Tubefilter News

Rain, even in Los Angeles, can’t stop a party like this one. There is something about top musicians in the world descending on one spot—and then performing—that make this special. Nothing against the actors, writers and directors of the world, but they aren’t exactly performing at most award shows. At the AMA’s tonight, it’s the best in the music game, and we get to see them work.

Sure, ABC has the main show (starting at 5pm PT tonight), but on this site we’re locked in on the internet broadcast. Because, in the future of television, it’s as Wayne Gretzky would say, where the puck is going to be. YouTube is broadcasting American Music Awards Red Carpet Pre-show live starting at 2pm PT.

What The Buck’s Michael Buckley is one of the official pre-show hosts, and there’s fashion coverage from YouTube’s Elle and Blair Fowler, live performances by DeStorm, Christina Grimmie and more. Basically, there’s reason to tune in even if Bieber wasn’t enough of a hook.

The news of a TV series based on one of YouTube’s most popular series, The Annoying Orange, has been out there for over a year. But today came word just where that show is going to live, as Cartoon Network picked up creator Dane Boedigheimer’s six-episode longer form animated version.

Management company and production house The Collective partnered with Boedigheimer to produce six episodes of The Annoying Orange animated TV comedy series. The episodes come complete with A-list cartoon talent, including Tom Sheppard (Pinky and the Brain) handling writing responsibilities, Conrad Vernon (co-director of Monsters and Aliens, Shrek 2) executive producing, and Malcom McDowell lending his voice to one of the characters.

Release date is not yet set, though sometime in the first half of next year is what we are hearing. The online version will continue on their YouTube channel, with its 2.2 million subscribers still a very fertile platform for the franchise.

There’s a lot of talk about money in online video lately. Who’s getting licensing deals, 7-figure advances, funding rounds—yet in the hubbub it’s too easy to take our eyes off the broader context of how the internet is reshaping entertainment.

Last night in LA, at Celebrate the Web’s screening of hastily-made web series pilots was a welcomed reminder that the independent, cooperative, sure-I-can-help-you-out attitude that underlies this whole creative revolution is alive and well. And that’s a very good thing.

Sure, it doesn’t hurt that there was some cash on the line—$500 grants to each of the two overall winning teams—along with a development deal with online comedy network My Damn Channel. But ultimately this was as festival about just getting out there any shooting something, rather than just talking about shooting something.

Enough burying the lead. Out of the sixteen pilots in the competition, two took home overall honors one from the Audience voting online and another from a judges panel that included CTW organizers Jenni Powell, Taryn O’Neill and Stephanie Thorpe along with My Damn Channel CEO Rob Barnett, Molly Templeton, myself, Bernie Su and Olga Kay.

This one comes with a stern warning we need to get out of the way. If you’re either a terribly naive fan of Rebecca Black’s vocal abilities or completely lacking in a sense of humor, then it’s best to move along, nothing more to see here.

For those of us who decry the pervasive auto-tune, this one hits home. The resident funny people over at Break whipped up an un-auto-tuned version of the viral pop singer’s new music video “Person of Interest,” using what they say is her “RAW, UNMIXED, ORIGINAL vocals” and synced them up to the new video. Astonishing.

Technically Break did this before when her “Friday” follow-up “My Moment” debuted back in July—with Break’s parody version racking up over 5.6 million views with a lively 58,000 comments from Black haters and lovers. Wherever you stand on the internet’s unforgiving assault on a the girl who just wanted to be Britney, you have to admit we are all tuned in.

Rebecca Black – Person of Interest (NO AUTO-TUNE VERSION)

If you asked most people outside of Hollywood to name the top producers in television, I’d take a bet that Mark Burnett would make be the most common name on those short lists. He is, after all, one of the most well-known names in the industry, having created international TV franchises like Survivor, The Apprentice, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? and The Voice.

Now, the 51 year-old producer is trying his hand in the online video arena with the recent launch of his first original series for the internet—animated comedy CliffsNotes Films on Cambio as joint project with AOL, Coalition Films and Josh Faure-Brac. We had a rare opportunity to sit down with Burnett this month in his Santa Monica office to discuss how he views the transformation of entertainment and the rise of the internet as a viable medium of its own. We also solicited questions from you the loyal Tubefilter readers, and you came up with soem great ones. A few of them made it into the final cut of the interview.

Check it out below (or directly on YouTube)

It was late June, the dog days of summer, when fast-talking Ray William Johnson leaped over Ryan Higa to claim the top most subscribed spot on YouTube with his primary channel, raywilliamjohnson. At that point he was at just over 3.9 million. Today, and some 1.1 million additional subscribers later, he’s reached another milestone by being the first channel to hit 5 million subscribers. Oh, and a not-too-shabby 1.4 billion total views.

These days none of the top creators on YouTube are sole-channel warriors anymore—many have two or three secondary channels some of which are themselves in the Top 100 list. Johnson’s animated music video channel yourfavoritemartian is a Top 20 powerhouse of its own with 1.6 million subscribers on 260 million total views.

Video games brought into live action—with the help of a little well placed VFX— have been an ongoing theme in online video for year, some even making a multi-season hit web series (The Legend of Neil) around it. Some are taking advantage of the trend to make a name for themselves. Little Rock, Arkansas-filmmaker Andrew McMurry is just 18 years old but already partnered up with YouTube’s mega-network Machinima with his growing channel of more than 36,000 subscribers and over 3.5 million views.

McMurry’s first breakout with the Real Life series was a minute-long Real Life Super Marios Brothers (watch it below) that playfully took the live actor, McMurry’s brother Seth, through a magically appearing landscape of pipes, koopas and bricks. It notched a respectable 750,000 views on YouTube. Rather than a beat for beat copy of the Nintendo hit, there’s a twist—one of the mystery boxes deploys a 9mm handgun for this real life Mario to unload on the game. McMurry made use of some Mario theme music freely available at Super Mario Brothers fan site, and sounds from The Mushroom Kingdom.

YouTube is wasting no time in getting their crop of 100+ newly funded original channels up and running. It’s somewhat fitting that the first of this freshman class CleverTeVe is launching today—in Spanish. YouTube’s advertising partners are hungry not only for more premium content, but as is now well known, for more options to reach a booming hispanic millennials market.

It also helps that LA-based Clevver Media can meet the agressive output requirements set by YouTube as part of the seven-figure funding deals. Their existing channels ClevverTV, ClevverMusic, ClevverGames and ClevverMovies churn out dozens of videos per day and racked up over one billion combined views.

The CleverTeVe channel is releasing some 20 videos today and then an average of 60 per week moving forward. One of them is a recap (see below) of Taylor Swift winning Artist of the Year at the CMA’s, or as I’ve just now learned to write in Spanish, “Artista Del Ano En Los CMA’s 2011.”