Tubefilter News

Amy Sedaris, whose web series Simple Times: Crafts For Poor People highlighted excerpts from her latest arts and crafts book, is applying her quirky crafts skills to Chipotle’s recent “Wrap What You Love” campaign.

The series, entitled Wrapping with Amy, features Sedaris, bedecked in a gold-colored aluminum foil dress, demonstrating how easy it is to enhance ordinary objects with a little ingenuity. “When you cover it with gold tin foil,” Sedaris explains, holding a half finished bottle of white wine in the episode Goldalicious Entertaining, “no one’s going to ask. They’re going to say Wow! Where did you get that bottle?”

Another gem, from the episode Goldify Your Grill: “Gold is one of our most precious commodities. If it wasn’t, then why are hookers hearts made out of it?” The subject of the final episode in the series, Goldiful Flower Arranging, is pretty self-evident.

The series ties into Chipotle’s “Wrap What You Love” campaign, which includes a contest where participants upload photos of objects they’ve wrapped in foil and then “Goldify” the image online. Sedaris’ crafts book is promoted in the campaign along with the contest.

Sedaris also popped up on Funny or Die’s Exclusives with Amy Sedaris’ Golden First Date, where Chipotle’s golden foil save

Lady Gaga resurrected her web series, Transmission Gagavision, last week after a two year and seven day hiatus. There’s no question she brought her stylized autobivlography back as marketing material leading up to the release of Born this Way, her third studio album set to drop May 23. But there is a question as to [...]

Last night The Digitour set off on its 27-city tour from the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, embarking on a 6-week journey across the nation during which fans can see their favorite YouTube stars perform live and in the flesh.

The Digitour features performances from top web stars with over one billion combined views and more than six million subscribers on YouTube. Last night teens, parents, and a slew of curious Hollywood agents and music reps filled the 750 capacity El Rey to watch back-to-back performances from Nice Peter, Destorm, MysteryGuitarMan, The Gregory Brothers, and Dave Days.

The show went off great, and clocking in at two and a half hours it was well worth the $17 ticket. From the quality of the performances, the energy on stage, and the fans’ reactions, it was clear that these were not amateurs—these were real stars. With kick-ass luxury tour buses to boot.

Those agents and reps—half-excited, half-intimidated—were asking one another the same questions: Is this sustainable? Is there real money to be made here? How are tickets sales going? How did they pull this off?

Well, at this quarter’s Tubefilter Meetup, “The Digitour: Debriefed” we’ll put these questions to The Digitour. Join us in Los Angeles on Wednesday, May 18 as The Digitour’s organizers and top performers recount their experiences from the road and reveal how they’ve unlocked a new way for web creators to reach audiences.

Online video and web series news worth clicking today:

Josh Sundquist hit the 100,000 subscriber mark on YouTube this week, giving the Paralympic ski racer, motivational speaker and writer something more to celebrate. “The growth of my channel is due entirely to the awesomeness of the YouTube community. I especially want to thank iJustine. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t possibly exaggerate how much she has helped my channel,” wrote Sundquist in his 100k video (below). Incidentally, he’s giving away the poster from the video to the fan that can guess precisely how long it took him to draw his 100k wall poster. [JoshSundquist on YouTube]

SOLO: The Series officially launched its Season 1.5 this week on YouTube, and is giving away an iPad2 and five Apple TVs to celebrate the launch thanks to new sponsor DataDirect Networks. The sweepstakes is only open to subscribers of the WatchSOLO channel, so, hint hint. “We are ecstatic that our friends at DataDirect Networks have jumped aboard to help us launch the remaining six episodes of our first season of SOLO,” said Jonathan Nail, creator-star of the show in a statement about the launch. [WatchSOLO on YouTube]

Deep in the far-flung future, a motley band of heath-care workers roam the nether regions of space – located just behind the Big Dipper – looking for love, adventure and a steady paycheck. These are the men and women and robots of Space Hospital.

Space Hospital can most easily be described as the union of a 70′s scifi series with the early episodes of General Hospital, back when the soap focused on hospital drama and not the glorification of mob violence. (What?!? It’s a guilty pleasure!)

Creating an intentionally retro, kitschy series is a smart move as replicating the visual effects of recent scifi blockbusters like Avatar would be nearly impossible on a web series budget. While the show’s visual style and campy feel, obviously, will not appeal to everyone it does serve a purpose. “It looks like a kid’s show,” states series creator Rob Poe, “[b]ut underneath that façade is something a lot darker and less distinct – whimsy with an undertone of menace.”

Like many independently financed web series, Space Hospital is produced on a shoestring budget. Poe creates all of the show’s various props by hand from household objects and odds-and-ends. The dedication of the series’ cast and crew has earned them the respect of their peers. Web series producer, Sandra Payne describes Space Hospital as plucky and admires the fact the series does not look like any other show.

Ultimately, those involved with the production see it as an opportunity to experiment and play without outside interference. “Nearly everyone who does the show falls in love with it. They fall in love with their own characters; they fall in love with the world,” states Poe. The show’s unique visual style and home-made feel enhances the impression that, at its heart, this is a production amongst friends, performed simply for the love of performing.

Casey Pugh and Jamie Wilkinson know their online video.

The former was on the original team at Vimeo as the video sharing site for cool kid’s Lead Flash and Senior App Developer and had a stint at Boxee as the internet TV and social networking software developer’s Head of Web Development. The latter was an Internet Scientist at the perennial online video program Rocketboom, helped conceive of and develop the Know Your Meme wiki and its accompanying web series, co-founded video discovery tool Magma, and taught an actual college class about internet fame at Parsons. (And Peter Thiel says higher education is a bubble. Ha!)

Together, Pugh and Wilkinson also make up half the team that took home an Emmy Award for the crowdsourced reimagineering of the original Star Wars, Star Wars Uncut.

You get the point. The two have a helluva lot of experience in the online video industry. And that experience lead them to realize there’s something missing from the experience of viewing online video.

“Finding and watching videos online is a fragmented and complex process,” Wilkinson tells me via e-mail. He’s right. We share share and discover videos via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube Likes and suggestions, Google Reader, Digg, Reddit, random links, sometimes even email, and a handful of other ways made possible by technology and social media. That makes for a disjointed way to discover videos and a loose and disconnected way to view them.

What online video is missing is a central, all-inclusive location for both video viewing and discovery, or a “dream website” that offers what Pugh describes as “seamless playback, big video, playlists, and community curation.” But that kind of online platform/destination doesn’t really exist. Or at least it didn’t, until Pugh and Wilkinson created it.

VHX.TV, which just launched into private beta, is a place where you can collect, share, and watch videos from around the web. It’s kind of like New Twitter with a singular focus on video instead of minutia.

It works like this. Users 1) sign up, 2) select friends to follow, 3) share videos with those friends via a bookmarking tool or automagic feature that tracks all the videos you watch on other sites, and 4) collect videos in their queues to watch later, continuously, and without interruption. There’s also seamless integration into services like Twitter and Facebook, so you can share your VHX selections with your followers and friends.

Somewhere between his stints on the police procedural and legal drama television series K-Ville and Law & Order, Anthony Anderson found time to take take off his badge and take on the role of a recently laid off 30-something impersonating a four-year-old African adoptee for director Rob Pearlstein’s online series Matumbo Goldberg.

The best part about the way Anderson plays the character is he makes sure Mark (the recently laid off 30-something) doesn’t act the part. Mark is supposed to pretend he’s Matumbo, who’s supposed to be an infant Kenyan orphan, but aside from sporting a pair of jammies and chillin’ in a bed with a bed rail and in a bedroom with Thomas the Tank Engine decals, he acts like your average American man taking advantage of all the comforts better-off family members can provide. Mark/Matumbo’s able to pull off the charade due to a chronic case of suspended disbelief suffered by his adoptive parents.

I like it. it think it’s because it’s comforting watching an entertainment property where a man pretending to be someone he’s not is not wearing a dress or otherwise acting totally absurd while he’s doing the pretending. That goes for Mark/Mutumbo and his two best friends, too. A gynecologist from Pacific Palisades and a tax attorney from Encino reluctantly go along with Mutumbo’s ruse, but put next to no effort into acting the part.

Matumbo Goldberg is an Atom original series courtesy of Tom Banister and SXM productions (the individual and company involved in other hit web series like Ikea’s Easy to Assemble and NBC’s Fact Checkers Unit). Banister tells me he saw Pearlstein’s original Matumbo Goldberg short film way back in 2008. “I saw it and invited Rob to the set of the first season of Easy to Assemble where we hit it off,” Bannister said. “We decided it was too risque for brands to be involved with and that it was a show orientated at younger guys and thought the atom/Comedy Central/Spike brands would be perfect.”

I’ll admit, I had never seen a video fashion lookbook before, and frankly my time spent with lookbooks in general is fairly marginal. But when StrobeLikes popped up on YouTube last week I was intrigued.

The channel, a partnership between new media studios Hud:sun Media and Fullscreen, brings the concept of a fashion photo lookbook to the YouTube generation. Each video is a sub-60-second montage of a single look photo shoot, edited together with a “strobe motion photography” technique giving the effect of movement.

Fullscreen founder Geore Strompolos told us the videos are designed to be shared, like “little fashion trading cards,” as he puts it, amongst the channel’s target of 13 to 29 year-old women. Where it gets clever is the use of web video and social media stars as models, on the thesis that their influencer status can trump the waify model look any day. One of the latest videos merges a new track from YouTube music star Dave Days over a shoot with Natalie Jane (below).