Since it’s Friday before Labor Day and the entire Internet is winding down, let’s just watch a funny new video, Damn it Feels Good to Be a Banker, by our friend Nate Houghteling (the guy in the vest) and his partners at Portal-A Productions, promoting Leveraged Sellout’s new book (also available in HD).
Also check out their really funny series from last year, Huge in Asia.
As Allen Stern noted on his blog, earlier this week The Media Kitchen held the Digital Media Venture Conference, introducing their clients to innovative VC-funded startups that are changing the media plans of tomorrow. The Media Kitchen’s Darren Herman approached us about helping them create an icebreaker video to kick off the spirit of the day, and we jumped at the chance to work with them on it, as Darren and The Media Kitchen have been big supporters and cheerleaders of our work.
After a bit of brainstorming with Darren and MK’s president, Barry Lowenthal, we came up with the video embedded above (here’s an HD version), featuring Gary, Indy Mogul’s incomparable puppet co-host (mostly because he’d be available for all the shoots) in a whirlwind tour of some of the better-known companies in Silicon Alley. All glory due to the amazing Justin Johnson, NNN’s superstar associate producer and first hire, who wrote, directed and produced the piece in a couple days’ time with no budget and a supplemental crew of one, which to me is just incredible.
Special thanks to Barry, Darren and Nicole DelVecchio from The Media Kitchen, David and Marco from Tumblr, Richard Blakeley from Gawker Media, Jake and Amir from CollegeHumor, Erik Beck, Derek D, Rob Czar and Corinne Leigh from Next New Networks, and Lindsay Campbell and Julie Alexandria from CBS Interactive for being such good sports, and to all the other people from NNN and Frederator who helped out as Rock Band partygoers or Gary stand-ins (especially Ben Ross). And special props to Kyle Fassenella, who DP’d and contributed all the amazing steadicam work; Rachel Garcia, for coming up with the idea to have Gary be the star; and Liam Collins, our super-nice VP of Finance and Business Affairs, for playing against type as the jerk who tells Erik to get back to work.
tumblr. - The Documentary from DaveAOK on Vimeo.
Our friend, director David Seger, finally tells the truth about our friends at Tumblr.
There are a few things that most of us at the company have in common: We like to have fun, we wish we were rock stars (well, we’re already rock stars, but I mean actual rock stars), we love movies, and we are superhero fanatics!
To my delight, I was able to catch the Superhero Fashion & Fantasy exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art this weekend (which I highly suggest), and it reminded me of a fantastic series that I saw a trailer for a few months ago.
Italian Superman was something of a mystery to me after I watched the trailer. I thought it was a brilliant, campy one-off, and nothing more. To my surprise, I saw an episode featured on Yahoo! Video last week, and was psyched to find the first two episodes up on YouTube, MySpace, and Yahoo!. The story that accompanies it is just as outlandish as the series, explaining that Italian Spiderman was adapted from the novel, Death Wears A Hat, and filmed in 1964 by Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Gatti, and produced by Alrugo Entertainment.
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Photo by Jared.
I first met the brilliant Ben Ross (of Channel Frederator, Ultra Kawaii, and more) on Channel Frederator RAW, our Ning-powered social network for animators and animation fans. He had posted the first episode of Inside Ben’s Head, his own original series, and there were so many crazy, great ideas, like “Nolte-Busey-Busey-Nolte” and “Italian Techno,” that I wrote him a fanmail right away. Here’s the episode in question:
Find more videos like this on Channel Frederator RAW
Ben wrote back and said he’d actually had a cartoon way back in the second episode of Channel Frederator (unknown to me, Fred had a similar experience, meeting Ben at an event and never making the connection that he was the same guy who sent that great cartoon in to Channel Frederator). Such was the pace of those early days at Next New Networks that about a week later, I walked over to meet a new intern who was sitting over with the Frederator team, and it turned out to be Ben. He’d already been hired before I’d gotten the chance to tell anyone about him. (more…)
It was a great weekend for politics here at NNN. This weekend we were all over the moon to see our very own Amber Lee Ettinger aka Obama Girl make a cameo in the opening of Saturday Night Live’s return episode after the Writer’s Strike. To quote Barely Political’s creator Ben Relles it was ‘beyond exciting’. Great job Amber and Ben.
And as the icing on the cake Noam Cohen in the New York Times did a great piece on Josh Marshall today and his winning of a George Polk Award. As soon as bloggers are considered, we know Josh will be up for a Pulitzer.
Who isn’t gushing over the new MacBook Air? Well, not everyone — but heck, there are always some complainers. The response has been relatively positive. In Meredith Viera’s case, that’s an understatement, as Engadget recently noticed.
Technology comes and goes, and I for one don’t think we mark the passing of old technology with as much ceremony as it deserves. That’s why I was thrilled to see the Indy Mogul team take a masonry drill to one of the old iBooks in the office. The ending is the best part.
So now that we’ve drilled it, which NNN employee (or other celebrity) do you think should lick it? Let us know.
Hope everyone had a happy thanksgiving. In case you missed it, the crew from Fast Lane Daily posted a very special Thanksgiving episode starring Derek DeAngelis, our longtime host. FLD takes their beef with 50 Cent to the next level and newly minted hiphop star 25 Cent gives you a little tour of Next New Networks HQ while he’s at it. Embedded below…
Earlier this week, we announced that BarelyPolitical.com, the upstarts behind hit online videos like “Crush on Obama,” was acquired by Next New Networks, and the creator and owner, Ben Relles, has joined us full-time to build out BarelyPolitical into a new political comedy network. We’ll get to the reaction on that in a second, but first — a lot of people here at Next New Networks worked hard to make this happen, and help Ben to expand his vision for the network over the past month or two. Our production team, who are already busy around the clock supporting networks like Fast Lane Daily, Indy Mogul, and more, really stepped up to help produce “I Like a Boy,” the first BarelyPolitical / Next New Networks project (embedded below), and our business team helped get the video in front of editorial teams at partners like YouTube, Veoh, and Break to help the video hit a million views across the web in its first few days of release.
Wednesday, BarelyPolitical.com relaunched with a new design and powered by the Next New Networks platform, and began adding “Barely Daily” programming, which is currently going to update at least three times a week — the first week of videos includes a great report by videoblogger Jennifer Prediger (who came to us through Veracifier’s Marc Boxser), who asked people around New York and DC to sign a going away card for Karl Rove, and a truly bizarre Obama Girl response video from comedy legend Jackie Mason. A couple people in particular, especially Marc Boxser, our Ideas & Culture network manager, Paul Blakely, Todd Morningstar and Marc Goldberg from our technology team, and our newest preditor (producer/editor) Ramon Desouza really put in extra hours to make this site happen, and proved to me once again what an amazing team we’re building here at Next New Networks. There’s a bit of work still needed to do on the site — adding iTunes and subscription feeds, a video archive, and embed and sharing features — but it should be running at full steam by early next week.
There’s been a lot of great coverage and pickup of the story so far — here are a couple highlights:
There were also a couple pieces that raised good questions, like Fast Company’s wondering about what this all means for the future look of television, Valleywag’s post, which was fine with me (thanks for the link!), and Om Malik’s smart observation that startups are beginning to band together in the space. The only way we can answer them is to help Ben turn Barely Political into something bigger than it was before — which we’re hard at work now trying to do. In the meantime, we’re really excited about welcoming Ben to our team, and to be working with his many collaborators and emerging stars of the web like the singer/songwriter Leah Kauffman, the charming Amber Ettinger, and new videobloggers like Jenn Themelis and Jennifer Prediger. With places like the Daily Show, Huffington Post, and The Onion all launching great online video content right now as well, the real winners this election season are going to be viewers on the web.
I’m trying to refrain myself from flogging Channel Frederator’s The Meth Minute 39. But Dan Meth made this one is so funny I can’t help myself.
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