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.
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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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.
Last year, Birthright Israel enlisted our good friend Dan Meth to create a video card people could send around for Rosh Hoshanah, and the very funny YouTube hit “Hebrew Krunk,” featured in this week’s Channel Frederator, was born.
It’s fun to see them up to the same tricks again. This year, Birthright created a pitch-perfect remake of “Crush on Obama” with new lyrics, called “I Gotta’ Love You Rosh Hashanah,” and as expected, it’s getting popular on the YouTube right now.
Great work… I like when she sings the “R to the O to the S to the H” part at the end. Happy 5768!
Lee Rubenstein has hit the intern jackpot. After 18 months with Frederator Studios, Lee recently signed on as production designer with Next New Networks. A man of many talents, Lee has wowed us with not just his animation, but also his juggling. I kid you not. The man juggles (a talent widely admired by his co-workers.) In fact, he even spent ten years of his life as a professional clown. Fresh off his uber successful, “The Joy of Shaving,” Lee has taken the Internet by storm including some bold admirers who’ve even proposed marriage. Lee takes it all in stride though even after topping 300,000 views. “I really didn’t think that much about it. I just always wanted to shave with a banana. I would never think in a million years that the stop motion video would blow up like this.” Lee, ya got us all wondering, what’s next?
I’ve been fortunate to sit in close proximity of our interns for some time now and I have to say, we hit the jackpot with this bunch. In fact, they’re so committed to N3, our staff often confuses them for employees. Though their ages and backgrounds run the gamut, all have brought their strengths and experiences to our office and we couldn’t be luckier. Some have even parlayed their roles into a full-time gig, but I’ll get to that later.
Our first crop of Next New interns were given a unique assignment this summer; to create their own network. They had roughly six weeks to come up with a concept, shoot the footage, post it on YouTube and generate the most views along with win over a committee made up of our staff. Five individuals took us up on our challenge and produced the following networks:
Sasha Levenson-Wahl’s- Pet Hot Spots
Nick Bonadies-VOD Recruit
Terry Quire’s- Hypeline Movies
Steve Nelson’ Improv Island
Omar Padilla’s-Blisterpoppers
A varied array of submissions, yet in the end, Omar Padilla wound up taking home the prize. Blisterpoppers is a network devoted to the community who collect action figures and as I’ve recently learned is a big business. Congratulations Omar!
From this class of interns, we recently snagged three to join our staff permanently. Lee Rubenstein had been interning with Channel Frederator for the past 18 months and recently came on as a production designer. Raleigh-Elizabeth Smith has worked on Veracifier and has joined as their network community manger, while Steve Nelson has easily made the transition from production intern to p.a. While we’ve regretfully had to return some to their respective schools, I’m glad to say we’ll be keeping some familiar faces around here.
Here’s a great little reminder on how to get tons of views. Personally, I think Burt Reynolds alone could do it — if you did it right.
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