by Joshua Cohen on September 16th, 2011
Jon M. Chu and his Legion of Extraordinary Dancers want to get jiggy with a choreographed dance of your design. The troupe of lithe modern music interpreters have teamed up with Coke Zero to find a crowd-sourced routine to which they can manipulate and contort their bodies into unbelievable positions in sync with hip hop-driven beats.
The Create a Dance from Zero campaign features prominent players of The LXD asking viewers from around the world to choreograph and videotape their own dance moves, one or some of which will be performed by The LXD as the center of a global marketing effort for Coke Zero. Chu and company want interested individuals to hit up the contest’s participation page to download a song to groove to and then upload the finished product to YouTube.
If you want to learn how to do The TOE Tappy, Shake Arm and Piz, or Hit That P Diddy! you should give the submissions a watch. The best part? The LXD principals make video comment on the uploads.
by Joshua Cohen on September 15th, 2011
Tubefilter’s been playing host to casual happy hours in New York City over the past several months, providing a time and place for online video professionals to get to know one another over some moderately priced cocktails and intriguing conversation. Those events have been great, to be sure, but now we’re kicking them up a notch.
On September 20th, join us and FourScreenMedia as we present a new kind of networking event at the intersection of video and advertising: Multi-Screen Mix-Up NYC. It’s totally free for industry professionals, and gives said professionals (including online content creators, advertising agency executives, traditional media veterans, and more) a chance to mix, mingle, and do business while learning about the latest in the industry from leading names in advertising, technology, and entertainment.
Our inaugural event will be at Copia in New York City’s Midtown this Tuesday, September 20 from 6:30PM to 8:30PM and will feature a short presentation from the always enlightening and entertaining My Damn Channel Founder/CEO Rob Barnett. For those few who are unfamiliar with Barnett, here’s a primer.
Barnett worked in television at MTV and VH1 and was President of Programming at CBS Radio before he founded My Damn Channel in 2007, a new media studio with a decidedly simple premise: Sign talented individuals and “get the hell out of the way.” In the past four years the site has been home to original web series from established celebrities and comedians like Harry Shearer, David Wain, Sarah Silverman, A.D. Miles, Josh Gad, and more, and launched the cult phenomenon You Suck at Photoshop.
by Julie Wolfson on September 15th, 2011
A recent story about Fridgeezoo on Tasteologie features an adorable ThinkGeek video of a little milk carton shaped creature from Japan explaining the importance of keeping the refrigerator door shut, something Americans apparently forget to do to the tune of $1.7 billion in wasted annual electricity costs.
Videos like that one are created to help sell ThinkGeek’s “stuff for smart masses” and have been making fans smile and order nerdy knickknacks for more than four years. From pranks to office tours, ThinkGeek videos teach viewers about not only ThinkGeek products, but also the quirky world of the company itself (probably prompting more than a few to check ThinkGeek’s job listings to join in on the fun).
We caught up with John Frazier, ThinkGeek’s Director of Video Marketing, to talk about the gloriously geeky world of ThinkGeek.
Tubefilter: How long have you been making videos that feature ThinkGeek products?
John Frazier: We started making videos around 2007 – they were short little things, designed to demonstrate some of the products that were tougher to get the point across. Our first video was for a long plastic ribbon that had grooves in it, much like a record player. Pulling on the ribbon with your thumbnail dragging across the grooves generated a voice that said, “I love you.” It was really cool but hard to explain properly in just photos and text.
TF: How important is the ThinkGeek video connection?
JF: We found that our customers really liked that new dimension of interaction. We had always been this kind-of skunk works of geek-chic. With that veil slowly being lifted, people wanted more. They wanted to meet the monkeys in charge of the asylum and be a part of it.
by Drew Baldwin on September 14th, 2011
He’s baaack! Tommy Wiseau, star of cult classic The Room, is back in a brand new online series from Studio 8.
The Tommy Wi-Show, distributed on the Machinima Network, follows Wiseau as “he is repeatedly abducted by different races of mysterious aliens and transported to distant planets, where he is forced to test popular video games. Each weekly episode has Wiseau playing a different game and delving deeper and deeper into strange, unknown areas of the universe.” Yeah, you read that right. It’s going to be awesome.
Brock LaBorde and Jared Richard, who directed and produced the Atom.com comedic horror pilot The House That Drips Blood on Alex (starring Wiseau and premiering at San Diego Comic-Con), are teaming up with director Payman Benz for The Tommy Wi-Show.
“For the past year Studio 8 been trying to make Tommy Wiseau’s dreams come true, and one of those dreams is to host his own talk show,” LaBorde told Tubefilter. “This has been an idea in our heads for a while, and The Tommy Wi-Show is the first step towards making Tommy’s dreams a reality.”
LaBorde also told us to expect to see “lots lof classic and new games, lots of aliens, and lots of screaming.”
by Tim Goessling on September 14th, 2011
There’s something unique about the NBA that allows us to expect more the league’s superstars. Maybe it’s the fact that it is the only professional sport where you can sit close enough to hear every word, feel every thundering dunk, and see every tiny movement of a player’s body. Perhaps more than any other sport, basketball allows for more individual creativity from each player (there’s so slam dunking in baseball). People feel a connection to the players almost more than any other sport (witness for the national Crucifixion of Lebron James for evidence).
With that in mind, it’s no surprise that superstar Kevin Durant has a web series called Kevin Durant’s 35th Hour where he wants to show he’s just a “regular person.”
by Joshua Cohen on September 13th, 2011
One very generous and supportive fan of Felicia Day’s hit web series The Guild with a penchant for non-profit organizations that support after-school music programs and a few thousand dollars of disposable income ($3,300 to be exact) will make a cameo appearance in an installment of this Season Five of the gamer-oriented series with mass appeal. He or she will be happy to know he or she will be in good company. A helluva lot of celebrities are making cameo appearances this season, too.
You may have noticed Author Neil Gaiman and original members of the Battlestar Galaticast Richard Hatch and Erin Gray showed up at the Megagame-o-ramacon in last week’s episode. This week’s installment reveals even more of those super secret guest stars Day and company hinted at earlier this year, but have kept hidden all season.
Chuck’s Zachary Levi, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Eliza Dushku and Tom Lenk, Los Angeles Laker and Eliza Dushku’s Rick Fox, Dollhouse’s Dichen Lachman, Eureka’s Colin Ferguson and Amy Berg, Hercules himself Kevin Sorbo and StarWars.com blogger Bonnie Burton all show up in ‘Social Traumas.’
Here’s the setup to whet your geek and entertainment appetites:
Zaboo’s “Seat Savers” reach the breaking point as his Master Chief henchmen confront a big star (special guest Kevin Sorbo). Codex encounters Tink’s secret origins while Bladezz and Vork hobnob with “the fancies” at an exclusive celebrity party.
by Marc Hustvedt on September 13th, 2011
The coolest part about MSN’s celeb hub Wonderwall is that massive meta mosaic of the latest celebrity images serving as a gooey replacement to a strict headline-driven news site. Go ahead, it’s hard NOT to click on one of the stories, if only to reveal more of the photos. Fittingly, the site has its own original video programming too, including the titular 7 Wonders of the Wall, which is back today with news Chevy Cruze and MSN have renewed the hosted series for a second season.
Renewals of branded entertainment series are always a good sign that something was working, both for the brand and the network, in terms of converting eyeballs into real measured engagement. The first season, which ran from May 2 to for 15 weeks through August 12, received what the network is calling “millions of visits,” though actual viewership numbers are not being shared publicly.
BermanBraun, the production company that produces the series did comment however that the show helped drive more traffic to Wonderwall, which it also manages. “Average monthly video views on Wonderwall increased three to four times after 7 Wonders launched,” BermanBraun digital topper Paco Vinoly told us
“The second season of 7 Wonders is very much a validation of our strategy of building video across all our sites,” added BermanBraun’s Head of Digital Video Ian Moffitt. “We are all very excited to have Chevy Cruze as our sponsor again, and looking forward to building the Wonderwall video brand even further in partnership with them and MSN.”
by Marc Hustvedt on September 13th, 2011
It’s hard avoiding the irony that a discussion on last Tuesday’s episode of What’s Trending about the perils of impulsive, unconfirmed tweeting can have serious consequences. The story centered around two residents of Veracruz, Mexico facing up to 30 years in prison for their tweets about an alleged drug gang attack on a primary school, in what some had called a case of “Twitter Terrorism.”
I was even a guest correspondent on that episode, filling in for Melissa Jun Rowley on Shira Lazar’s six month-old weekly online news show, and the conversation circled around vetting news before reactively re-tweeting it.
Then on Friday afternoon, the show’s offical @WhatsTrending Twitter account posted a tweet reporting that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs had died. The tweet, though quickly removed within minutes, spread rapidly around Twitter and into the blogosphere, with many citing CBS News as the official source of the false report, given that What’s Trending aired on CBSNews.com.
By Saturday, CBS News summarily cancelled its relationship with What’s Trending and removed it entirely from the CBSNews.com site, with all previous links re-routed for the time being to the show’s Facebook page. The producers of the show, Lazar and Damon Berger, issued a brief apology on Twitter and on Facebook, but those didn’t stop CBS News execs from their decision to part ways.
