-talks and dolly shots galore giving Asylum a familiar feel for TV natives.