by Brittany Sandler on October 13th, 2011
The high-profile girls at HelloGiggles.com announced this week two new original web series will be coming to their site – Internet Dating Disasters and HelloStranger. For those unfamiliar with the “ ultimate entertainment destination for smart, independent and creative females,” HelloGiggles is a lady-friendly online outpost founded by actress/singer Zooey Deschanel, producer Sophia Rossi, and blogger Molly McAleer.
Regarding the HelloGiggles online originals, Internet Dating Disasters will feature stories of people meeting online and the unexpected, undesirable outcomes of what happens when they then meet in real life. It’s kinda like the original premise for The Guild, except it’s not scripted and lacks the references to WoW. HelloGiggles describes it as less You’ve Got Mail and more Catfish.
In contrast, HelloStranger is aimed for people trying to connect to people from real life meetings, like the video version of Craigslist’s Missed Connections.
Now, HelloGiggles is no stranger to the idea of web shows. Before the website went live, HelloGiggles produced a three-part web series for Teleflora called What a Mom Wants just in time for a special Mother’s Day promotion. And since the site’s launch last May, HelloGiggles has featured a series of videos including Wine Time with Marissa A Ross, Get Yo’ Nails Did by Molly McAleer, and – my personal favorite – Video Chat Karaoke, which features a variety of the site’s regular contributors singing to their screens.
by Drew Baldwin on October 12th, 2011
Last night on CollegeHumor’s Live Cast Hardly Working’s Jake and Amir announced a new show: Jake and Amir: Fired.
Three thousand fans tuned into the live stream to ask questions about the new online special and upcoming DVD release. This is CollegeHumor’s first (independent) foray into long-form content.
Fired will be distributed through Facebook (and can be purchased with Facebook credits) as well as CollegeHumor.com. The DVD, distributed through Bustedtees and Amazon, will feature bonus footage including a short and behind-the-scenes clips.
The 30-minute special was produced entirely in house at CollegHumor. In the story, CollegeHumor’s CEO Alan Avery (played by Matt Walton) makes Jake an offer he doesn’t refuse: fire Amir and get a promotion. But without Amir, life just isn’t quite as good for ol’ Jake, and the duo hatches a plan to get Amir his job back—hilarity ensues.
“Fired is very much an extension of the Jake and Amir that people already know,” said Sam Reich, President of Original Content for CollegeHumor Media. “It begins and ends with them at their desks. That being said, it also expands the universe considerably by adding characters, locations, and something even newer to a Jake and Amir plot.”
Watch it for $2.99 at CollegeHumor.
by Joshua Cohen on October 12th, 2011
From days of earlier this week, from the Los Angeles, California area of the universe and the YouTube region of the internet, comes an opening scene of an entertainment property of potentially legendary proportions. The original web series and/or feature film of Voltron: The End. (Editor’s aside: All children of the early ‘80s reading really [...]
by Marc Hustvedt on October 12th, 2011
In our ever improving and evolving weekly Tubefilter video blog of online video news worth knowing, this week it was all about improving the audio setup. Can you notice the difference?
To get technical for a second, I was using the RODE VideoMic mounted on the camera—a Canon 7D—but for various reasons this just wasn’t going to cut it. The 7D, like many DSLR cameras, is stuck with automatic gain control (AGC) that was adjusting sound levels dynamically based on my levels of speech. After talking with several cost-conscious video creators, I settled on the $299 Zoom H4n external recorder, using a Sennheiser shotgun mic hooked up through an XLR cable.
This week’s video features two stories from the UK to start off, with Alex Day grabbing a few friends to cover one of the more under-appreciated original songs from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog—”A Man’s Gotta Do.”
by Drew Baldwin on October 11th, 2011
When we talk about YouTubers, we’re usually referring to the creators and producers who make the videos we watch and love. But a true “YouTuber” is actually someone very different. It’s actually someone who works at YouTube, at the headquarters in San Bruno, CA.
That’s right. People actually work at YouTube. Not just bots and algorithms. Ever wonder what that’s like? To work there? Are the people all experts on cats? Or on viral videos? Or on people talking about viral videos? Or on a growing amount of high production quality entertainment? Or something?
Well, wonder no further. YouTube has put together a new series about working at YouTube on its LifeatYouTube channel. It’s called Tales From the Tube.
The series offers “an insider look at what life at YouTube is like, with videos ranging from the heartfelt to the ridiculous,” according to the YouTube Blog. Tales From the Tube tries to shed light on “what happens behind your screen, and will talk about things we think you might want to know about like job opportunities, interesting folks working and visiting here, projects we’re testing out, our gnome overlords and more.”
If you are looking for some hard-hitting investigative journalism or an exposé, you’ll be sorely disappointed. The videos are produced out of YouTube’s HR department and look like they were produced out of a major global corporation’s HR department, which is to say, they’re pretty tame.
by Joshua Cohen on October 11th, 2011
If you don’t know the name Mondo Media – one of (if not) the internet’s “leading multi-platform distributors of animation for teens and young adults” that routinely garners 70 million views for its programs across its many networks – you probably most definitely do know the name of at least one of their original web series productions.
The most notable is the online cartoon Happy Tree Friends, which features a familiar cute and cuddly cast of pastel-colored fluffy anthropomorphic animals with multiple lives, morbid imaginations and violent predilections. They’ve enticed internet audiences to click play since 1999.
There’s Dick Figures, too. That’s the Mondo Media original animated web series created by the very talented Ed Skudder about two dysfunctional, wannabe fratacular, socially awkward, odd couple, stick figure friends. The show debuted in November 2010 and has already racked up over 50 million views across 21 episodes.
Combine those figures with the view counts from Happy Tree Friends and a handful of other Mondo Media YouTube channels (including Guy Collins, Germondo, and Spike and Mike) and the number you get adds up to something well north of 10 figures. That makes Mondo Media one of the latest additions to the YouTube Billion Views Club, joining Clevver Media and a few other choice networks in the upper echelons of online video pervasiveness and popularity.
by Joshua Cohen on October 11th, 2011
The premiere of the sure to be fanboy/girl favorite original companion web series to video game publisher BioWare’s role-playing title Dragon Age II went live late last night/early this morning on Machinima’s YouTube channel.
The first of six installments of Dragon Age: Redemption introduces us to our star Felicia Day’s character Tallis, an ‘knife eared’ Elvin assassin in moderately protective fantasy armor with crazy skills on the hunt for the dangerous and recently escaped Qunari mage Cerebus. Take a look:
In addition to slaughtering pigs and humans in front of the camera, Day contributed a helluva lot to the series behind the camera, too. She wrote Redemption, executive produced the series along with Kim Evey and Dan Kaplow, and her Knights of Good Productions (the same crew behind her uber-hit web series The Guild) took on the physical production duties of the program.
We caught up with Day to ask her how the Knights of Good got along with BioWare and Dragon Age lead producer Mike Laidlaw, if she has any particular penchant for elves, and how she thinks Dragon Age: Redemption will impact sales of Dragon Age: II and the game’s latest downloadable content package (DLC) Mark of the Assassin (which features an in-video-game character based on the live-action Tallis).
by Joshua Cohen on October 10th, 2011
Whether or not the future revolution will be televised, MakerBot Industries hopes you’re watching it on some kind of a device of your design printed on your desktop by way of your 3D printer with a steady supply of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), high-density polyethylene (HDPE), polylactic acid (PLA), and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) in the comfortable confines of your home.
The company founded by esteemed Colbert Report guest and maker extraordinaire Bre Pettis along with Zach ‘Hoeken’ Smith and Adam Mayer recently closed a $10 million round of funding in order to “grow the MakerBot team to democratize manufacturing and make 3D printing more accessible to everyone!” One of the first steps in making that vision a reality is to better market the magic of MakerBoting to the online and connected masses. And one of the first steps of doing that marketing is to make a web series.
The MakerBot founders tapped perennial online video guru and the proud owner of a domain name that’s the same as his first name Eddie Codel to co-produce an original web series to show off all the wonderful stuff you can do with a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic. MakerBot TV features exceptionally cool creations from the Thingiverse and highlights the burgeoning community of 3D printing enthusiasts.
I caught up with Codel over e-mail to ask him about the program and at what time in the near future it will be safe to expect your average early adopters to own a 3D printer.
