I just watched the eight extant episodes of The Guild (YouTube channel), a (what is the right term for this? Webisode?) comedy series about the lives and times of gamers. Here’s the first episode:
If you’re a World of Warcraft player, you’ll get all the jokes. If you’re any other kind of gamer, you’re probably get 80% of the jokes (”You like my helm? It’s +5 Sexterity”). Everybody else might get half the jokes.
The performances range from decent to marginal, but that’s pretty standard for any pro-am type project. The main creative force and best actor is Felicia Day, who’s done a lot of work (she was on Buffy in the final season, though I can’t specifically recall who she played–one of the new crop o’ slayers, I suspect).
The conceit of offline and online lives colliding feels fresh, though, and the writing is occasionally witty. In any case, there are worse ways to spend about 40 minutes (eight episodes times about five minutes).
I think this is probably the first piece of fictional video that I’ve watched consistently on YouTube. Do you have a favourite web-only show?
ZDNet reports that YouTube faces criticism and possible legal action for hosting anti-semitic videos:
The videos hosted on YouTube include clips of a 1940 anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Suess and two music videos of outlawed German far-right rock band Landser, which show footage from World War II depicting Nazi military operations.
Report Mainz, which is due to air the program, said in a statement that Social Democrat (SPD) parliamentarian Dieter Wiefelspuetz said airing the clips on YouTube in Germany was scandalous. Report Mainz quoted him as saying: “Publishing these films amounts to aiding and abetting incitement of the people.”
You know, the older I get, the less sure I am about dealing with hate speech, particularly in a context like YouTube. After all, the web has increasingly sophisticated filtering mechanisms which enable the truth to bubble to the top. Nothing lives in isolation online, and so people who comment on and link to a hateful video can dilute much of its power. Is metadata a reasonable replacement for anti-hate speech laws?
Being a Caucasian, male, straight Westerner, I’m pretty much in every majority group you’d care to identify, and so I’m not really the target of any such speech. I’d probably feel differently if my grandparents died at Auschwitz.
I couldn’t figure out how to tastefully work in a reference to JewTube in this post, but it’s just staring us in the face, isn’t it?
I was looking at something on YouTube the other day (maybe it was this animated project from Bud.TV), and noticed a so-called “Director Video” (I gather these are pay-for-placement) featuring an 18-year-old doing a monologue (not “To Be Or Not To Be”, to his credit) from Hamlet, apparently in a vacant lot:
He’s certainly givin’ ‘er, isn’t he? He’s got plenty of passion and enthusiasm, which is great. And he’s got the thing down, memorization-wise.
What the Words Mean
I’m no Shakespearean performance expert, but this piece highlights a really common difficulty in performing the Bard’s work: you can’t do a great job if you don’t understand the words. All the words. And not just what they mean, or meant in the 16th century, but also some context for their usage. A ‘fishmonger’ isn’t just a guy who hocks cod–it’s also a slang term for ‘pimp’.
Anyhow, I’m not picking on this kid–he seems to have the heart and spirit. You can probably teach the rest.
I did get to thinking about what other Hamlet-related videos I could find on the Tube.
As you might expect, there are many earnest, exceedingly-awful recitations of monologues. I’ll spare you those, but here’s a top tip to aspiring thesbians: memorize the speech instead of reading it off your screen. Here are some of the more interesting videos I found:
The wonderful (if overly fey) Derek Jacobi, along with Patrick Stewart as Claudius:
I’d forgotten all about Cat Head Theatre:
“Hamlet the Musical”, from Gilligan’s Island. That’s truly priceless: “From Ophelia, no one can steal ya, you’ll always be my own”.
And finally, here’s one young actor who’s got her lines down:
I’m doing a bunch of stuff on YouTube today, and noticed a series of videos from “The Official Google Channel”. They’re short interviews with Google staff from around the globe. Here’s Lina from Zurich:
I’m not accusing anybody of anything malevolent, but it struck me that the style of those videos is extremely similar to those Apple ads from a few years ago. Here’s the most famous one:
It’s obviously an effective look. In case you were wondering, you can read about what Ellen’s up to these days.
Here’s a strange, strange story about Natalie Portman courtesy of those Silicon Valley gossip-mongers Valleywag:
The winsome movie star, who came to public notice as a 12-year-old in the charge of a grizzled assassin, is proposing a continuous video feed of her work and personal life…
Hollywood is freaked by the emergence of instant celebrities, in reality television, and on web sites such as Youtube. The agencies, and the stars, want in on the action, just as they did during the last internet boom. Thus CAA, the number one talent agency, put Will Ferrell, the comedic actor, together with Sequoia Capital. The result: Funny or Die, a version of Youtube for comedy clips.
I initially thought this was pretty groundless, but it sounds a lot more plausible when I remembered that I’d seen a couple of other pop stars co-opting the YouTube medium. From a marketing perspective, Portman seems like an obvious choice. She’s young, attractive and popular with the Web’s early adopters thanks to Star Wars and V for Vendetta.
I’m certainly no judge of this sort of thing, but Ms. Portman doesn’t seem like the type to be a publicity hound. I watched an interview with her on “Behind the Actor’s Studio” a while back, and she struck me as quite private.
Combine this with the Barenaked Ladies recently released YouTubesque songs from a water closet (thank you, Chris), and something weird is going on. Musicians seem to be saying “I can’t beat them, so I’ll join them with no-budget parodies and songs from my bathroom”.
A couple of weeks ago, a new video shot to the top of the ‘most viewed’ list on YouTube (boy, we’re a bit YouTube heavy around here, aren’t we?). It was ten seconds in length and was utterly benign. In other words, it was just like the other zillion young talking heads in front of a webcam. Why, then, did this young woman named Kallie (with a YouTube account called GreenTeaGirlie) garner 268,653 views (according to Utility Belt, who otherwise misses the point, the video got about 215,000 views in the first two days)?
View spam. Unethical marketers, presumably with green tea to promote, apparently used auto-refresh software and fake accounts to ratchet up the number of views and subscribers. As always happens, the YouTube community detected this bold and ill-advised deception, and piled in with a schwack of nasty comments. Here’s a quick sampling:
Viral marketing sucks. So why make the whole YouTube community go mad over this?
OMG OMG! You are like the Mostest AWESOMENEST ever! I am going to call all the TV stations and newspapers in my area and let them know of this AMAZING discovery!!
i hate you already.
You get the idea. Kallie replied with a pretty vague, denial-free follow-up. If she wasn’t, in fact, a marketing shill, I would have expected some moral indignation.
No one has owned up to this particular campaign. About ten days after the fiasco, Dragonwater Tea Co. registered the domain www.greenteagirlie.com. I suspect this is just opportunism. The folks behind this project are clearly dimwitted, but you’d hope they’d register associated domain names before launching.
The situation presents an interesting conundrum for the marketers behind the project. On the one hand, their original plan backfired gloriously. On the other hand, they have the attention of about 250,000 people, which doesn’t come cheap. Is there a way for them to come clean, apologize, save a little face and still come out ahead? Maybe they should post an apology video, and send free green tea to the first 10,000 YouTubers who comment on it? Or, as James suggested when we were chatting about this, they could use the opportunity to crowdsource their next marketing campaign so they don’t mess up again.
It’s a risky proposition, but if their product and company is new and relatively unknown, it might be worth the gamble. In the worst case scenario, they close up shop and re-launch with a newly-branded, squeaky clean green tea.
UPDATE: To complicate things further, Gary Gause from Dragonwater said they didn’t even register the domain. Somebody else registered it, and pointed it at www.dragonwater.com. How odd.
In the past six months, I must have gotten pitched with a half dozen travel video sharing sites over at Geeky Traveller. They all did more or less the same thing, and they were all battling YouTube for a chunk of the video action.
The other day, James sent me the cleverly named Yaaway (a play, of course, on a Hebrew name for God). I gather that they still haven’t officially launched, but here are some initial impressions:
Every video is reasonably well produced, and makes use (too much use, actually) of cuts, camera moves and video effects. They don’t look like the standard grainy YouTube video–they’re going beyond the static, unedited dude talking into a webcam. I assume all of this is seeded content.
There’s no indication of who’s behind Yaaway. I can’t even determine where they’re located or the denomination of the site creators. At least one of the videos I watched is shot in Vancouver, so they may be local.
There are no user feedback mechanisms in place. I trust they’ll fix this before launch.
I started wondering how many such sites there were, and (courtesy of BlogMinistry) found three more: GodTube (”Broadcast Him”), Jesus Clips (his toenails?) and iQuestions (somebody will answer for that name in the hereafter). GodTube and Jesus Clips both emulate YouTube’s functionality. The former seems to be the big player in the space, while the latter features some downright scary stuff.
iQuestions is the most liberal of the sites, as far as I can figure. They’ve got a whole intimacy section (get your questions answered by old white dudes in sweaters!) that is, as these things go, fairly provocative.
I imagine that there are dozens of emerging video sharing categories. There are also regional video silos, like Video.ca. What else have you seen?
