It’s Internet Week in New York City! That means all my Twitter friends are going to three parties a night and texting from each about about how bored/drunk/drowning in nerdy masculinity they are. Because they keep going back night after night, I have to assume that either the NY tech community is full of self-destructive masochists (probable) or these events are actually kind of fun (naaaahhhh).
I’m going to see what all the fuss is about tonight, as IndieGoGo, FILMMAKER Magazine and the IFC Center co-host an Internet Week event called Where Internet and Film Collide. The evening will begin with screenings of Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno shorts; one of Jamie Stuart’s short films produced during the annual New York Film Festival press screening grind; Beyond the Rave, an online series for which Lance Weiler created an interactive game; and web neo-Western The West Side, about which we’ve gushed previously. After the screenings, Stuart, Weiler, and West Side creators Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Leiberman will join Ari Kuschnir and Scott Thrift of web video studio M ss ng P eces and Christopher Barry, a digital media exec from the Sundance Channel for a panel discussion. I’ll Twitter it, I promise!
The Webby Award nominations are out, and several Spout favorites have gotten the nod across the various Online Film & Video categories. David Wain’s Wainy Days was nominated for Best Comedy Series. VBS.TV, VICE Magazine’s video portal and the original home of a serialized version of Heavy Metal in Baghdad, is a finalist in the Travel video category (and wouldn’t it be fun to see the NY Times‘ service journalism trounced by Garbage Island, above). Finally, The West Side, the deconstructed Western web series which I wrote about in November, was nominated as Best Drama Series. Congrats to all, and don’t forget to cast your vote at the Webby Awards homepage.
The West Side, a web series by Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Lieberman, defies online video stereotypes in virtually every meaningful way. It’s not a quick-and-shoddy, webcam-in-a-dorm-room production; there are real scripts, costumes, score and locations. It’s presented in wide screen, in crisp, meticulously lit and After Effected black-and-white. Plus, it’s a Western, a period piece, and a gangster fantasy. But it’s also a truly independent production, produced with more ingenuity than cash, taking inspiration from existing genres but twisting them to fit its own unique iconography and mythology.
This is likely one of the reasons for the four month gap between the debut of the first episode (which I wrote about here) and the posting, this week, of the second. In the interim, the filmmakers’ blog has become an essential read, not just for details on their tech struggles and triumphs, but as a source for tips and tricks for DIY filmmakers making work specifically for the web.
This is truly a serialized work, so if you haven’t seen Episode One, watch it here before moving on to Episode 2. They’re not embeddable, but that’s okay, because they look really pretty on the plain white page.
Full disclosure: Ryan and I both used to work for this company, but we’ve never met.
