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Hi, this is Josh from CBS media relations. We were surfing the blogosphere and noticed that you’ve recently written about animated comedies. We thought you might be interested in CBS’s new web-exclusive show “Animate This!” (click on the link below to see an episode).

The shows are humorous animated shorts that feature celebrities telling funny stories from their personal lives, which are brought to life through animation. You can find episodes of ANIMATE THIS! on CBS’s new broadband channel, innertube.

If you have any questions about “Animate This!” or any of innertube’s original programming, please feel free to shoot me an email at…

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Animate This!
Jeff Probst: Beneath the Sea
In the series premiere, Jeff Probst tells a hair-raising tale involving himself, Mark Burnett, a large sea creature and an altered state of consciousness.

Watch it now [http://www.cbs.com/innertube/index.php?vid=109061&format=rm|wmv]

The Innertube interface was very unresponsive and slow loading for me. The video wouldn’t load when I clicked on the link but I got it to work by browsing for it. You have to watch a short Mazda commercial before the clip.

As for Animate This it was ok. It was a let down when Mark Burnett didn’t get eaten by the shark.

Billionaire Mark Cuban will hire you and all you have to do is convince millions of people to go see more movies.

How do you get people out of the house to see your movie without spending a fortune. How can you convince 5 million people to give up their weekend and go to a theater to see a specific movie without spending 60mm dollars.

Come up with a great idea that i want to use and I will come up with a job for you to make that idea happen.

Ehh…well I am under employed at the moment so why not give it a shot…here is my response to his open letter:

I love movies. I’m a filmmaker. I work in the film industry. However, I rarely see movies and never at full price. High ticket cost is the only reason I don’t see a movie every single weekend. I simply can’t afford it and only occasionally feel like the movie I saw was worth it anyways.

My solution is dramatically lower ticket prices combined with a same day DVD release that is sold only in theaters. Charge $25 to see a movie AND own give a copy of it to take home. OR, you can buy a ticket without the DVD for $5. A few months later. after the theatrical run, the DVD goes to Best Buy.

Family of Four:
1 DVD Ticket at $25 dollars
3 admission only tickets at $5
=$40

4 Tickets at $10
=$40

The consumer feels like they’re getting more value since they’re taking the movie home and you preserve the theatrical window by making the DVD only available in theaters.

I do not believe the answer is in marketing. If anything marketing is the only reason movies continue to make any money at all. Bad movies and high ticket prices are the reason movies don’t make money.

I’m response 703. I’ll let you know when Mark calls me in for a face to face.

If you live in the Tucson, Arizona area Glitterfish contributor Dj Erock will be playing at Heart Five Tuesday August 1st. Last time I was at a Dj Erock show I totally hooked up so definitely clear your schedule for both that night and the next morning.

Xeep reports that the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences is making programming delivered over broadband eligible for its Emmy Awards beginning in 2007. This should add some much needed credibility to web video.

The smallest ideas are always the most genius.

By appending a time stamp to the end of a URL Google Video now allows you to link within the video.

You’re watching this documentary on monkeys and then halfway through, this monkey does the funniest thing ever. So of course, you want nothing more than to share this hilarious monkey moment with your friends. Now, on Google Video, doing just that is easier than ever.

Now you can email links to specific points inside a video! All you have to do is add the time you’d like to share to the end of a video’s URL. We support hours (h), minutes (m), and seconds (s).

For example, Invisible Board is a 1 min 46 sec long video but I believe the coolest part is at 1 min 26 sec, so all I have to do is add #1m26s to the link I’m going to send to my friends! Just like this: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6396990712930217422#1m26s

This is cool. I love watching video get more and more searchable, indexable, and all around hyperlinkable.

Bonus Link: Check out Dabble.

Arstechnica has a great write up about the shaky copyright laws Youtube is operating under made even more timely by the lawsuit that was just filed against them.

This Air video is 10 years old but it popped up on Videosift and I thought I would share. Anything with an astral projection deserves a link. The song is “Kelly Watch the Stars” off Air’s 1998 debut album Moon Safari.

First I want to apologize. My first post about indie music was almost off topic and this one is downright unrelated to filmmaking. Nevertheless, I can’t resist regurgitating some more Stereogum content. Lilly Allen had this to say in NME about indie rock after fans got upset she was talking shit on her blog about The Libertines.

I like lots of indie bands. I’m a fan of good guitar music. I think it’s just that at the moment everyone’s like, ‘Music’s so great, we’ve got these great indie rock bands’ but in reality they all sound the same. They’re just doing what S Club 7 and Steps did - regurgitating the same songs because that’s what people are buying at the moment.”

Lilly you are my hero. Word on the street is that the rest of your new album is only half as brilliant as your two singles but still, lets get married.

UPDATE: The entire record, start to finish, is amazing.

I love the tracer effect in the new Yeah Yeah Yeah’s video.

Directed by Patrick Daughters. Enjoy the clip just a little bit more by downloading the quicktime version.

name droppings n – “Droppings” is as in shit. The product of person trying to impress you with their knowledge of a played out bourgeois art scene (i.e. indie rock).

It happened last year. The inevitable backlash was finally upon us. Adam Shore, General Manager of Vice Records, had this to say about indie rock:

“I feel like there has been created, in the past two to three years, an indie-yuppie establishment. Bands like Death Cab for Cutie, Iron and Wine, the Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, they are great bands, really great bands, with great albums, great songs, high quality. And to me, it’s just so fucking boring,” he says. “It’s like fancy-coffee-drinking, Volvo-riding music for kids. And kids should be listening to music that shakes them up more, makes them uncomfortable. … I don’t think we’re ever going to sign an indie rock band. … I want to sign stuff that is more immediate and shakes you up a bit.”

Last May the NY Post wrote (scroll down a bit for the article) about how Stereogum (you know that totally hip indie blog that you and your grandmother read everyday so you know what to listen to) responded to the above quote with a “You know you’re an Indie Yuppie if…” contest. The irony that most of the commentators participating in the contest didn’t even get what an indie yuppie is, wasn’t lost on the Stereogum judges.

I find it not only exhausting but also totally unrewarding to keep up with indie bands. There is a new one every thirty seconds and this month’s name droppings don’t carry nearly the same amount of cred as they used. Back when listening to indie rock meant something—back when you weren’t ashamed of your Bright Eyes albums—you could be proud to be familiar with lesser-known second tier indie bands. Now, there is some sort of expectation that you know the fifth and sixth tier bands and whatever derivative off shoot nonsense side project they have going on.

Does it really mean anything to you that Hot Club De Paris is sort of like the Future Heads meets the House Martins? Because seriously that sounds like it would sound like shit to me.

Here is the part where I talk about movies. I like “Sundance” movies. Just like everyone else I’m a sucker for coming of age stories, family dramas, and quirky comedies. But honestly if I see one more Wes Anderson knockoff I’m going to snap and that includes movies actually directed by Wes Anderson. Replace movies with music and band names with 2005 Sundance titles when Adam says, “[Movies] like [The Squid and the Whale], [Thumbsucker], [Me You and Everyone We Know], [Junebug], they are great [Movies], really great [Movies], with great [Directors], great [writers], high quality. And to me, it’s just so fucking boring.”

Breakout of the indie-yuppie establishment! Please move on with your snobbery. I have a suspicion there are a bunch of 14-year-old-more-hip-to-what-is-next kids laughing at you and your haircut right now.

Bonus Link: Zach “the Shins will change your life” Braff released the sound track to his next movie. Coldplay? No wonder Mandy broke up with him.

UPDATE: Links fixed.

Following the footsteps of the Grey Album and Purple Reign, Gnarls Biggie looks to mash up this years super group Gnarls Barkley with the sounds of the late, great Notorious B.I.G. The album is set to be released on July 18th, but a video surfaced recently to promote the forthcoming album. Check it out.

Check www.gnotorious.com for more information on the album.

UPDATE: Glitterfish reader killllaaaa writes:

the full gnarls biggie album will be available for download at www.gnotorious.com on tuesday July 18th…

Add Glitterfish to your feed reader, bookmark manager, or other web service. Go ahead! I dare you.

This popped up a few months ago but for some reason it’s making the rounds again. Here is the YouTube clip but I suggest you opt for the higher res quicktime version here.

And in case you read French, the short won something and was made by animation students:

Film réalisé comme court métrage d’ouverture pour le Festival International du Film d’Animation (FIFA) d’Annecy 2006. Par Vincent AUPETIT, Florent de LA TAILLE, Jeanne IRZENSKI, Maxime MALEO, Aurélien PREDAL, Claude-William TREBUTIEN, étudiants de la formation Dessinateur d’animation.

This how to is not only informative but also has funny MS paint screenshots.

Link.

Xeep.net just posted a great little guide to finding TV, Video, and Movies on the internet. Check it out.

There is a counter-point over at Movie Marketing Madness to Steve Rubel’s post about the marketing campaign for Snakes on a Plane.

I don’t think SoaP will come close to being an all out blockbuster like Pirates was this weekend. Even though the unofficial community marketing has much deeper penetration into online community that community is starting to grow weary. It’s simply a case of this going on too long. Where Pirates coverage was largely confined to official news and mainstream coverage, Snakes has been spreading around the internets for months. That level of interest simply can’t be maintained.

This Google Trends chart has Chris all in a huff.

He has a good point, that social marketing can’t be sustained indefinitely, but I don’t think Rubel was really asserting that Snakes on a Plane was going to as successful as Pirates of the Caribbean. Rubel’s just saying that New Line facilitated the movies fanbase to do all the marketing for them speding next to nothing doing it whereas Disney spent millions plastering Captain Jack on drink cups, bill boards, and other vertical surfaces. If we trust the Goggle Trends chart as a good measure of interest, even accounting for the recent drop in interest, Soap still beats Pirates.

Like Chris says, the ultimate success of the film will depend on all sorts of other variables (like how good it is). However, the Google Trends chart doesn’t project success or even interest in the film. It just measures the level of “conversation” out there and in terms of that, generation of awareness; New Line has something to smile about it. I ultimately don’t think SoaP will do anything near what Pirates does but the take home point is that it is amazing what social marketing can do for a movie about snakes on a motherfucking plane.