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…
Dallas works as a construction manager.
Rafi is a programmer for a non-profit.
I make commercials for cable channels.
Dayjobs are how we make money.
We want to make money off of our movies.
Not fuck you money. Not retarded money. Maybe just a little make-it-rain money? No, just enough money to support taking some days off work, to justify spending some night-time hours on an edit and maybe most importantly, actually paying the good people that shoot, score, design and help us craft the IC flicks.
So we’re asking you kind souls who have enjoyed Checkmate or Bodega, Ghetto Big Mac or Cereal is Dope, Rock the Bells or Hip Hop Honors to help fund our next movie.
We’ve even implemented a handy widget on the right side of this site where you can throw us whatever loose digital dollars you’ve got floating around.
Seriously, even 1 dollar would be appreciated. The great thing about our internets is that we’re lucky enough to be able to get our documentary on check-cashing places in front of almost 500,000 people. If even a fraction of that group pitched in a dollar each, we’d be able to make movies our dayjob.
Now, we don’t have tote bags. And we’re working on T-shirts. Sweet Jesus, we’re working on some T-shirts.
But what we can offer you as a small token of our appreciation is a producer credit.
We don’t have a patron at the moment. We don’t have an agent. We don’t have any sponsors yet. So, basically, we’ve got a lot of room in our end credits and we want that space to go to the people who fund our next movie – essentially producing it.
The producer on most projects is the one who either comes up with the money or handles the money’s distribution throughout the set. For a $1 minimum contribution, you will be listed in our next movie’s end credits as one of our producers.
The wheels are turning on the next project and it’s going to be great. We can’t talk about its content yet as we don’t want to be scooped. But if you’re interested in finding out more before committing some cash, email us for a short synopsis on the next opus.
We’re always happy to discuss future projects with our producers.
You’re not allowed to shoot video in Whole Foods or at the Time Warner Center (or urinate in phone booths)
You’re not allowed to shoot video at 2007’s biggest hiphop concert
And basically, if you asked a lot of places (supermarkets, banks, MSG, etc) they’d say you’re not allowed to shoot there either.
So should you?
Absolutely.
Get the shot. Get what you need to make a good, rich movie.
Just don’t be a jerk about it.
If you need a shot of Brooklyn from a subway car, then go get one. Just don’t be a jerk about it. Don’t film a lot of commuters just trying to go home after their crappy job. Don’t film people in the supermarket just trying to buy some groceries. Don’t film people at your local Commerce just trying to cash in their change. Don’t film people at the Knicks game spilling beer on the seat in front of them (apologies to the people I spilled beer on while trying to film Lebron go off for 50 points at the Garden last week).
If you are a jerk about it, you become a paparazzi. Photographers and videographers who don’t give a fuck who they film and are actually hoping that their subjects look like chumps on camera are paparazzi. Putting someone on camera against their will is a bad look.
But there are exceptions
Filming a woman who carries around her dog in a baby bjorn while she casually leafs through CDs is not being a jerk. She’s the jerk. And her jerkitude trumps whatever jerkitude you enact by filming a person against his or her will.
So run your potential guerilla shoot through the Jerk Matrix (the Jerk Matrix presupposes that you are an essentially decent person). Who is a bigger one? The subject or the shooter?
If you are confident you’re not being a jerk about it, you can feel comfortable filming anywhere or anyone you think will provide good information for your movie.
Why can’t you film at Whole Foods?
Why can’t you film on the subway?
Why can’t you film at the Hip Hop Honors?
THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT ANSWER: Establishments create rules about recording devices because they don’t want you bothering their customers, interrupting their business flow or fucking up their money.
When we were in Whole Foods, we just wanted to film the bathroom and film us sitting around enjoying an organic parfait. We weren’t trying to get in a customer’s way. So if you go back to the Jerk Matrix you don’t have to worry about the benefit of the doubt answer.
THE CYNICAL ANSWER: Establishments create rules about recording devices because they don’t want to be caught doing embarrassing or shady things.
More institutions that do shady things or take advantage of their customer should be put on camera. We’re about to make a documentary about an institution that serves various communities in useful ways but certainly makes a decent amount of their money through semi-nefarious methods. If you are making a non-fiction film that exposes a double-standard or sketchy situation, you definitely don’t have to worry about the cynical answer
THE WHO GIVES A FUCK ANSWER: Establishments create rules about recording devices because they don’t want you making money off the live event they’re going to make a huge amount of money off of.
Hmmmm. I don’t have an ethically defensible position here. I just don’t feel bad filming something when I paid 100 bucks to come see it. I don’t feel bad filming an event when the company behind the event is disgustingly rich. This is the office supplies stealing justification. The truth of the matter is whatever video I make at a live event isn’t being sold or licensed for any money (unless I’ve been contracted to do so). It’s going up on youtube and probably making me more of a pr person than a bootlegger. So you could argue that a Jerk Matrix can be created based on how your recording is going to be used. If you went to a concert and recorded it and sold that recording, you are starting to tip the jerk scale.
In this day and age, you have the ability to shoot video anywhere you like. With small high-quality cameras, patience, a crew/cast that are good sports and a quickness, you can orchestrate documentaries and some narratives in locations where the official word is No Recording. Guerilla filmmaking creates the possibility for more great art.
Life happens quickly and our memories aren’t trustworthy. If you see something that is awesome, that demands being recorded and improves the world by being shown, you may not have enough time to ask whether you can film it. You just have to dive right in, focus your lens with a little help from your moral code and record the transcendent but fleeting moment you’re witnessing (or contriving) at the Apple Store.
It’s hard to have a good answer when someone asks what my business model is regarding short videos and their presentation on the Internet. But two things that I think a group like Internets Celebrities or a filmmaker like me has to employ in search of livelihood is:
1) Flexibility
2) Prolific Output
The former is essentially the ability to take your #2 (prolific output – pun intended) and mold it (pun still intended) into an infinite amount of permutations (pun intended but not really clear now). By producing different editions of your video you can generate capital through licenses to websites and sometimes channels OR by entering them into contests. One edition by itself isn’t necessarily going to pay a lot (the going rate for a short video license seems to be $500 - no matter the exclusivity) but the rough model here is producing multiple editions and licensing non-exclusively as much as you can. Contest prizes depend on the sponsor. But for a minimal to irritating amount of editing, they can pay nicely. The contest above pays the winner a $1000 American Express giftcard. Not bad for 3 hours of work (if we win).
When it comes to licensing or entering your video into contests, those sites and/or channels almost always want a different version of your movie than the one you made originally. It’s usually an issue of timing (and when it comes to timing ALWAYS about shortening it) but sometimes it’s presentation. The original video - Ghetto Big Mac - definitely owes a lot of its success to Dallas’s inspired title. But in 30 seconds, I didn’t feel we had enough time to get into the socio-economic angle of the original video nor explain why we were calling it a GBM – so I thought re-titling it DIY would give the viewer a headstart towards appreciating its right-to-the-sandwich style (be careful of overthinking your re-edit).
Does creating multiple edits of a piece mean you’re compromising a singular vision? I worry about that but I don’t think so. By practicing flexibility, I think you take advantage of the infinite spectrum of the online landscape. You get to invent the remix over and over again. You can honor your favorite version by placing it in the most identifiable space (the site, channel or in the festival that will potentially get the most views). Then, go ahead and spawn extensions of the original vision. Remixing a video is both cathartic – a healthier less uptight view of your work – and good practice – all online filmmakers could do a lot worse to sharpen up their editing skills.
The surprising thing here is that the version you like the best may not actually be the best. As much as I complain when I hear the broken record response to videos – Can it be a little tighter? Shorter? Less Fatter? The opposite of more expansive? – truthfully, going back to the lab to pull a minute out of your original video almost always produces a better film.
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.
“What TV show are you with?”
“It’s bigger than TV. You heard of the World Wide Web?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s us.”
- Conversation between filmmaker and Dallas Penn at Sundance 2007
The Re-Up Gang
On Monday we posted a performance of Scenario from this years VH1 Hip Hop Honors which we had attended as press last week. We had just made it down to the show’s floor in time for the Tribe tribute and capturing that moment of Busta’s Scenario verse was a definite highlight of the evening. Many who saw the VH1 show that evening must have considered it a highlight too because 24 hours after we posted the clip to YouTube it had over 8,000 views and was considered a top 15 most viewed video for the day in the music category. Our director profile benefited as well, cracking the day’s top 80 for most viewed on YouTube overall.
So we felt like our plan to release this cool-ass video (get the re-up as a quick-time file here) to get people hyped for our upcoming VH1 Honors video had gone even better than planned. Then all of the sudden it was yanked, the email from YouTube saying that Viacom had requested the clip be pulled. The whole thing puts a confusing cap on Viacom’s mixed signals to the Internets Celebrities.
Are we the purveyors of cool that they want as one of their flagship sites for their new decentralized social network product Flux? Or are we the XXL blogger that is not allowed to criticize their MTV greatest hip hop groups list? Are we the video crew that is told we are allowed to shoot the VH1 Honors show or the one who gets delegated to the press room and gets their video pulled off of YouTube?
Trying to comprehend CUNY-form
Web video (and YouTube in particular) gets a bad rap from the old guard of the film and tv industry. They criticize YouTube as being nothing but clips of people’s cats and pirated material - but this critique should go both ways. Even we have been affected by TV’s free-wheeling ways with internet clips that they do not own.
NPR host Brian Lehrer runs a TV show on CUNY (City University of New York) TV here in NYC. They recently featured Bodega and spent about ten minutes discussing the issues addressed in our video. You can find this 10/3 episode online in the show’s archives. We weren’t contacted for permission (we certainly would have granted it), or contacted about being one of the guests talking about the problems Bodega addresses (we certainly would have attended). Our reaction upon hearing about the show by a fluke (do you know anyone who watches CUNY TV?) is one Viacom could learn from. The reaction was somewhere between bemusement, flattery and irritation. We were glad to see our video get promoted but curious as to why Lehrer wouldn’t bother to notify us that our video was being broadcast on TV. We have a decent sized NYC following that we could have suggested tune in to the show.
What we wouldn’t do in such a situation though is take legal action. We recognize that in the grand scheme of things we are not harmed in any way by CUNY TV using our video without permission. You may be saying, what does a public television network like CUNY TV have to do with Viacom but the point is that this double standard is pervasive and should be addressed. The web as a medium has that stigma - a den of thieves where people with nothing to offer of their own (amateurs!) re-post the sacred intellectual property of the true creatives in Hollywood / the music biz / the software industry. Yet web properties are seemingly fair game to TV. Was that website you see on some TV show cleared? Was that web video clip?
And so this hypocrisy does come right back to Viacom, who from their high horse have been suing YouTube and demanding Viacom clips be pulled from the video host community, one of many parties in the TV business who assert that YouTube’s success is built on their hard work and intellectual property.
But are they any better? A bit over two years ago Internets Celebrity director Casimir Nozkowski co-created the web site Crying While Eating as part of a viral media contest. The site went very viral when BoingBoing covered it and days later it appeared as part of a segment on the VH1 show Best Week Ever without any permission given from the creators of Crying While Eating. If that segment was on YouTube today, Viacom would no doubt pull it down for a copyright violation but who is truly in violation?
Some of you may be aware that this exact chain of events did happen this year with a different web video for another VH1 show. WebJunk profiled a video by Christopher Knight, Knight was happy for the attention and posted a clip of the show on YouTube. Viacom went after him for violating their copyright, though they had done the same to him by airing his clip in the first place. You can read more about this on Knight’s blog.
So this is the company suing YouTube for copyright violations. The same company that regularly uses background music on MTV without clearance of any kind, and are able to enjoy that kind of privilege because of their position in the music business.
Viacom Dios
But lets look past the hypocrisy of Viacom’s copyright lawsuit. Companies act out of self-interest so there is no sense holding them up to moral scrutiny. The fact is Viacom are foolish for pulling our video - it goes directly against their own interest to pull the Scenario tribute video we had posted.
Here are things Viacom would be better off doing instead of pulling our video:
Enjoying the Promotion!
I posted the video in a few places and around 10% of the comments were people like Jay B at Oh Word who said “I’m more enthusiastic about seeing the show now.” At Philaflava, some replies to the video included “shit gave me chills” and “EASTERN TIME WHEN DOES THIS START?”
Letting their customers go deeper with their content.
At least half the comments on YouTube were clearly from people who had seen the show on TV and then wanted to re-experience or comment on that performance. There’s nowhere online, not even on VH1.com where you provide that experience. Instead of removing the video as it blows up the YouTube charts, how about learning from its success and offering up your content online in small chunks? It’s not like we were stealing people away from Viacom’s online offering of the performance, if anything we were enriching their experience by giving them a way to share and communicate about it. Instead of thrilling its audience or building a better relationship with them, Viacom is wasting serious resources trying to teach their customers a lesson.
Building with us
Good work giving us press passes, we have a video coming out soon of the Internets Celebrities backstage at your show that IMHO is fresher than the show you aired Monday! You should be happy about this, instead of making us worry if we can post it on YouTube.
Embracing the mash-up culture
Can a company successfully front like it represents hip-hop and web culture while suing over intellectual property? Is having an audience that wants to spread your material something to fight? Wasn’t it better once upon a time when people thought you guys were cool?
Realizing it’s not even the same clip we’re showing
We’re just some jerks in the audience with one camera. Viacom has union guys that have cameras on cranes and shit, and top-notch audio equipment. Surely you trust your rendering of the same performance over ours, right? Plus YouTube compression can’t hold a candle to television quality. Although by removing it from YouTube you motivate us to spread the high quality QuickTime file….
Several people have asked me exactly what is an iNternets Celebrity? In this age of meta celebrity we find that people can be famous for whatever it is that they do well. Paris Hilton spends her parents money and often gets caught for driving drunk. Paris Hilton is a DUI Celebrity.
One of the excellent things about celebrity status is that it is easily commutable. One person can exist in various states of celebrity throughout their lifetime. Bobby Brown was once an accomplished rythym and blues balladeer, but now he is more famous for smoking freebase. Almost overnite he went from an R & B Celebrity into a Crack Fiend Celebrity.
In the case of iNternets Celebrities, there are millions of us, living in our parents basements, and placing ‘Do Not Touch’ labels on our containers of orange pineapple juice in the old folks’ refrigerators. Our porn collections are detailed and immense and most of us care enough about conserving energy that we shower only once a week.
I know what you’re thinking… This guy isn’t a celebrity, he’s actually a homeless bum. Well you’d be wrong about that because even the homeless have celeb status. It’s called Celebrities Without Windows.
Peep this video from fellow internets celebrity Mr. Pregnant as he explains in great detail what it means to be an iNternets Celebrity.
