I hope you are all balls deep in some summer fun. Your balls, of course. [ll] to me referencing your balls.
The i.C. collective has been ruminating on which outdoor music festival we would fucks with this summer. The Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival is on and popping again. I thought we did a pretty decent job covering this single day event by posting four (4) videos of our exploits there. My favorite joint was the final one titled ‘The Lost Tapes’. This is where I think you can really see how much love we have for this Hip-Hop shit. Plus, Rafi came off with the greatest line evar when he asked Killa Sha what he did for Traj Kadafi other than holding dude’s sacks [ll]. Classic.
With this event under our belt we trudged around Randall’s Island in a downpour to film the scene at the Rock The Bells concert. On that day the ‘i’ in i.C.’s should have stood for intrepid. The grounds were a fucking mess and the event organizers treated the press worse than the shit that was festering all summer in the gang of port-a-potties on the campsite. None of the difficulty in producing the video was evident and what you see are Rafi and I having the time of our lives enjoying the soundtrack to our lives while kids injured themselves mudwrestling and someone gets to smoke some good ass “white boy” weed.
You would have thought that we would be invited by either of these event organizers to return this summer and produce videos of these concerts that surpassed the quality of our previous work? You would be wrong in that thinking however. The iNternets Celebrities remain as the Rodney Dangerfields of this outdoor Hip-Hop concert shit. This lack of love from the event organizers had left one i.C. member a bit unmotivated to return to these events.
I can’t blame Rafi totally since I am the dude that said “Eff the Bklyn Hip-Hop Fest!” I found myself feeling a kind of way because of their previous swagger jack from i.C. material. I know who taught them dudes their language and I didn’t even get a Brooklyn Bodega New Era fitted cap as a thank you. Rafi feels that Guerilla Nation doesn’t represent or support that ethos by not recognizing our transcendant guerilla filmmaking.
At the end of the day we are both correct. Our love for the subject matter was never based on profit. We cover these events because we love this music. Sometimes though we have to use tough love even if it breaks our hearts so that we don’t contribute to the bottom lines of the vultures that are picking at the bones of the Hip-Hop carcass. I would love to cover the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival and the Rock The Bells concert in true iNternets Celebrities style with all access press passes that allowed us into the craft services area and the hooker bus. But alas my friends, not this year.
However, our outdoor concert season isn’t totally fucked the fuck up…
In this effed the eff up economy, it is important to capitalize on those special events where the organizers are promising free local wine, free cheese and free delicatessen snacks.
As it turns out those are my favorite kinds of wine, cheese and delicatessen snacks.
They’re playing all kinds of movies including our very own public pee opus, Urine Nation!
If you couldn’t tell what was going on in the phone booth on the small screen, you can savor every detail on the bigscreen this coming Monday. Here are the details:
What: Free short films in Chelsea Market with a live performance by Drew and the Medicinal Pen.
Where: Chelsea Market
Enter at 75 9th Avenue in Chelsea,
(Between 15th and 16th Streets)
When: Monday, March 24th, 7:00 PM
Music at 7 PM | Films at 7:30 PM
Admission: FREE
The ICs will be in attendance. We might even have some stickers.
The 27th Black Maria Film Festival kicks off tonight in Jersey City and will include Bodega among its lineup of adventurous short films.
You can check it out tonight, some IC’s will be in attendance. Tomorrow the festival is in Newark then back to Jersey City on Sunday. This festival travels around to other points in Jersey and even makes it out to Pennsylvania and points as far as Georgia and Ohio. Check the film festival’s touring dates.
If it’s coming to your vicinity, please come out for some fun. Bodega is even more suave and delicioso on the big screen.
This weekend we met up with 3 of the MC’s on the bill - Cause, Donny Goines and Hired Gun - so that we could give you a little sample of the talent that will be on display on December 6.
We recently received an interview request from a Canadian college student who had seen “Cereal is Dope” and was working on an article for her school paper about web video. The questions came and I did my best to oblige but it’s kind of odd receiving questions that really aren’t specific to you as interview subject. Only three of the nine questions really asked us to draw on our own experience.
The rest were more pertaining to general knowledge of the internet and web video. Fortunately for this student, I’m a well informed person who loves the sound of his own voice schooling others.
By the way, feel free to send any interview requests to internetscelebrities at gmail. Here’s the one I did for the college paper:
When and why did short film making explode on to the internet scene
Wow, tough question. I’m an old-time nerd so I remember surfing the web back on the first Mosaic pre-netscape and there were no pictures in web pages. That was a feature that came in the next version! But everybody’s impulse off the bat has always been to make things more geared towards multimedia. How can we add sound, how can we add video. Only the technology wasn’t really up to it, the software had to develop and that took time. And more people got online and internet connections got faster and that took time.
In the late 90s if you had a broadband connection it probably meant you were on a college campus so really that was a good chunk of who was represented on the internet at the time. And I remember it was in that era literally ten years ago that I first personally came across short films that were “exploding” because of the internet. The two videos that come to mind are the short star wars spoof “Troops” which was a huge hit online and - even before that - the Satan vs Jesus short by the South Park guys. Nobody had ever heard of South Park before and then all of the sudden because of the internet you have all of these people knowing who they are which basically made their career. I remember it playing everywhere on campus… in the dorms, in the computer labs.
So those are a few early examples of web videos that went viral but things don’t really really explode for web video until you fast forward to a few years ago. Because people want rich media and fast downloads and because the technology becomes available and cheaper, everyone starts getting broadband. And then youtube comes along which gives people a way to share videos and embed them on their myspace pages or anywhere else. And a massive community grows which of course means anyone posting there has a potentially huge audience.
Before youtube you mostly had people who considered themselves unique for being filmmakers being the majority of people posting their videos online. The reason they were doing it? They could distribute their video cheaply that way. But still it was a small niche of web video evangelists or else well-funded media sources posting the stuff because there were so many hassles associated with web video. You had to find a host for it. Bandwidth costs a lot of money. You needed special software to stream it. Your audience needed special software to play it and it’s not getting a mass audience because your user has to wait for this experience. A lot of hiccups.
But after youtube, it becomes so easy to post videos, and the reach, convenience and fun of it becomes so clear, that basically what it means to be someone who creates videos instantly changes. Instead of filmmakers being this separate class of person with a huge barrier to entry. Now there’s basically no barrier to entry. A webcam can be bought for like $20 and you have the example of tons of people already doing it to encourage you. And even people who don’t make movies get involved. By posting other people’s content to youtube or by embedding videos that you like on your blog, the individual becomes a broadcaster.
what draws film makers in, why is the internet a good place for their work?
For the same reason the internet is a good place for any musician, writer, business person, human being… There’s no barrier of entry on participation. It’s cheap to distribute your message so you’re replacing so many obstacles and middlemen to be able to spread your ideas.
are interent films taken seriously?
It all depends who you talk to and which films you’re talking about. I think they’re taken pretty seriously. We were lucky enough to attend the Sundance film festival last year and they were offering courses there on how to use the internet to get your films seen, so that shows me that it’s something taken seriously by filmmakers.
You know the internet is in some ways just a reflection of the world so many internet films shouldn’t really be taken seriously. Most of it is made for fun and without much thought and it’s treated accordingly. That’s true of a lot of non-internet films too though, right?
what are your fav internet films ?
Hm, I don’t know. That’s a really tough call… I was pretty into ze frank’s video blog for a little bit. I like bike messengers are on crack. That’s a thrilling one. I’m terrible at “what’s your favorite” questions. I watch a lot of web video but years later I don’t know that any of them stand out to me as above all the rest. If I can be conceited and name one of our own, I pick Bodega.
Actually, I just heard a bit of a Steely Dan song on the Jimmy Kimmel show and it reminded me of Yacht Rock. That is probably my favorite internet film series of all time.
do you think this will get bigger in the future ?
It’s already gi-normous and yes it will get bigger. The internet is replacing television as we speak.
How many have you guys made? how and why did you start? what made you want to distribute over the internet rather than things like film festivals ?
Our director Cas comes from a background in film - he’s made tons and tons of short films. The 3 of us together, not so much. We’ve completed 6 official projects (with 2 more currently being edited) but then we’ll also post out-takes sometimes and 2 of our projects were in a series format. Like, we did a 7 episode series from Sundance, we did 4 covering different aspects of one concert. If you count each of those as separate videos plus the outtakes we have 22 videos up on youtube. But really it’s 8.
Dallas and I both run popular blogs (dallaspenn.com and ohword.com). Last year he had blogged about a way to get big mac for less by doing some creative ordering at McDonalds. I thought that was a great topic and blogged about it too, joking at one point that we should make a video about it. My friend Cas said that was an idea he’d be down to shoot, and shortly after we both met Dallas for the first time while on our way to McDonald’s. That became Ghetto Big Mac which if you add up various places it’s hosted at has nearly a million views. That was like a first swing home run so we knew we’d have to do more of this.
Honestly, I’d also been wanting to try web video for a few months by the time that came about because I think many people connect with video in a way that they can’t with writing. We live in a post-literate age. Maybe that’s a nice way of saying illiterate, but who am I to judge. It’s not like I read hoity-toity stuff. I read internet writing!
As for why distributing over the internet… the audience we’re already talking to through our blogs is via the internet. It’s clear how to post video on the internet, and it’s instant. And from what we saw with Ghetto Big Mac, it’s possible to reach hundreds of thousands of people just like that with the right idea and execution. But for the record, we have sent videos to film festivals and Bodega has played at a few film festivals as well as airing on TV. Those have been very rewarding experiences in their own right.
did it start out as fun and become for serious?
I think the 3 of us have a perspective in life of taking fun things seriously and trying to make serious things fun. So from the start yes it was a lot of fun but we’ve also worked hard to make good videos from day 1. It’s become more fun in a way because we’re more comfortable doing it now. It was a little awkward creating our first one. And it’s also become more serious because we’re seeing how this could feasibly become the basis of long term paying work which I don’t think any of us would have considered on that first day.
SitDownStandUp has banded together with OhWord to curate a great night of Hip Hop on December 6th called Stand Up!. It will be hosted by Rafi Kam and Dallas Penn, together known as the Internets Celebrities. It’s all presented by Liberated Matter and features four of our favorite underground artists that we think deserve some extra attention. Each artist will perform a solo set followed in the end by a big posse cut with all four artists PLUS our special secret guest. The special guest will then close out the night with a set. Get your tickets here now! All info below.
Liberated Matter Presents
Stand Up!
Curated by OhWord.com & SitDownStandUp.com
Hosted by Internets Celebrities
featuring Hired Gun, Donny Goines, NYOIL, Cause & one special surprise performer
Where: Pianos, 158 Ludlow St. NYC (directions)
When: Thursday December 6th, 9-11PM
Buy tix here
I’ve been dieting for the past four weeks and have lost seventeen pounds in that time - going from 265 to 248 pounds. I’m hoping to break the Mendoza line by my 31st birthday in February. I haven’t been sub-200 since college. I did get down to 205 when I decided it was time to get healthy after my son was born in 2002 but in the five years since I had put it all back on plus some.
I’m really psyched about the weight loss and lifestyle changes that I think will keep the weight off but I hope this doesn’t ruin my credibility for our junk food videos.
We have two new videos coming out very soon (one on a great food topic) but both were shot before this transformation began. So don’t expect to see it this month. But an October project or two will reveal a slightly smaller Rafi.
On a related note, do you think Dallas and I should start video blogging in between our official video projects? I think we should launch an Internets Celebrity Fit Club and show those VH1 fools what’s up.
The event starts at 8pm
350 Grand Street @ Essex (Lower East Side, Manhattan)
F/J/M/Z to Essex / Delancey
In the event of rain the show is indoors at the same location.
Tickets - $8 at the door or $5 online HERE with code: RFJUNE Presented in partnership with - IFC.com, New York magazine & Open Road New York.
