Tubefilter News

The 15th Annual Webby Awards unleashed its massive list of nominees today, with 130 nominees in the Online Film and Video section alone.

“If the Web 2.0 revolution has shown us anything, it’s that the Internet is a proven star-making invention,” reads the Webbys website. Indeed, Best Web Personality category noms came from outside Hollywood: YouTube and web star Justine Ezarik for iJustine, New York Times technology columnist and CBS News correspondent David Pogue, Between Two Fern’s Zach Galafianakis, Great Depression Cooking’s Clara Cannucciari, and Egyptian-American filmmaker Rahab Elewaly.

For Best Individual Performance however, nominees included more traditional Hollwood names: Lisa Kudrow for Web Therapy (Lexus), Ralph Macchio for Wax on F*ck Off (Funny Or Die), Isabella Rossellini for Green Porno (Sundance), Cheri Oteri for Liza Life Coach (AMCtv.com), and Jim Carrey for Funny Or Die’s Presidential Reunion.

The Best Drama category saw nominations primarily from independent series: Out With Dad, Anyone But Me, Urban Wolf, Diary of a Single Mom, and Eastenders E20 (BBC).

The Comedy: Long Form or Series category also reflected a nice mix: Funny Or Die’s Presidential Reunion, Web Therapy, 30 Rock: Frank vs. Lutz,The Office: The 3rd Floor Webseries, and The Muppets Kitchen with Cat Cora.

Other highlights include Justin Bieber Takes over Funny Or Die and Steve Carell’s episode on Between Two Ferns for the Comedy: Individual Short or Episode category, Auto-tune the News’ Bed Intruder Song for the Best Viral Video category, and Old Spice Response Campaign and OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” video for the Best Viral Marketing category.

Webby Award categories for Online Film and Video include Animation, Editing, Individual Performance, Interactive Video, Web Personality, Writing, Branded Entertainment, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Events & Live Webcasts, Experimental & Weird, How-To & DIY, Music, News & Politics, Public Service & Activism, Reality, Sports, Technology, Travel & Adventure, Variety, Video Mashups, and Viral.

To all the readers in the audience who spent an embarrassing amount of their childhood learning every Mortal Kombat fatality possible and all the other readers in the audience who may or may not be video game enthusiasts but can appreciate when a content creator is able to successfully convert an entertainment property from one medium to another, this is the web show for you.

Warner Premiere and Machinima.com today released the first installment of the much-hyped, long-anticipated Mortal Kombat: Legacy web series. It’s good. Me and 13,000+ YouTube Likes and 4,400+ YouTube comments in the first 11 hours since the video was released can’t be wrong.

The initial installment features mortal combatants Jax (Michael Jai White), Stryker (Tamoh Pennikett), and Sonya Blade (Jeri Ryan) raiding Kano’s (Darren Shahlavi) weapons-grade robotics production facility. In the 12-minutes of action, we see equal parts explosives detonated by futuristic weapons of local area destruction, kick ass fight scenes, winks to Mortal Kombat enthusiasts, and beautiful exposition of the video game’s mythology and its characters’ backstories. Those stories will continue to unfold as Machinima releases new weekly episodes every Tuesday.

It’s nice to look at, too. Director Kevin Tancharoen did an excellent job maintaining the production value of his prologue and proof of concept that got him the gig to create a nine-episode Mortal Kombat web series in the first place.

There was an episode of radio show This American Life called “Kid Politics,” in whose first act Starlee Kine observes a class of elementary schoolers at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library as they performed a simplified reenactment of the decision making process behind the U.S.-led invasion of Grenada in 1983. The purpose of the exercise was to demonstrate how that President Reagan’s actions reflected the right and only choice.

In a similar vein, President Reagan’s son, Michael Reagan, is hosting What Would Reagan Do?, a new web series that purports to “take a look at the issues of the day and how his father Ronald Reagan set the tone for strong American Leadership.” The series is filmed from the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, CA.

WWRD, a play on the acronym WWJD (meaning What Would Jesus Do?—the comparison does not seem to be tongue-in-cheek), is a part of RightChange, an organization “committed to supporting policies and candidates dedicated to fiscal responsibility and a strong national security for the United States,” whose stated goal is “to counter the internet dominance by liberal and progressive groups.”

The series employs a device in which the celebration of Reagan’s past actions are used criticize current leadership. The latest episode, “Labor Unions,” compares the labor issue in Wisconsin to the air traffic controller walkout in 1981, during which President Reagan fired over 11,000 controllers. The previous and only other episode focuses on the escalating situation in Libya, and draws connections between the Reagan and Obama administrations.

For those of you upset by WWRD, don’t worry too much: despite the RightChange’s 642,000+ members, each video has clocked in fewer than 1,000 views on

The original Star Trek debuted in 1966. The Patty Duke show began broadcasting in 1963. That makes both television series a couple decades shy of retiring and receiving full Social Security benefits. The stars of those shows, however, are more or less at the age where they can start collecting. And they’re definitely at the age where they can star in a lo-fi, low-budget online ad campaign instructing other age-eligible individuals on how they can start collecting, too.

Late last month, the US Social Security Administration released a series of eight promo spots. Those spots feature George Takei and Patty Duke dressed in faux Star Trek garb expounding the benefits and ease of boldly going to SocialSecurity.gov for all your Social Security-related questions and needs.

The videos are out of this world (sorry!) because

Duke sports a set of Vulcan.
Duke and Takei engage in a special kind of tongue-in-cheek, back-and-forth banter usually reserved for late night advertisements from local car salesmen.
It’s kinda ridiculous to think a government organization developed an online ad campaign for geriatrics.
It’s kinda sweet to think a government organization developed an online ad campaign that features at least some semblance of cool.

50 years ago today, a trial commenced in Jerusalem before an Israeli tribunal with one of the chief architects of the Holocaust seated at the defendant’s stand (via an ingenious kidnapping engineered by Mossad) behind a bullet-proof encasement accompanied by two Israeli guards.

The Trial of Adolf Eichmann lasted 14 weeks – Eichmann was later put to death by hanging in 1962, the only execution in Israel’s history – and included testimony from at least 90 Nazi concentration camp survivors, making it one of the first times Holocaust survivors so publicly spoke about their experiences. As Franklin Foer at the New York Times notes, the trial also forced the “genocide onto the front pages of the world’s newspapers. Nearly 20 years after the fact, the Holocaust finally began to find a place in the public consciousness that reflected the size of the atrocity.”

In order to serve as a reminder of the events of five decades ago (and to ensure similar atrocities happen never again), Israel’s Yad Vashem museum – the country’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust – uploaded footage of the entire Adolf Eichmann trial to YouTube. That footage includes over 400 hours of film, both in Hebrew and dubbed in English, including survivors’ testimony.

If you watch any of the segments (like the above accounts from Holocaust survivors Arie Breslauer and Aviva Fleischman) you’ll find the trial footage both enraging and enlightening. The former because the man largely responsible and for the death of some six million people is sitting feet away from a handful of the individuals who were able to escape his purges and he’s not at all remorseful, and the latter for the fact this is a first-hand account of a defining moment of history, which dramatically impacted the world and shapes our current world view.

Last Friday’s second annual UCLA / USC Transmedia Hollywood Symposium capped off an extremely vibrant month of confabs and overall reporting from the transmedia trenches. Almost a year to the date from the Producer’s Guild of America officially ratifying the “Transmedia Producer” credit, the media industry at large are realizing they can no longer ignore how multi-platform storytelling continues to evolve in our digital age- no matter how much the actual definition of the word “transmedia” remains debated. The Transmedia Hollywood event notably rounded out weeks of buzz surrounding the topic that included countless panel discussions at MIPTV in Cannes to an intimate Transmedia Los Angeles Meetup hosting industry luminary Jeff Gomez.

Moving from USC to UCLA’s James Bridges Theater this year, event Co-Directors Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins moderated four distinct panels that resulted in a marathon day of shared insights from some of the top creative and academic minds actively pioneering a wide range of new storytelling experiences. The moderators steered panel discussions with a decidedly design-centric focus keeping in mind the Conference’s subtitle of “Visual Culture and Design.”

In particular, panel one, entitled “Designing Virtual Worlds–From Screens to Theme Parks and Beyond,” provided a welcome focus on the “experiential” impact that amusement park rides can have in expanding the story universes created around franchise-worthy intellectual property. Immersing fans into an environment that can trigger sense memory emotions associated with production design that used to be limited to an onscreen experience creates a business opportunity only limited by imagination.

The Decorah Eagle Cam – the Raptor Resource Project’s 24 hour live feed of a bald eagle’s nest complete with three little eaglets – is still up and running, still attracting six-digit simultaneous viewers, and still racking up its total view count to the tune of 32+ million eagle, mother nature, and American iconography enthusiasts. It’s also giving some attention to the greater birds-of-prey-watching community, including those in urban environments.

The Hawk Cam is a live, daylight hours feed straight from the 12th floor of New York University’s Bobst Library on Washington Square Park in Manhattan. The camera and footage come courtesy of the New York Time’s City Room, which had the good thought to install the equipment after NYU president John Sexton tipped the paper off to the two red-tailed hawks mating and nesting outside his window.

The hawks’ names are Violet and Bobby – named after one of NYU’s colors and the library where they stitched together a home – and together they look after a trio of speckled eggs scheduled to hatch sometime around April 22.

Viewer numbers for the Hawk Cam don’t come close to those for the Eagle Cam, at least not yet. At any given time of the day, 900 to 1,300 or so individuals tune in to see what Violet or Bobby or both are up to. Add all those viewers up and they account for roughly 5+ million total minutes of viewing time on the Hawk Cam so far. Expect those numbers to increase as Violet and Bobby get closer to their due date.

Billy Crystal released aFunny or Dievideo. It’s the sequel to When Harry Met Sally. It probably came about from 22 years of protracted conversations between Crystal and Rob Reiner about whether or not to release another major motion picture installment of one of the original ‘Can best friends be sex friends?’ romantic comedies and deciding a four-and-a-half-minute short would be more fun and in much better taste.

When Harry Met Sally 2 is really the making of When Harry Met Sally 2 and stars Crystal and Reiner pitching studio executives about where to take the storyline for the movie’s sophomore installment. The execs like what they hear, but want to make a few, minuscule #HollywoodPostItNotes inspired changes, which means, in this case, the addition of vampires and zombies.

The trailers that follow star Crystal and Helen Mirren, and feature Adam Scott, Mike Tyson, Rob Riggle, Maya Rudolph, Jennifer Crystal Foley, Mike O’Malley & Josh Fadem. They’re funny, basically exactly what you’d expect if Crystal were to take on a role of someone undead. But what was unexpected is how Crystal promoted the video.

The eight-time Academy Awards host started a Twitter account and appeared as a guest on The Daily Show specifically to market his Funny or Die “film.” Before Crystal walked out to sit behind The Daily Show desk, Jon Stewart introduced him as, “The legendary comedian and actor whose latest venture is a starring role in a Funny or Die video.”

So, one of the most famous comedians and actors in the world who hasn’t been in a theatrical release since Analyze That does a combination of new and old media marketing to promote one of his most significant on camera performances in almost a decade, which happens to be in the form of an online video. Kinda strange, right?