Tubefilter News

Kurtzman and Orci, Bays and Thomas, Schwartz and Savage. Most of what shines in Hollywood these days comes straight from the pages of a well-crafted writing duo. One partner brings the story concepts, the other the snappy dialogue, one brings the irreverence the other the bite, and so forth.

On the digital side of Hollywood, the scrappy lone wolf scribes are a plenty, but occasionally we’re seeing the rise of the web’s version of the power duo. Leyna Weber and Annie Lukowski and their new shingle Working Bug Media are emerging as a digital writer-producer duo to keep an eye on, building their chops with a strong toehold in the web world.

The duo is most notably known in web circles for the Jaleel White topped comedy series Road to the Altar with MWG Entertainment back in summer of 2009. The series landed some modest sponsor deals from the likes of Pier One and iRobot.

Today’s TV show theme songs are shorter, simpler, and far less informative than their wordy, descriptive, clip show progenitors. If you’re nostalgic for 60-second long introductions with poppy, literal theme music, presenting and explicitly defining characters and actions on screen, you’ll have to navigate away from the television and towards a web series featuring the likeness of a 30-year-old Brazilian supermodel.

Gisele Bündchen is the star of Gisele and the Green Team, an animated AOL web series from A Squared Entertainment. The program is a candy-colored reincarnation of Captain Planet. The early 90′s cartoon favorite featured five individuals wearing five magic rings, who – with their powers combined – could summon a superhuman force and protect the planet from ecological villains like Hoggish Greedly and Tony Hayward.

In Gisele and AOL’s version, the five individuals are all svelte ladies working in a swank fashion store, their five magic rings are five magic gems, and the superhuman force they summon transforms all of them into the Green Team, mighty morphin’ style. The ladies collectively use each of their unique abilities (telepathy, telekinesis, remote viewing, foresight, and earth memory in leiu of earth, wind, fire, water, and heart) to battle the likes of Nick Slick, a well-dressed corporate type who’s more interested in another kind of green.

At the end of each installment, Animated Gisele directly addresses the camera in a Knowing is Half the Battle-type segment to inform viewers about environmental issues and where they can find more information.

A Squared Productions found all of its eco-information from the United Nations Enviornment Programme. The organization helped A Squared develop storylines for the web series by identifying the 26 most important issues around the world, all of which will be covered in the first 26-episode season of Gisele and the Green Team.

AOL and A Squared have also teamed up on two other animated online original programs with household celebrity names. The Secret Millionaire’s Club stars the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, and Martha and Friends features domestic icon, Martha Stewart.

For three years Robert Townsend has been working as one of the more prolific and successful web series directors around, trying to do good with a number of projects with socially progressive non-profit One Economy.

With over 30 years in the industry, Townsend is an understated but respected player in black Hollywood. Perhaps best known for his sitcom The Parent ’Hood and film Meteor Man – at least to me! – Townsend continues to work, making documentaries and films, most recently directing and producing a number of successful web series, including Diary of a Single Mom and the upcoming Los Americans.

“It’s for the web but we’re trying something different,” Townsend said in an interview.

For Townsend, these series, targeted at multicultural audiences, are not just a job but a philosophy. Diary, whose third season premiered last week, tells the story of a single mother, Ocean (Monica Calhoun, The Best Man, Love & Basketball), who moves into a three-unit apartment with her kids. Throughout the series she faces numerous challenges, from the return of the kids’ father, passing her GED and getting evicted from her flat.

Unlike most web video, Diary of a Single Mom and Los Americans are produced and distributed by a non-profit, One Economy, an organization tasked with providing life improvement resources to underserved communities through technology.

“The most significant part for me is that it sends a message of hope,” Townsend explained. “Her situation is very real. It’s not Leave It To Beaver. It’s not the Huxtables. She’s gotta work hard. Every twist and turn there’s a new problem.”

Diary is not your run-of-the-mill web series. Each episode runs a bit longer than most, about 13 minutes, meaning each season runs the length of a feature film. Well-shot and acted, it boasts some classic stars, from Billy Dee Williams to Diahann Carroll and Richard Roundtree. “The whole cast has been doing interviews, and when you get stars, they can basically give you millions of dollars of free publicity,” Townsend said.

“I’m really blessed,” he added, on getting talent to come for a modest project. “Like the last documentary I did, Why We Laugh: Black Comedians and Black Comedy: I called everybody, and Bill Cosby calls me back and says, ‘Hey man, do you want me to do an interview for this documentary, I’m in.’ Chris Rock: ‘I’m in.’ Wayans Brothers: ‘I’m in.’”

Currently looking for sponsors and talking to TV networks about funding a new season, Diary has a core of fans, with at least 50,000 tuning into the third season premiere. Townsend credits Rey Ramsey, One Economy’s CEO, with coming up with the concept, and Cheryl West, playwright and TV writer, for bring the story to life.

The team behind it has a clear mission of social justice. When people watch the series online, they can get practical information on how to pay rent, stave off eviction and work toward getting a degree.

“We went to the housing projects outside of DC, Potomac Gardens. And we had a screening of a couple of the episodes for the community center there. You know, real people. They responded: ‘This is what we need. We need stories to encourage us. Because a lot of times people feel all alone,’” Townsend said.

Having completed post-production on Diary, Townsend said shooting just wrapped for the next series Los Americans, about a middle class Latino family whose patriarch has lost his job. Written by Dennis Leoni (Resurrection Blvd.) and starring Esai Morales (Caprica, NYPD Blue, La Bamba), Townsend promises a non-stereotypical look at a Latino family trying to make it.

“The beauty of it is we’ve never seen this kind of family on television, and now it’ll appear on the web: normally it’s got to be in the barrio, and they have no money – the stereotypes,” he said. “It brings up issues from immigration, to alcoholism, to pride in one’s culture.”

Also in development is The Discarded Boys, a film set for web distribution about a woman who starts an alternative school for teenage boys who are not wanted by the system.

“I’ve always tried to do quality work in my career,” he said, “and tried to do the right things.”

Still have unchecked items on that holiday shopping list? A thirtysomething Filipino-American comedian and the internet’s largest video-sharing site are here to help.

Christine Gambito (aka Happy Slip, aka one YouTube’s earliest and most popular personalities known for expertly imitating her family’s accents and inability to operate anything technological) released a video earlier this month introducing YouTube’s Holiday Gift Guide.

It’s a dynamic YouTube page presented by Samsung, EA, Logitech, Nintendo, Western Digital, and Call of Duty: Black Ops with 110 videos highlighting the perfect presents from 22 of YouTube’s participating advertisers. Those include: Activision, AT&T, Beachbody, Bose, Carhatt, Duracell, Dynomighty, Fitness Anywhere, Fox, French Connection, GoVacuum, Konami, Lego, Namco Bandai, Nikon, REI, and Sega.

YouTube bills the Gift Guide as “your shoppable video catalog.” They’re not too far off. The act of monitor shopping, clicking from one video to the next, and bookmarking your Want List is not terribly unlike the experience of going through the Toys “R” Us Great Big Christmas Book, folding pages, and circling awesome things you can’t wait to unwrap attack.

Check it out at YouTube.com/GiftGuide and give yourself a treat this holiday season. Let your fingers do the buying.

Emmy award-winning commercial production company The Institute, co-founded by Transformers director Michael Bay and Pearl Harbor producer Scott Gardenhour, turned heads with yet another eye-catching holiday tv commercial for women’s lingerie and beauty product retailer Victoria’s Secret.

The video, which premiered at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, was the inspiration for a behind-the-scenes web series entitled One Gift A Thousand Fantasies: Inside the Holiday 2010 TV Shoot, which launched last week on the Victoria’s Secret YouTube channel.

The series, shot during production at Chicago’s Lyric Opera House, features supermodels Candice Swanepoel, Lily Aldridge, Chanel Iman, Adriana Lima, Erin Heatherton and Katsia Zingarevich.

The first episode features Edward Razek, senior creative of Victoria’s Secret (and President and Chief Marketing Officer of parent Limited Brands), who has been hand-picking the models for Victoria’s Secret for two decades “Our holiday campaigns have a certain requirement to be fairly epic at this point,” he says.

Rooster Teeth is the Austin-based entertainment company responsible for popularizing the filmmaking art of machinima.

For the unitiated, machnima is the use of video game engines to render graphics in real-time and generate computer animations. Savvy filmmakers use environments from first-person shooters (games like Doom, Quake, or Halo), control characters’ actions and camera angles with the use of video game controllers, record the footage, and presto! Make wildly popular, financially viable, and incredibly entertaining web series.

Burnie Burns, Gus Sorola, Geoff Ramsey, and the rest of the team at Rooster Teeth Productions have created a number of machinima entertainment properties since the launch of the original Red vs. Blue in 2003. The shows are successful, sustainable and bring in enough income to support Rooster Teeth’s production staff because they’re relatively cheap to make and comprised of compelling storylines. Burns and company have a knack for infusing relatable, human attributes – character, emotion, quirky comedy – into otherwise empty, homogenous video game characters. Combine that with beautiful video game environments, and you have some great content.

But after seven years of introducing real life into video games, Rooster Teeth is now introducing video games into real life.

Immersion is a live-action series that transports common video game conventions from their normal station on consoles and inside animated worlds into the meat space. It’s a kind of Mythbusters meets Mario, hosted by Rooster Teeth’s own Burnie Burns and Griffon Ramsey, starring Rooster Teeth’s own stuntmen Gus Sorola and Geoff Ramsey.

In the pilot episode, Griffon outfitted Burns’ busted pickup truck with a monitor, black out shades, and a live feed from a Canon DS strung up on a makeshift crane, all in order to simulate the vantage point from wich one drives around in Grand Theft Auto. The next installment pitted a Special Ops veteran with a rifle against a group of annoying gamers (played all too well by the guys from Mega64).

Immersion debuted earlier this year, but Rooster Teeth re-released the program in late November, promising more installments throughout January. It’s fun to watch. Partly because it’s great to see the men and women of Rooster Teeth in front of the camera, but mostly because it’s always sweet to see video game practices applied in reality.

Nintendo sold 600,000 Wii consoles during the week of Black Friday. Sony has shipped over 4.1 million of its Wii-like Move units to retailers worldwide. Microsoft has moved at least 2.5 million of its controllerless Xbox Kinect devices to consumers and is on pace to sell 5 million before the end of the year.

Sales numbers, gift guides, and anecdotal evidence (I have a friend in USC’s Video Game Design and Management Master’s Program who tells me his do not allow him to conceive of any video game that requires any kind of tangible controller) all indicate motion gaming is going to become a big part of the $60 billion US global video game industry.

What’s a consumer to do stay on top of all the latest and greatest games, consoles, and news coming from this growing, family-friendly, body-moving niche? Watch GT Motion.

GameTrailers.com recently launched the online destination for all things motion-based gaming. Tech expert and seasoned journalist Chi-Lan Lieu plays host to the GT domain, which has all the trappings of GameTrailers proper: video reviews, previews, how-tos, tips, hints, tricks, and trailers for the latest titles.

The tone of GT Motion reflects the expanded audience all motion-gaming producers and manufacturers are trying to capture. It’s easy-to-use, informative, and easily enjoyed both by children and their grandparents.

Remember Jackie Chiles, the beloved fast talking civil litigator from Seinfeld whose lawsuits were thwarted by Kramer time and again? Well, after a decade since Seinfeld aired its final episode, Jackie’s back (and he’s badder and madder than ever).