The first ROLFCon took place last week. The official website describes the gathering this way, “Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you’ve got ROFLCon.” It’s the most recent edition to a long list of fests and cons I would go to if I had unlimited time and money. Oh well.
For those of us who couldn’t make it, the website provides some goodies, like the playlist of a video session called “Sleeper Hits of the Internet.” All of the videos are hilarious, cool, or both, and all are relatively unknown. Most have around 100k views or less.
With 26 links, the list of videos takes some time to get through. My favorite is Losing You by Jan Terri, embedded above. Other notable entries include America We Stand as One by Dennis Madalone, another bone-chillingly awful music video; Alternative Designing Women TV Intro by Fatal Farm, a demented rehash of the opening of the Delta Burke sitcom; and Special Report by Bryan Boyce, a mash-up from ‘99 combining news anchor talking heads with spooky b-movie monologues.
Piper at Lazy Eye Theater has started meme challenging bloggers to build a post around the infamous Dramatic Chipmunk clip, with the goal being to utilize the familiar viral video “in new and different ways but not in ways that might attract creepy middle-aged guys.” Alan at Burbanked answered this challenge by inserting the Chipmunk into a lesson on Lev Kuleshov’s Montage Effect. Kuleshov, a contemporary of Eisenstein, argued that shot order matters because each image in a film is imbued with meaning by the image that comes before it. So suddenly, the chipmunk’s drama makes sense–-”It’s as if that piping hot soup is just outside his reach.” More here.
