by Drew Baldwin on October 20th, 2011
That 70s Show star Wilmer Valderrama and 7-year old skateboarding prodigy Asher Bradshaw have launched a Kickstarter campaign for a feature length documentary.
Bradshaw’s father posted a video of him skating at Venice Beach. His skills drew national attention and 1.6 MM views on YouTube. Valderrama, along with filmmakers Jeff Renfroe and Kathy Herndi, are putting together the doc, entitled, SHRED: The Story of Asher Bradshaw.
“When I first saw Asher’s YouTube video I was amazed,” said Valderrama. I knew I had to meet this kid and somehow get involved, and when I first met him, I knew that his kind of talent and passion could inspire a whole generation. He is an example of finding what you love to do early so you can eventually love what you do for the rest of your life,”
Valderrama and the filmmakers are seeking funds to underwrite post production on over 140 hours of footage, “spanning fromAsher’s home life in the gang-infested neighborhood of South Central and his father’s daily struggle to support his family, to nail biting competitions and insightful interviews with some ofthe world’s biggest skateboarding legends.” The film will chronicle Bradshaw’s unique journey and his father’s struggle to make his son’s dream come true.
by Logan Rapp on October 20th, 2011
The problem with parody is simple: You have to make sure people know you’re doing it, and you have to make sure that you’re not jumping into a genre that’s already oversaturated with similar spoofs, satires and what-have-yous. And that’s kinda the problem with Lesbian Cops.
(Writer’s Aside: Out of curiosity, after watching the first episode, I googled “Lesbian Cops.” Thirty minutes later, I turned Safesearch on and tried again. There were plenty of books, some Rizzoli & Isles commentary, and then this show.)
Clearly trying to ape and skewer the tough-guy cop shows and movies of the 60′s and 70′s, along with what you’d find googling about without Safesearch on, Lesbian Cops is all about being big. Big movements, big acting, big, big, big. Death Wish was thrown out as the creators’ prime inspiration, which I completely see. From the Lesbian Cops website the premise goes, “Detective Tori Jones (Gena Shaw) is paired with a new detective on the force – Rashida Thompson (Krystal Marshall). They’re assigned to solve a brutal murder at Hamilton Elementary School.”
And that’s pretty much it. The remainder of the program is filled with attractive women acting like they’re about to rip your throat out with their bare hands and have angry sex with any woman they can find. It’s id unbridled, to be certain, but lacks the small touches that make such an exploitation spoof successful.
A prime example of the exploitation spoof done great is Black Dynamite, where the powers that be opted to pull back the curtain – revealing crew, stunt men, the actors themselves, all screwing up what they’re supposed to do as they barely manage to keep the movie coherent.
by Marc Hustvedt on October 19th, 2011
Al Thompson has enjoyed a very good year. His digital production company ValDean Entertainment closed pickup deals with all of its active series—including two of them Lenox Avenue and Odessa scoring BET Networks deals.
Now fresh off winning the Syfy “Imagine Greater” honors at NYTVF last month for Odesssa, Thompson is heading to Los Angeles to premiere the drama at the NBCUniversal Short Cuts Film Festival next Wednesday the 26th. (Free tickets to the event are available below.)
Cast includes Richard Herd (Star Trek Voyager), Fulvio Cecere (Battlestar Galactica), Skai Jackson (Disney’s Jessie), Clayne Crawford (A&E’s The Glades, Fox’s 24), James De Bello (Cabin Fever) and Al Thompson (The Royal Tenenbaums).
In case you wonder just what makes the mind of Al Thompson tick—something we’ve affectionately dubbed the “Al Thompson Hustle“—we tried to get a few pages from his playbook out of him in a recent interview, where he cites an early 2007 Tubefilter article on the series We Need Girlfriends as the impetus to fully jump into the web mix:
by Joshua Cohen on October 19th, 2011
The goal of YouTube’s NextUp initiative is to foster and train fledgling online video talent who have the skills, but not necessarily the means or the knowhow to elevate their status from amateur creator to paid professional.
Earlier this year the team at YouTube Next bestowed the tittle of NextUp Winner upon 25 burgeoning new media content creators. The title was accompanied by a check for $35,000 and entry into an exclusive four-day YouTube Creator Boot Camp in New York city where YouTube insiders and top performers dropped production, internet, and marketing knowledge onto the online video sharing site’s stars of tomorrow.
The content of those stars of tomorrow ran the gamut of online video genres, from guy-with-a-guitar music to classic Korean recipes to super sweet animation and back again to girl-with-a-microphone music. But for the just announced second round of YouTube Next Up, the powers that be at YouTube Next are looking to flesh out more specific content verticals.
YouTube Next Chef and YouTube Next Trainer are two similar initiatives with the intent to train and coach online video’s next crop of catchphrase wieldin’ celebrity cooks and super inspiring online video workout partners. 16 participants for each program will be selected amongst all the applicants, and be afforded the opportunity to partake in a “three month virtual class held on Google+ Hangouts” (which is all the rage these days) as well receive “an equipment kit worth more than $5,000, mentoring from industry leaders, filming and editing lessons and more than $10,000 worth of promotion on YouTube.”
by Marc Hustvedt on October 19th, 2011
Continuum is one of those anticipated independent series on our list long due to a check-in. It was after all, announced back in February of 2010 as Streamy-winning Pink director Blake Calhoun’s next project. Now the series is finally teasing out on the interwebs with a special Facebook-only exclusive release of the first three episodes.
Continuum is a move into the more heady sci-fi realm for Calhoun and co., in what they are billing as “a futuristic thriller in the noir-ish tradition of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien.” Melanie Merkosky (Harper’s Globe, lonelygirl15) stars as a Reagan, a woman waking up inside a space ship without any memory whatsoever of why she is there. Taryn O’Neill voices the ship’s computer—or at least eventually does about midway through the first episode.
by Heather J. Taylor on October 19th, 2011
It’s a totally rational decision to search out a movie review online before heading to your local neighborhood cineplex to drop close to the amount of cash a minimum wage worker earns in a single day for a couple tickets, a couple sodas, and a bag of popcorn with a calorie count that rivals blooming [...]
by Marc Hustvedt on October 18th, 2011
Mobile is where the eyeballs are, and it’s surging, so adding content extensions on those attention-robbing devices in everyone’s pockets is a natural move.
At this point, Camera Obscura was resting quietly on Dailymotion, now a full year since its release back in 2010 when we reviewed the series as a solid win. But since then, the gripping horror series from director Drew Daywalt and MWG Entertainment hasn’t released new content after its four-week, 20-episode run.
That didn’t stop MWG however from releasing a Camera Obscura mobile game (on iTunes and Android) today at $0.99, along with in-app purchases of original songs from the series. There’s even a trailer for the game, which lets fans control Clara and other Camera Obscura characters from the series through the twisted demons and scenes of the show.
by Marc Hustvedt on October 18th, 2011
Our latest weekly video blog of online video news worth knowing is up and fully online now—after a false start with a corrupted video upload almost doomed this one into mid-week status.
This week’s edition takes a crack at some low-hanging fruit in online video—pointless How-to videos—and uncovers one channel designed to poke fun at a fruitless SEO-friendly channel that explains how to pronounce an assortment of names and confusing brands. The original channel is PronunciationBook, with some degree of utility for non-english speakers perhaps, but its doppleganger PronunciationManual jibes at it to our delight with 8-second mis-pronunciations.
Loyal readers, lend us a few minutes and watch, like and comment our latest weekly video blog (thanks!):
Also featured in the video blog is the launch of Illeana Douglas’s Easy to Assemble Season 3 on My Damn Channel today. I’ll have a more complete review of the new season posted later this week. And also on My Damn Channel, Mary Lynn Rajskub has her first original series, Dicki, with one episode out so far. I interviewed Rajskub, so be on the lookout for more from inside the mind of Dicki this week on Tubefilter.
