CHAPTER 6

Multimedia Storytelling

By now, you are becoming pretty savvy at the new and digital media environment. You’ve explored websites, viral videos, and memes, and you understand how and why users participate. This chapter will expand your knowledge to the most valuable sections of the digital environment: storytelling in the online space.

THE EVER-EVOLVING MULTIMEDIA STORYTELLING ENVIRONMENT

Throughout the history of visual storytelling, television producers have relied on the audience to guide them in the storytelling process. Since the advent of the online media distribution outlets, the audience has fragmented more than any professional could have predicted, and, as we move toward the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, we aim to give you an understanding of the new and digital environments. The evolution of visual media is a drawn-out process, and only in the last few years has storytelling rapidly changed.

In “New Narrative Programming in the Digital Space,” we look into early web series, such as We Need Girlfriends, Chad Vader: Day shift manager, and The Guild, that serve as foundation material and inspiration for thousands of future web series producers. During the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, the online narrative environment shifted when several famous actors and directors took to the broadband space to produce high-quality content. Comparable with the 1987 writers’ strike that spawned Cops and the subsequent reality genre, the 2007 strike resulted in unlimited access to the web and was an invitation for independent creatives in a new environment.

Vloggers, or YouTube personalities, are storytellers who use themselves as main characters to fulfill the audience’s demand for a relatable persona to watch on the screen. In the early days of YouTube, just after the upload craze of copyrighted material, bloopers, stunts, cats, and babies, storytellers appeared. Early adopters such as Peter Oakley (geriatric1927) and Tyler Oakley (not related) used the YouTube platform to express themselves and tell their personal stories. We will show you how to participate as a vlogger, beginning with several case studies on the early days of YouTube participation. Several of the early adopters, such as Shane Dawson and Tyler Oakley, continue producing content and evolve along with the audience. Their methods and attention to detail help YouTube evolve as well.

The nature of digital media allows content to be downloaded, manipulated, and re-uploaded by any user with access to the right tools. In “The Remix Culture” section, we will cover the online art form and prevalence of remixes and explain several examples of remix culture, from amateur remixes to highly produced remixes such as Kutiman’s ThruYou project, Nick Bertke’s Pogo, and “Brian Williams Raps Rappers Delight” from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. As popular as it is, remixing comes with drawbacks—namely issues concerning copyright and theft or alteration of intellectual property. Expanding on some of the issues discussed in Chapter 2, this section will introduce Lawrence Lessig, Kirby Ferguson, and remix activists such as Elisa Kreisinger.

As a result of the content created by new media participants, the traditional media markets are shifting, and traditional content creators have been forced to come to a rapid understanding of the value of the broadband video experience. Services such as Netflix, which surpassed HBO in subscriber revenue in 2014,¹ are competing with 30-year-old brands to produce television series and independent films made for the streaming audience. In less than a decade, broadband video went from a video depository to becoming one of the sole ways that people receive media. As a result, the growing number of “cord-cutters,” (those who have chosen not to have cable) has pressured the cable companies and distributors into thinking differently about the model of how people are watching content and how content should be made.

Fragmented visual media audiences have changed “the business of multimedia storytelling” by identifying where and when they want to watch programming. From web television channels such as My Damn Channel or Funny or Die to high-concept programming such as Video Game High School, Epic Meal Time, and Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, online multimedia content is chaotic, creative, and fascinating. We will show you how vloggers have transformed themselves into media conglomerates, how YouTube channels have teamed up for profit sharing, how brands have moved to the creative space, and why traditional television has chosen outlets such as Netflix and Amazon.

This is an exciting chapter, with a lot to watch and understand, as we offer a vast survey of material while we simultaneously educate you and inspire you to participate.

EARLY DIGITAL STORYTELLING

The web browser allowed any user access to HTML code and nearly unlimited space to make projects. Coders and creators found they could launch a multimedia website within days or weeks—projects that would have taken weeks or months previously. Other technologies of the mid 1990s included the CD-ROM, a now unbelievably small, self-contained file system. CD-ROM technology was valuable to developers, as well as traditional film and television producers, because it could contain interactive video and special features. The best-selling CD-ROMs of the 1990s happened to be the games Myst and Doom. Myst was an open-world game (now a common model in present game franchises such as Assassin’s Creed and Grand Theft Auto) that became a hit. It appealed to a gaming audience, as well as a movie audience, as the story was scripted. In its time, people “talked about Myst the same way they talk about The Sopranos during its first season: as one of those rare works that irrevocably changed its medium.”³ A game such as Myst empowered the user with technical know-how to consider creating and designing as well.

This inspiration struck Scott Zakarin, a commercial director and industrial filmmaker who realized that the digital space allowed creators to experiment for niche audiences and create passion projects. (Zakarin is profiled in the book Digital Babylon: How the geeks, the suits, and the ponytails tried to bring Hollywood to the Internet.) The Internet allowed Scott to create his own creative future in this new space, but he knew Hollywood producers and traditional media executives wouldn’t jump in right away. Scott was enamored by the idea of the web and “the novelty of being in an electronic cave with a group of strangers.”⁴ He merged the concept of the “electronic cave,” more commonly known as the chat room, with a broadcast TV structure and wrote a television show to be made exclusively for the web, called The Spot.

Scott became addicted to the idea that you can create fictional characters in the online space. You can make an account with any name, enter a chat room, and role-play a character. Scott created several characters with “quirky, neurotic personalities—anything to push people’s buttons.”⁵ The experience left him with the idea of a television show that was like Melrose Place (a popular 1990s television series) meets Reality Bites (a geeky film about Generation X). The Spot launched in June of 1995, making it one of the earliest versions of web television. Set as a “cyber serial” show about “real” characters in a Southern California beach house, the show was very popular among some of the web’s early adopters. The characters reminded the viewers of themselves in the chat rooms: an odd, quirky, and sophomoric community. The show had live chat sessions, online communities, and forums, with dedicated fans and real-life get-togethers. The show ran until 1997 and changed the online multimedia environment forever.

In 1997, AOL created a new online entertainment network called Entertainment Asylum. The network was an interactive mix of Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood for the web and featured celebrity interviews and special segments.⁶ Zakarin was named president of programming at Entertainment Asylum because of his knowledge of the industry and his groundbreaking attempt at web video. Patrick Keene of Jupiter Communications, an Internet analysis company, told the New York Times that, “AOL is a real success at building community—about 30 percent of AOL usage is chat—and its marketing strength of about 10 million subscribers.”⁷

Jupiter Communications’ founder Josh Harris also plays a large role in the history of multimedia storytelling. As the head of a company that analyzed website traffic, he noticed a growing trend of people looking to find original multimedia content online. He and a team of creatives and artists invented a website called Psuedo.com, a web television network offering dozens of niche channels for viewers to choose from. Harris later went on to create a streaming-video Orwellian surveillance experiment in 1999 called “Quiet: We live in public,” where 100 artists and volunteers allowed themselves to be watched and streamed 24/7. (The experiment was shut down by the New York Police Department on January 1, 2000. Josh Harris, Pseudo.com, and his experiments are explained in Ondi Timoner’s documentary We Live in Public.)⁸ Harris told Bob Simon of 60 Minutes that his online television network would eventually compete with channels such as CBS.

Although Harris was eventually proven correct, the dotcom bust occurred in 2000, and thousands of sites, such as Psuedo.com, were the victims of audience evacuation when people left such sites en masse owing to their frustration with the lack of high-speed Internet connections and large files to download. People liked the idea of watching shows such as The Spot or visiting Psuedo.com, but didn’t like waiting for long load times and enduring buffering issues and low frame rates.

So, what happened to multimedia content creation in the gap between the dotcom bust and the broadband video sites?

THE GAP: 2000–2005

As mentioned in the last chapter, grassroots creators with access to video cameras and low-cost animation software found the Internet to be a boon to short-form creative material. When it came to storytelling and longer-form content, actual video was found to be too immense in size to work properly. Matt Chapman and his college friend Craig Zobel created a Flash-animated online web series called Homestar Runner in 2000. Chapman animated the series in Flash and voiced all the characters. Originally conceived as a parody of children’s books, Homestar Runner took off online as an animation series that spanned nearly a decade.

The series revolved around characters Homestar Runner and Strong Bad, but had dozens of additional characters and story arcs. The animation of the series was not intense or smooth, but the writing and the witty comedy attracted thousands of viewers and dedicated fans. “The designs were simple, poppy, and instantly recognizable,” Todd VanDerWerff writes in the A.V. Club feature about Homestar Runner. “Couple those appealing visuals with the well-defined characters and sneakily amusing scripts and [Chapman and Zobel] had a recipe for Internet success.”⁹ The show also understood how to appreciate its audience. The cast of the animated series would accept email from the viewers and answer it on the show.

The site is still up at HomestarRunner.com (www.homestarrunner.com). The sizes of the site’s graphics are the average size of screens at the time of Homestar Runner’s heydey (2002–2005), and all of the content and episodes are still online. As a side note, the “doge” meme originated on Homestar Runner in a puppet show episode in 2005, where Homestar tries to distract Strong Bad from his work and says that Strong Bad is “his dog” but spells it D–O–G–E.

BROADBAND VIDEO HOSTING

Vimeo, Dailymotion, grouper, vSocial, motionbox, metacafe, bolt, blip.tv, Revver, and YouTube. These were the top ten video outlets of 2006, among over 1,000 outlets to upload video.¹⁰ How did YouTube win out as the most popular video upload site of our current era?

In late 2004, many web users had acquired high-speed broadband Internet access via DSL or cable modem, and digital cameras were becoming more commonplace. Although there were hundreds of places to upload video files, what was missing was a repository of searchable and shareable videos. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim had an idea for the video site after Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the 2004 Super Bowl and the devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean in December 2004. Every time the founders looked for footage of either of these events, they couldn’t locate them online. They decided to make their own video site to store various videos. The team registered the domain name youtube.com on February 14, 2005 and uploaded the video “Me at the Zoo” on April 23, 2005. The official launch date was set for November 2005, though users could access it before the launch.

YouTube’s ease of use, speed of translating videos to a shareable flash format, and the benefit of shareable metadata, made YouTube the go-to place for video uploads. Around the time that Matt Sloan and Aaron Yonda were uploading the premiere of Chad Vader: Day shift manager in July 2006, YouTube boasted 65,000 video uploads per day, and Internet users were consuming more than 100 million videos daily.¹¹ In October of 2006, the same month that Ragtag Productions uploaded the first episode of We Need Girlfriends, Google offered to buy the site for $1.65 billion—the deal was completed a month later.

The lava from the explosive volcanoes of new media that erupted in the mid 1990s started to cool in 2007, and the landmasses of the web took hold just after the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike. In contrast to the strike in 1987, auteurs, creatives, and producers had a plethora of outlets where they could produce new media material online in 2007. When Joss Whedon produced Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, he inadvertently created a new civilization of creators in the multimedia storytelling environment. As we see from our present day, the new networks online are legitimately competing with traditional environments. The creators found a new ground to live on.

THE NEW LAND OF MULTIMEDIA STORYTELLING

Since 2005, YouTube has evolved, along with the creators and audience participants. At first, a location to simply “Broadcast Yourself,” a slogan with a double meaning to say it is both a DIY platform and also encouraging you to broadcast, YouTube became a culture. In 2006, Time magazine named “You,” as in YouTube, the person of the year.¹² The site started a partner program in 2007 where celebrities and vloggers alike were able to profit share the advertising dollars. YouTube states that thousands of channels make more than six figures a year in profit.¹³ The site became a place to grow ideas and share powerful videos, a place to broadcast commentary on societal issues that traditional media would ignore. Multimedia storytelling platforms helped users topple governments in 2011, brought attention to Joseph Kony, and aided Barack Obama to attract attention to the Affordable Care Act. YouTube currently boasts more than 100 hours of content uploaded to the site every minute, and nearly 700,000 years of video are downloaded per month.¹⁴

Over the next few sections of this chapter, we’ll introduce you to the vloggers and early adopters on YouTube, the savvy editors and creators who remix media and turn shareable media into art, and web-series producers bypassing the arduous path of traditional broadcast, and we’ll show you how to get involved as a creator. As you’ve made it to this part of the book, we expect that the previous information you have learned about web literacy, memes, and virals will play a role in how you read and follow this chapter. But, most importantly, don’t just read this chapter—create and participate in the multimedia storytelling environment!

NEW NARRATIVE PROGRAMMING IN THE DIGITAL SPACE

In his brown corduroy pants and geek-chic black-rimmed glasses, Steven Tsapelas found comfort in his basement bedroom surrounded by Arrested Development posters and Batman lunchboxes. Steven had just finished writing a short film about a Midwest news station he intended to produce in the coming weeks. Steven called his partners in production, the adventurous, explosion-loving friend Angel Acevedo and the quiet, classic-cinema aficionado Brian Amyot, to start the production process and read over the script. It was late 2005, and the media industry was shifting rapidly.

Steven, Angel, and Brian made up the aptly named production company Ragtag Productions. The quick-thinking team had become popular on the 48-hour film festival circuits in New York City after graduating college in 2004. While discussing their new project, the Ragtag bunch reconsidered their short-film approach and instead wrote up an 11-episode television series that would span a feature-length film’s running time. The story would be about three guys who recently graduated college and moved out to Queens, New York, in hopes of finding love. They titled the project We Need Girlfriends.

What Steven didn’t realize at the time was that he, as well as thousands of active creatives across the country, was figuring out the visual desire of the new audience. The new audience is made up of participants rather than passive viewers. The new audience wants a role in the creation process and wants to feel as if what they are watching relates to them. Steven knows the audience, because he was writing content for himself.

The section shifts to the earliest storytellers of our current era, with several case studies on projects and users that showed early signs of success and longtail audience achievement. Our case studies will follow some early web series such as Ragtag Productions’ We Need Girlfriends, Aaron Yonda and Matt Sloan’s Chad Vader: Day shift manager, and Felicia Day’s The Guild. We will discuss the common character theme visible in online narrative production as the projects have evolved. From Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog to Freddie Wong’s Video Game High School, the characters of the web have always been different from those of traditional broadcast.

WRITING THE CHARACTER OF THE WEB

The first episode of We Need Girlfriends launched on YouTube on October 31, 2006. The production called for 11 episodes to be released at the end of every month at midnight. Although released to very little fanfare, the series went on to grab the attention of Hollywood producers such as Darren Starr (Sex and the City) and Greg Daniels (The Office). Darren Starr found the awkward sincerity and authenticity of the characters to be compelling to a new media audience. What made We Need Girlfriends popular with its audience was that the characters were relatable to the viewers. To those who watched the series, it felt like the characters were familiar friends.

The reason we are to focus on We Need Girlfriends as our first case study is because of the characters in the show. We believe there is a lot to learn from the way We Need Girlfriends was written in 2006 that will aid the savvy user of the present. The authentic and sincere personalities on web television shows competed with major television network characters in an independent space. Stephanie Rosenbloom of the New York Times coined the phrase “The beta male,”¹⁵ because that character is the opposite of the alpha character commonly seen in shows of the time, such as Entourage or Lost. There were three main characters in We Need Girlfriends: Henry, modeled after Steven; Rod, modeled after Angel; and Tom, modeled after Brian. The show takes place in and around Astoria, New York, where the creators lived, and many of the scenes were shot in their own apartment.

The Ragtag crew knew that the new and digital creator has to produce regardless of the limitations. From the beginning of web-series production to present, the savvy creator has always managed to self-produce their content. This is similarly seen in Aaron Yonda and Matt Sloan’s savvy production process for the web series Chad Vader: Day shift manager. In the series, Chad Vader (obviously based on Darth Vader) is the day-shift manager at the Empire Market. Chad has personality difficulties with his co-workers, employees, and customers. The production team borrowed a Wisconsin supermarket to produce their series. In their desire to tell their story, they had to work out how important it is to find locations that work and take advantage of the opportunities they had available to them. In most cases, the storyteller understands that they have access to their own house and network of friends who may offer their locations to the production. Having a passionate project attitude helps the creative gain access for production. The passion pays off: George Lucas was impressed by the series, and Matt Sloan was chosen to voice Darth Vader in the video game Star Wars: The force unleashed.¹⁶

THE BETA PERSON

Creating the beta male was something a bit uncommon on television in 2006, but today he is a very common character in visual media (here forward called the beta person because, although the characteristics of the awkward authentic beta person are more likely embodied in a male personality, the characteristics are not limited to male characters). The beta person is “You,” the person willing to hold a book about becoming a savvier user of the online experience. The beta person is someone you can relate to, in your group of friends, perhaps, or your siblings. Most importantly, the beta person is someone you want to watch and relate to and see how they negotiate their space in their daily lives, whether fictional or real. Learning and growing up in a digital age is not easy, and having examples of similar people to watch makes navigating the environment a bit easier.

In We Need Girlfriends, the beta person is part of the anti-Entourage group, “that gentle, endearingly awkward, self-conscious soul for whom love is a battlefield.”¹⁷ In most cases, it’s a character who doesn’t attract a mainstream audience in traditional broadcasting. Advertisers in the traditional markets are looking for characters for the audience to escape to and idolize, not recognize. The general audience is not really attracted to someone who resembles who they already may be. In the case of Henry, Rod, and Tom of We Need Girlfriends, the characters are a bit timid and quirky, but secure in their weirdness. The We Need Girlfriends characters were not written by a team of television show writers in a writers’ room, and their dialogue isn’t corrected by dozens of notes. Their performance is bare and awkward. Much like the people who create the product.

In his essay Awkwardness (2010), Adam Kotsko explains that we are in an era of awkwardness, especially in visual entertainment. “Awkwardness dominates entertainment to such an extent that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to remember laughing at anything other than cringe-inducing scenes of social discomfort,” he writes, referring to The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Judd Apatow films.¹⁸ Although the characters on television and film may present a level of beta character, the web personalities that follow exhibit a sincere strangeness only found in the online space. The web beta person is a niche subject, just like that of the vloggers. They don’t entertain mass audiences; they fulfill the fans of their specific interest area.

The opening sequence of the first episode sets up the plot for the entire series. The characters’ arc is established right away: They “need girlfriends” for the duration of the plot. It’s not just the writing that creates the beta person: The action and personalities complete the image. As you can see, the Ragtag crew consider their characters as actual people. The beta character is someone who is not afraid to lay bare all their quirky personality traits and display themselves as overgrown adolescents.¹⁹ Rod and Henry are presented “as is” and are portrayed immediately in images, as their characters are. Rod unloads a box that says “Rod’s porn A–H,” and Henry’s box is a QVC box labeled “Toys and Wrestling VHS.” On traditional television, you would most likely never see a character pairing of this much difference, but, in actual life, friends and roommates are often very diverse. The horrors of a break-up are also on full display, as the actor Patrick Cohen, who plays Tom, shudders at the realization that he too is all alone.

Figure 6.1

Rod: “Squirrel.”

Figure 6.2

Tom: “Why are you hugging me so tight?”

You should watch the entire series of We Need Girlfriends, because many current web-series creators credit the show as their inspiration to create in the online space. Pay close attention to the character arcs and the trials the characters endure.

Chad Vader: Day shift manager is an early web series that went quite viral in its early days. Chad Vader is masked, and the audience is unable to see his expressions, but Matt Sloan voices Chad so well that we can feel the awkwardness in the scenario. In the opening sequence, Chad, recognizable as one of the most brutal villains in movie history, walks up behind his employee who is stocking shelves and quotes some of Darth Vader’s most violent threats, only to be countered by the stockboy’s snarky retorts. The “evilness” of the Vader look is removed in the first minute of the show, when we find he is just as fallible and timid as any manager in real-life retail space. As the series progresses, we learn Chad’s personality weaknesses and his struggle with his peers and co-workers, which even a villain’s costume cannot hide.

The point in our timeline where the beta character became cemented into the online narrative culture occurs near the Writers Guild of America strike in 2007. The first point is from Felicia Day’s The Guild, and the second is from Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog. The Guild launched in July 2007, just 5 months before the Writers Guild of America strike. The Guild opens with Felicia Day directly addressing the camera, as she is recording her vlog in diary form. It opens with a candid monologue that sounds typical of a recorded diary. Felicia’s Cyd starts her monologue, “So. It’s, uh, Friday night. And still jobless. Yay. I haven’t left the house in a week. My therapist, uh, broke up with me. Oh yeah, there’s a gnome warlock in my living room. Sleeping on my couch.”²⁰

Figure 6.3

Chad Vader.

Felicia Day’s Cyd Sherman is a gamer in the MMORPG World of Warcraft. She captains a team of people working together for a common game goal, also known as a “guild.” The series begins when the normally unseen teammates meet in real life and find they are far different than their online characters. It’s possible that MMORPG players may go their entire game experience without knowing what the actual player ever looks like. The act of meeting one of your co-players in real life draws on real fears of social anxiety and potential mishaps. These characters would not likely be cast in traditional media, because they are so specifically niche they exist in a subculture that many people don’t know about or may be critical of. The Guild lasted for six seasons (2007–2013) and directly inspired Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog was Joss Whedon’s creative project during the writers’ strike. Joss Whedon, now known for his work on major action films, was then best known for his cult television shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. During the strike, Joss, like many other writers, refused to cross the picket line, but, unlike with previous strikes, where unionized writers and directors had no other outlet, by 2007 web video had become a new outlet for creatives—as long as they wrote for the online audience.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog does just that. Made under the table, Whedon’s show is a genre-busting comedy–drama–scifi–musical starring Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion (Firefly) as Captain Hammer, and Felicia Day (The Guild and eight episodes on Buffy) as the love interest, Penny. Dr. Horrible is the main character and antagonist, set on world domination, but unlike movie and television villains, he is just a common, active web vlogger willing to talk to his camera about his issues and insecurities. We sympathize with him because he reminds us of our friends or loved ones, but he doesn’t really intimidate us. This is similar to Chad Vader—they play against our intuition to dislike the enemy.

Web series became far more prominent after Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, because Whedon cast popular actors into the show. The show was made in three episodes, launching over three nights. The characters draw you in because of their familiarity and sincere traits, and the viewers are left devastated at the shocking ending. The ending, especially the last 2 seconds, shows the audience that, if you want to make an authentic ending, you have to use the web.

HOW CAN YOU MAKE A WEB SERIES?

Creators of new media content refuse to fit into the norms presented by a traditional entertainment hegemony and aim for only a small portion of the audience. The creators create for themselves and their friends. When learning to write for new media, you should remember to write beta characters. Do not be afraid to show the characters as they are and would be if you were to meet them in real life. Try your best to write down actual dialogue that you have heard—include all the “uhs” and “ums,” because that is how people actually speak. To be authentic on the web, you have to convince the viewer that you know the person you created and you know them so well you gave them the same quirks. In other words—write you.

As we learned previously in the chapter on viral videos, the concept of storytelling is most important. If you understand plot, character arc, and the general rules of writing, you can create a show. We found that casting was the difference between a popular show and a mediocre production. Do your best to cast believable, awkward, and authentic characters, and the audience will find you.

YOUTUBE AND PERSONALITIES

This section is going to focus on the modern history of participatory video content and multimedia storytelling. In their effort to use the web in the savviest way possible, we hope the reader benefits from the several case studies we present in this section. We will focus on the stories of some of the savviest users and multimedia storytellers to give some understanding and context to our current online environment.

WHO CREATES THIS CONTENT?

The term “the under-30 crowd” has always been used when referring to new media. It’s as if the youth group is the only set likely to view new media visual content, vloggers, or web series. The web is open to all audiences, but those who influence the content are those who participate. Much of the early era of content participation was coming from the under-30 crowd, but it was much more likely the under-20 crowd was consuming it. The younger generation is more likely to be consuming video media online, and that means those creating content should be considering the younger audience when producing content.

According to the Pew Research Internet Project, creators who upload photo or video have increased yearly.²² Although young adults and teens are more likely to be content creators, people of all ages are uploading content that they have created. Creators are users who produce their own content, and don’t simply repost content from someone else. Video creators span nearly all ages, but more than half surveyed by Pew are in the under-30 crowd. As you read this and the rest of the chapter, we implore you to get involved in the online space. Now is the time!

THE PERSONALITIES

Who is Tyler Oakley? That’s the question most asked by non-savvy users when any news media, blog, television show, high schooler, or even President Barack Obama, says his name. Tyler Oakley turned on his web camera and started recording vlogs in 2007, when he was in college at Michigan State University. Tyler is one of the most popular YouTube personalities, or “YouTubers,” on the site. He spends a majority of his screen time simply talking about the things he likes (One Direction, Darren Criss) and the things he hates (trolls) and hanging out with other YouTubers (creating “collabs,” short for collaborations). In his YouTube career, Tyler has gone from college student, to YouTube partner, to gay rights activist, to brand consultant, to consulting the President of the United States on web video.

Tyler Oakley, Jenna Marbles, Shane Dawson, PewDiePie, Bethany Mota, Grace Helbig, and Hannah Hart make up an incredibly small and diverse sample of popular YouTubers, yet they all have something in common: They live their life on camera and stay positive. They produce their content for themselves, knowing full well that, if they produce niche content, someone from the YouTube community is bound to be interested. It isn’t just the act of recording that makes them popular: These YouTubers are charismatic, compelling, and authentic. The audience of traditional media is accustomed to watching characters larger than life, perfect in the way they speak, dress, and act. The people you see on YouTube are the same people you would meet in real life—they are not playing a character.

Figure 6.4

Grace Helbig on My Damn Channel.

Grace Helbig, formerly of Daily Grace on My Damn Channel, is a perfect example—she produced her show every day from whatever room she was in and wearing whatever she felt like, and she has become incredibly popular among the YouTube viewers. In 2014, she and Hannah Hart hosted the Streamy Awards, the live-streaming event celebrating the best of web series and YouTube personalities, and both Grace and Hannah released books. Grace is now on the E! channel as a late-night talk-show host and she still stays true to her YouTube roots and produces videos.

The following is a quick breakdown of various types of niche vlog on YouTube and an example of a popular YouTube personality in that genre. What you will learn with the following is how different each personality is. We hope we have provided a nice sample of personalities for you to discover and we understand we cannot cover them all. The intent is for you to become inspired to try making vlogs on your own.

WHO ARE THESE VLOGGERS?

Most vloggers have created their own new genres of video, and some do not fit into any traditional mold. Much in the way that Joss Whedon created content outside categorization, you’ll find that vloggers are too diverse for classic taxonomy. That said, we’ll use the categorization that reporters and news media utilize to explain where these vloggers fit in the environment as best we can. The following are the most popular types of vlog and the most recognizable face in each category.

Pop-culture Vlog—Tyler Oakley²³

Pop-culture vlogging is the most common type of vlogging found on YouTube. It seems to be what anybody who starts out for the first time on the platform attempts. There are thousands of possible examples to tell you about, but the most popular is Tyler Oakley. Featured prominently on the Frontline documentary “Generation Like,” Tyler Oakley isn’t just an on-screen person ality, but also a brand powerhouse. He doesn’t just support his content on YouTube, he also has an incredibly strong presence on Instagram and Twitter. His authentic nature has inspired brands to trust him with promoting their product in an honest and sincere manner.

In “Generation Like,” Tyler explains that the YouTube channel is the main outlet of his brand, and he puts a lot of work into operating and maintaining his brand. He tells brands that approach him that they “have to play by [the YouTubers’] rules.”²⁴ He takes a lot of pride in the community of YouTubers and says that the sites were built without the help of brands and corporations. When brands now see they want to be part of the YouTube community, they have to work with Tyler and the other personalities. This approach has helped brands negotiate the space, which is still fairly foreign to their sales strategy. Tyler, as well as the other YouTube personalities, attempts to remain as transparent as possible about brand sponsorship, and people know he “has to pay the bills” too. He doesn’t just use his viewers to promote products either: He also gets the word out about his favorite non-profits and causes such as Project Trevor,²⁵ an LGBTQ crisis intervention and suicide prevention group. It’s an interesting duality that allows Tyler to be brand promoter as well as an authentic voice to his many millions of viewers. It takes practice, but, more than anything, it requires the YouTube personality to be consistent and stay true to their persona.

In early 2014, Tyler visited the White House to consult President Barack Obama on multimedia storytelling and, later that year, he interviewed Michelle Obama about new education standards. Whether it’s a brand, non-profit, the POTUS, or the FLOTUS, Tyler has a way of helping people into the online space.

Entertainment Vlog—Jenna Marbles²⁶

Just about everything on YouTube is entertaining in one way or another. To be an entertainer online is to understand how the character of the web works. You can find beta personality traits in Jenna Mourey, who goes by the online name Jenna Marbles. The characters online are a bit awkward and endearing, with a strong sense of self-efficacy. Jenna was a basic YouTube user, unafraid to say her raw thoughts (many NSFW) on camera. She was emotive and entertaining, and users were drawn to her charisma. In 2010, she uploaded her comedic advice video, “How to trick people into thinking you’re good looking,” where she over-uses makeup and hair dye to prove looks can be deceiving. In addition, her video “How to avoid people you don’t want to talk to” made her the de facto online leader of the “anti-grinder” movement and helped people realize you can combat abuse in a public space.²⁷

In the years since, Jenna has uploaded hundreds of videos that range from features about her dogs to comedy sketches, makeup videos, relationship advice, and regular vlogs. She releases a video every week and entertains her audience as a one-person variety show.

Comedy and Sketch Vlog—Shane Dawson²⁸

In 2008, Shane Dawson got fired from his job because he decided it would be funny to post a video on YouTube of himself pole dancing and stripping while at work. He learned two lessons that day: Companies don’t like their employees to abuse the workplace, and he was a natural for the YouTube environment. Since his early uploads on the site, Shane has invented dozens of characters and impersonated Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus. Shane doesn’t just talk into the camera: He highly produces all of his content. He wants to gain viewers. The New York Times recognized that his formula for equal parts teen confessional, pop satire, and really great hair attracts young viewers.²⁹ He talks about his personal life and his struggles through weight loss and entertains with raunchy sketches and parodies (such as a disgusting take on the 50 Shades of Grey film). He is consistent and continues to release a video once a week.

“Let’s Play” Vlog—PewDiePie³⁰

Since the beginning of the Internet and the web, console and computer gamers have used the web to find user guides, post tips and tricks in forums, and meet and compete with other players. YouTube has been the display case for gamers to post their progress through games. There is a certain specific genre of YouTube clips called “Let’s Play” (or LP) videos. LP videos are not user guides or forum based: They are single-point-of-view game play of different games, usually with the gamer’s audio narrative and commentary. There are hundreds of these channels, but, as of this book’s time of writing, the most popular by far is the user PewDiePie. His is not only the most popular LP video channel: PewDiePie is the most popular channel on YouTube.

Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, is a Swedish-born game commenter. Although PewDiePie creates his content for “his bros,” a fair number of his audience are female and non-gamers. Felix plays all his games, adds all his personal commentary, and personally edits all his content. In a profile with the Wall Street Journal, Felix said his secret for success is making the audience feel like they are hanging around watching their friend play a video game. His YouTube earnings and the endorsements apparently make an economic impact, and he is supposedly earning more than $4 million a year from his work.³¹

Theme Vlog—”My Drunk Kitchen”³²

When you have a niche skill, you should use that skill to its full potential. Hannah Hart is the author of My Drunk Kitchen: A guide to eating, drinking, and going with your gut. The book is a print adaptation of her extremely popular vlog, called “My Drunk Kitchen.” Hannah moved to New York from California and decided to make a fake cooking show to make her friends laugh and remember her. The concept is simple: Hannah gets drunk and attempts to cook. It results in humorous outcomes, messy experiments, and pure entertainment. She’s collabed with dozens of YouTubers, and, aside from the possible damage to her liver, her production model is very sustainable and consistently creative.

Parody/Sketch/Comedy Vlog—Smosh³³

Ian Andrew Hecox and Anthony Padilla knew the Internet was the only place for them to tell stories. Since 2003, the duo has created content in the online space. To say the Smosh duo create oddball and screwy content would be a vast understatement—they make people laugh. Ian and Anthony are two of the most recognizable media stars and have continuously produced content on a weekly basis since 2006. They epitomize relentless creators and take story inspiration from original comedy to quirky parodies of games, movies, television shows, and other YouTube entertainment. Smosh is one of the most robust channels on the web, containing a vast network of additional channels and merchandising.

TUTORIAL VLOGS AND PERSONALITIES

Makeup Demonstration Vlog

Have you ever dreaded a photo day at school or at work? Did you ever wonder how to prepare? Much the way you find out how to change a tire on YouTube or learn new Photoshop tricks, there are YouTubers who focus on makeup demonstration. These videos are step-by-step training on everything from just adjusting eyebrows to imitating the makeup style of Lady Gaga.

Search for some of these:

•  Michelle Phan (www.youtube.com/user/MichellePhan): Michelle is quite possibly the most popular YouTube makeup demonstration vlogger. She has been featured on YouTube advertisements and she is Lancôme’s spokeswoman.

•  Zoella (www.youtube.com/user/zoella280390).

•  Andrea’s Choice (www.youtube.com/user/AndreasChoice).

Haul Vlog

Demonstration vlogs are popular because they are instructional and helpful, but what if you just want to explain your purchases to an intrigued public? Some YouTubers go shopping and show off their purchases, and these videos are called haul videos. The vloggers get home from their day shopping and explain to the audience each purchase and offer reasons for the purchase. The haul vloggers prefer shops where there is a constant variety of clothes to collect.

Search for some of these:

•  Bethany Mota (www.youtube.com/user/Macbarbie07): Bethany is featured on YouTube advertisements on New York City subways and was also a contestant on Dancing With the Stars in 2014.

•  ChanelBlueSatin (www.youtube.com/user/ChanelBlueSatin).

•  Meghan Rienks (www.youtube.com/user/meghanrosette).

Hair-style Tutorial Vlog

Where there is makeup demonstration and wardrobe assistance, there must also be hairstyle vlogs, and there is a hairstyle tutorial for every hair type.

Search for some of these:

•  Franchesca Ramsay chescalocs (www.youtube.com/user/chescalocs). Franchesca runs a channel for tutorials and inspiration for natural hair. She is a growing YouTube personality with her comedy channel chescaleigh.

•  Bebexo (www.youtube.com/user/bebexo).

•  Cinthia Truong (www.youtube.com/user/CinthiaTruong).

Cooking Vlog

After Pinterest became popular, users starting collecting recipes and tutorials to post on their pinboards. Pictures only do so well for tutorials, and it helps to have a vlogger guide the viewer through the process. Cooking channels are as abundant as food, but some YouTube personalities have created a niche for their audiences.

Search for these:

•  Rosanna Pansino (www.youtube.com/user/RosannaPansino): One of the most popular cooking tutorial YouTube personalities, she is also featured on YouTube print advertisements. She posts new “Nerdy Nummies” every Tuesday, where she makes food based on video games and movies.

•  “How to Cook That With Ann Reardon” (www.youtube.com/user/howtocookthat).

Science and Education

“Hey Vsauce!” Michael Stevens exclaims at the beginning of each episode. Michael Stevens runs the main Vsauce channel and gives explanations of real science and philosophy in an attempt to answer our curiosity. The main channel is about our amazing world. On Vsauce2, Kevin Lieber talks about amazing people, and, on Vsauce3, Jake Roper talks about Internet and fiction interests. The three channels make up some of the most popular learning information available on YouTube. The Vsauce channels combined are subscribed to by millions of people interested in different niche topics, and their upbeat approach to science has caused channels to be an addition to in-class learning in many school classrooms.

•  Vsauce (www.youtube.com/user/Vsauce).

•  Vsauce2 (www.youtube.com/user/Vsauce2).

•  Vsauce3 (www.youtube.com/user/Vsauce3).

CAN VLOGGERS MAKE A LIVING ON YOUTUBE?

The aforementioned channels and personalities all have two things in common: Their on-screen performances are almost always presented with an extremely positive attitude, and their content is extremely niche. Robert Kyncl, the global head of business for YouTube, loves niche product, because he feels that, “the experience is more immersive” for the viewer.³⁴ YouTube has considered profit from niche product since 2007, when the platform invented the Partner Program that allowed users to profit share with YouTube’s advertisements. This amounts to thousands of channels profiting in some way, but it also means that over 500 channels on YouTube are earning six-figure incomes from the program.³⁵

Robert Kyncl has redefined television in much the way that Zakarin did in the 1990s. These visionaries consider what is next with television media and go for it, with the audience in mind rather than the advertisers. In the end, the audience will decide what it likes best. The method and model are passed down onto the creators, and they are to focus on their subscribers, the people that keep them in business. The more subscribers any given channel has, the more YouTube knows how to advertise to viewers, and the nicher the better. Although the traditional television audience may fluctuate, the online YouTube audience is very loyal and consistent, and this helps pinpoint advertising to become more specific and relatable to the audience.

The goal of a creator is to entertain their subscribers, because they can see, in real time, how many people follow them (or unfollow them) and can tune their product to their specific interests. Comments are extraordinarily valuable to a creator as well. Unlike traditional TV, which vastly separates itself from the viewers, relying on focus groups and ratings to keep going, vloggers must communicate and answer the questions to seem familiar and close. The creators are always positive, because that is what the audience wants to watch—they want to escape to a familiar friend online who will talk to them about their interests.

Create and Participate

Now, it’s your turn. There are several ways to start producing content for the online environment and turn your ideas into a web series or a vlog. We have focused specifically on YouTube in this section of the chapter, and so the following lessons are designed for YouTube, but many of the methods can be used on various different online video outlets.

Getting Started

You’ll need some tools of the trade:

•  camera

•  microphone

•  editing software

•  a brief script

•  a sense of humor

•  persistence and a willingness to learn

•  patience.

Video

The camera part is easy—there’s probably one in your pocket. Your cellphone’s camera is sufficient, but it will be a bit shaky. You may want to buy a small cellphone tripod for it. There are many models available, but any will do. You can also use your web camera on your computer. Our recommendation for the highest quality with the computer is using QuickTime Player and the New Movie Recording feature. On new computers, that will record in high definition. The highest-quality bet is investing in a small HD camera or a DSLR with a flip out viewfinder, so you can see yourself. Don’t forget to look in the lens! Don’t look at yourself when you are recording. (This takes some getting used to.) And lastly, always remember to make sure the camera is shooting in landscape (horizontal), not portrait (vertical)!

Audio

Don’t forget the audio. Many people forget how important audio is to the creation process. Think of it this way: Audio is 50 percent of the production. If your project doesn’t sound good, the audience is likely not to watch. The microphone on your headphones actually works well as a recording microphone, before you’ve saved up some money to buy an external, clip-on lavalier microphone.

Editing

Editing is vastly important to the creation process. It’s especially important if you are shooting narrative programming such as web series, but it is just as important when recording a vlog. You will notice, in all the aforementioned examples, that there are a lot of cuts in each of those episodes. They use an editing technique called jump cuts. Jump cuts remove some of the slower material of the video, but leave the edit uncovered by footage that would hide the edit. A jump cut is raw and visible, but also keeps the pace of the product moving forward. It’s also a way to add humor and movement to an otherwise static shot—try moving around in the frame and cutting from side to side, like Shane Dawson does. You can have a conversation with yourself!

There are different types of editing software available for your projects, but the editor is in your head, not in the machine. Some of the more expensive, but vastly more intense, software would be Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere, or Final Cut for Mac. These all work with various types of video and audio material in one sequence. This helps if you are switching between cellphone, DSLR, and/or computer video on one sequence/edit. Using the editing software that comes with your computer (iMovie or Windows Movie Maker) will also be sufficient when you are starting out, but we also recommend you check out YouTube Editor.

YouTube realized that it should facilitate creativity on its platform, and so it created a basic editing tool at YouTube.com/Editor. It allows you to access your clips in your library and edit them together, adding music, pictures, and text. We recommend you make a fair amount of clips, so it is easier to assemble. In other words, don’t be afraid to “cut” often and assemble the clips on the sequence. Try this out—it’s free, and, after a few tries, you’ll become an expert.

Writing

Although it seems as though many of the YouTubers “wing it,” their on-screen performances are planned, with notes or a full script, depending on the project. You should always write down what you will say. Not only will it save you time in production, you will also organize your thoughts and be much more coherent when you are delivering your material. If you are working with a small team, they can hold your cue cards just below the camera, so you can see where you are in the script. If you are working alone, large post-it notes or large text on a computer screen work well too. Just try to make sure it never looks like you are reading off the cards.

A Sense of Humor

We cannot stress this enough! As you’ve discovered by reading this book, the Internet is a weird place. Now you are becoming involved at the most intense level: putting your video personality online. In a perfect world, all the commenters on your page are there just to support you, but this is not the case. Wherever there is a comment box, there is a critic. Take it lightly and don’t engage with those who seem to be posting ignorant comments. As mentioned in several of the previous chapters, trolls are just trying to get a rise out of you. Laugh it off and let it go. They aren’t worth engaging in conversation. Answer those who seem to genuinely care. If you are posting yourself online as a YouTube personality, you have confidence and strength and you are already better than the critics. Don’t forget that.

Persistence and Learning

Persistence and learning are parts of the recipe of success in doing anything. It’s crucial to the vlogging environment. Your audience, whether that is ten people or 10 million, expects a certain consistency to your projects and expects new episodes regularly. Much like television viewers, online viewers are creatures of habit and will leave if there is an unscheduled gap in production. Make a schedule and do not be too ambitious. Start with once a month or once every two weeks and work your way up. Many first-time vloggers feel that the experience is easy the first few times, but then realize how much work goes into the production, and they begin to slack off. It’s better to create a more liberal time schedule and work your way into a routine. This is all part of the learning process. Your technique will become much better as time and experience progress, but you have to be willing to learn and correct mistakes as you go along.

Patience

The most important part of being a YouTube personality: patience. Making these projects can sometimes be frustrating, with technical issues, creative blocks, and the audience participation process. Be patient—not one of the vloggers we have mentioned became professional overnight. Go back to their early work and see how different it was at the beginning. It’s a growing process, and your ability to stay cool and patient will reflect in your video.

THE REMIX CULTURE

Participating in Creative Ways

Participation in the online video space isn’t limited to scripted performance or vlogging. To participate as a multimedia storyteller, you simply need creativity. If you have access to the web, some fairly easy-to-use editing tools, and imagination, you can combine or edit existing material to make something new—you can remix it.

Digital media in any form, whether, music, sounds, pictures, or video, can be remixed and reshared very quickly. As Kirby Ferguson points out, “you don’t need expensive tools, you don’t need a distributor, and you don’t even need skills.”³⁷ Kirby Ferguson explains, in his online series Everything Is a Remix, that the folk art of remixing and the techniques of collecting and transforming material and resharing are the same techniques, used at every level of the creating process.

Before we begin with some examples, we should make sure you are aware that, although remixing is creative and exciting, you can easily get in trouble with copyright and usurping intellectual property.

With these three easy steps, you can remix legally:

1.  Attribute material to the original artist.

2.  Modify the material enough, or it is not original.

3.  Make fundamental changes.

Although that may sound limiting, these rules help inspire creativity.

REMIX EVERYTHING

This section will teach you how to watch and discuss remix, appreciate it as an art, and become a savvy remix creator.

As a cultural observer, you may notice remix everywhere. Every time you recognize something from somewhere else, or feel that some bit of media seems familiar, you are probably recognizing something that is remixed. The remix we’ll be talking about in this section is not about the overall culture of remix that has existed for centuries, but new and digital media remixes, available on the web.

To increase your level of savvy awareness, the following are some examples of remix you may come across on the web. The projects range in creativity and style, but all show a style of changing original media into something new.

REMIX STYLES

Machinima

Machinima is a narrative mash-up of video games and cinema—or “machine cinema.” Machinima uses multiplayer games, usually first-person shooters (FPS), to create narrative films. Creators attach a video game console to a recording device, such as a computer or a camera, and then carefully script stories to be acted out by fellow players. Far more inexpensive than live-action acting and animation, the creators use the computer graphics from the game as their talent. In multiplayer mode, the on-screen characters are voiced by the players. Sometimes, many players gather several game systems together and connect them, to better organize and act their digital roles.

Red vs Blue is the creation of Rooster Teeth (http://roosterteeth.com). The creative team, lead by Burnie Burns, began creating machinima using the Halo games in 2003. The long running series is a comedy that parodies the serious nature of FPS games.

Auto-tuning

Made famous by the rapper T-Pain, Auto-Tune is an audio processor that corrects and alters pitch. The machine can retune and synthesize any sound to a musical note. Now, with dozens of apps and software devices to be utilized, nearly any sound can be auto-tuned. Auto-tuning as remix was made most famous in the online video space by the Gregory Brothers (schmoyoho),³⁹ who created a web series called Auto-tune the News (originally called Songify the News). In order to make news broadcasts fun and entertaining, the team of brothers Michael, Andrew, and Evan and Sarah (Evan’s wife), remixed segments and auto-tuned them into music. The team would seek out obscure and odd clips of interviewees all over the country and remix them to songs.

Auto-tune remix broke into the mainstream when the team created the viral hit “The Bed Intruder Song,” which auto-tuned and remixed a news report about alleged crime victim Kelly Dodson and her exuberant brother Antoine Dodson. The news report, originally shown on an Alabama newscast, may have remained local news if the Gregory Brothers had never made the remix. The team auto-tuned Antoine’s voice to make him sound like he was singing and added music and additional vocals. In 2010, “The Bed Intruder Song” entered the Billboard 100 at #89.

Some of the most popular clips on the Schmoyoho channel are “The Bed Intruder Song,” “Winning—a song by Charlie Sheen,” “Double Rainbow Song,” and “Can’t Hug Every Cat.” Each of these most popular clips is a remix of an already-viral video mentioned in Chapter 5. The remix of these clips allows the viral videos a second life, as well as creating a new viral that competes with the original video.

Mash-ups

A mash-up is a combination of two or more existing pieces of content to create a new, transformational piece. It’s well known that many songs and music videos are edited in a similar formula, and, if you replace one audio track with another song’s music video, very often the song images of one video line up with the vocal tracks of a different song.

Aside from mashing up music, many creative users also mash up videos to create a new take on a given film. For example, the YouTube user Brad Hansen (moviemaestroten) mashed up the original audio of The Dark Knight Rises trailer with the video of The Lion King movie trailer.⁴⁰ With some minor re-editing, the video track oddly syncs up with the audio track. This particular mash-up remix attracted the attention of director Christopher Nolan, and Nolan thought the remix was “pretty epic.”⁴¹

Speaking of Christopher Nolan, one of the most creative mash-up trailers online is “Upception,” a mash-up of the uncut audio from Inception added to the re-edited trailer for Disney’s UP.⁴²

Recuts

Transforming material is one of the most fun ways to remix content online. A recut involves taking an original piece of content and transforming it into something unintended by the original artist or creator. In the early days of YouTube, recuts were very popular, as they encourage high levels of creativity to transform the piece. These are different from mash-ups, because additional material and production experience are utilized in the creation of these edits. For example, in 2006, Christopher Rule had an idea, after rewatching Mary Poppins and recognizing it had traits of a horror film. Using horror music from An American Haunting and adding sound effects, Chris Rule and his friend Nick Eckert reinterpreted Mary Poppins as a horror film.⁴³ The effect works—users continually post comments on this video saying that, “they’ll never look at Mary Poppins the same again.”

This trend has inspired hundreds of users to recut trailers on YouTube. Some of the most common involve turning comedies into horrors and horrors into romantic comedies. You can find “Willy Wonka Horror Recut”⁴⁴ and “Breaking Bad as Romantic Comedy Recut,”⁴⁵ or The Shining as if Cameron Crowe had made it.⁴⁶ Nearly every film can be reinterpreted and transformed, if it is done in a savvy manner.

Music Creation

The most intense and beautiful remixes can be found as YouTube projects that most likely take immense amounts of time. The projects of Kutiman’s ThruYou and Nick Bertke’s Pogo take remixes to the next level. Their creations require an incredible attention to detail, musical talent, and willingness to create art with existing material.

Ophir Kutiel, known as Kutiman, is an Israeli-born DJ and performing artist. In 2009, he started a large-scale art music project called ThruYou and remixed YouTube video clips to create original music. On his site at thru-you.com, Kutiman explains, “What you are about to see is a mix of unrelated YouTube videos/clips edited together to create ThruYou. In other words—what you see is what you hear.”⁴⁷ Crediting each original video in the description of each clip, Kutiman scoured YouTube for people who were performing songs or giving instrument tutorials. He then used each of those clips as instruments in his new music creation. With savvy editing, Kutiman shows the original clips playing side by side. In the end, the aural result is a new, original piece of music made with the YouTube videos. The new music is fascinating and original and could only be made with everyone involved.

The second music creator we feature is Nick Bertke, who created Pogo.⁴⁸ Bertke takes movies and films and remixes the popular phrases of the film with sounds from the film and original music. His most popular remixes are music creations from Disney films such as Alice in Wonderland, Up, and Mary Poppins. Pogo uses the films and original content to create the music by quickly editing scenes to make new sounds and music cuts. With the dance-pop sounds of his remixes, he completely transforms the ideas and concepts of the original films into catchy and entertaining musical pieces. Pogo does not have the rights to the images, and, although he claims Fair Use, very often the original creator asks for the projects to be removed. Some companies have realized that Bertke’s work has become accidental promotion and they appreciate his artwork.

Remixes With an Asterisk—Savvy edits

If you have a good ear and a knack for finding content online, you can create new media out of existing material. Good remixers in this space are often sued or accused of copyright infringement, and their material is removed. Some of the best and most abundant material to work with on savvy edit remixes comes from traditional media. Take Bad Lip Reading for example. This form of remix is very popular and has even been featured on television. An anonymous remix artist from Texas takes clips from films, music videos, sports broadcasts, and political debates and replaces all of the audio with his voice, using seamless lip dubbing—and saying extremely odd things. For example, in the Bad Lip Reading of The Hunger Games, he takes the audio of an emotional talk between the protagonists Katniss and Peeta, and he replaces Peeta’s audio with “Every night, I want you to hold Marvin the cat.”⁵⁰ These postmodern remixes explore the audience’s desire to see unusual material on the web, and the seamless lip dubs take enormous skill.

The idea of savvy remixes has made its way to the mainstream audience of late-night television as well. The Late Show with Jimmy Fallon features savvy remix edits pretty consistently on the show. Fallon understands that, in order to achieve an audience in the online space, even he has to participate in the online trends. Fallon’s staff searched through hundreds of Brian Williams’s news broadcasts in order to recreate the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”⁵¹ By searching through all of Williams’s and Lester Holt’s broadcasts, the remixers isolated each word of the song and edited them together without auto-tune. Fallon’s methods get an asterisk because NBC Universal owns the footage, and Fallon also airs on that channel. These remixers have nothing to fear when it comes to copyrighted material in this case.

Remixing for Social Commentary

Social commentary is allowed as Fair Use most of the time, and Elisa Kreisinger, also known as Pop Culture Pirate, remixes for that reason.⁵² Elisa’s goal is to take existing pop-culture television and media such as Sex and the City and Mad Men and remix the videos to show hidden subtext and give additional insight into the show. For example, over the course of seven seasons, Mad Men’s Peggy Olsen character goes from secretary to copy chief of the company. Elisa recuts the scenes with Peggy to show an enhanced view of how feminism plays a large role in the construct of the show. In her Sex and the City remixes, Elisa discovers the subtext of Carrie Bradshaw’s character and, using actual footage from the show, recuts the character as a lesbian. This type of social commentary deserves a watch and should be encouraging to those interested in intertextual analysis. Remixing as social commentary helps expose and analyze overlooked scenes in popular media.

SOME PITFALLS—HOW TO REMAIN TROUBLE FREE?

As mentioned in our sidebars, the laws surrounding copyright, Fair Use, and transformational material should be adhered to. As with any type of multimedia storytelling, there are rights and ownership involved in the creation process. The only real way to make sure you have access to copyrighted material is by asking permission and getting a written response; otherwise, you have to justify the use of copyrighted material under Fair Use.

Copyright is a United States law that protects “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works.⁵⁴ As a multimedia storyteller, and especially a remix artist, you should read the documents at Copyright.gov and read about Fair Use from Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.⁵⁵ Although it may seem fun and playful to utilize works other than your own to assist in your creative process, we creators have something that Kirby Ferguson refers to as “loss aversion.” In other words, we don’t mind using someone’s work, but we are offended when someone uses our work. As a savvy creator, keep this thought in the back of your mind while you work.

As mentioned earlier, the three most basic ways to remix without encountering much trouble is to always attribute material to the original artist, modify the original material enough to make it different, and make fundamental changes. When you work, keep a list of what parts of the material you are remixing and where the source material comes from. That doesn’t just mean sourcing it on YouTube: It means finding the original creator. For example, if you find a clip of Tyler Oakley on Jenna Marble’s channel, you should credit both Jenna and Tyler, regardless of the fact you found him on her channel. The same goes for uploaded content of copyrighted material such as films. You do source and credit the uploader, but also the original material’s director or producer. You must go to the source.

Modification of the material cannot just involve a reordering of clips or an edit together of your favorite parts. It has to transform the material into something new. It means the material you use cannot still be confused with its original context. To recut something such as The Shining trailer into a comedy film, the film’s lines can no longer have a horror connotation, because that is what the director Stanley Kubrick already made; the remix has to be a new context. And lastly, fundamental changes must be made. In other words, if you feel you are using someone’s material too closely to how they originally created it, you probably are. Use common sense, put yourself in their minds, and see if you would be offended.

Create and Participate

After all these caveats and additional information, why should you go to the trouble of remixing? You should, because it can make you culturally savvier and better able to appreciate content. A good remix artist is not just aware of content in its linear form, they are aware of how to analyze and reconsider original media. Additionally, remixes sometimes offer an audience a new and original take on content it has taken for granted. When you watch Hook, you never consider that the bites can be reordered and remixed into a catchy song such as Pogo’s “Bangarang (Hook remix).” Also, when you watch television shows or movies, you may never see the subtle innuendos or double entendre embedded in the material—the savvy remix artist does and helps show others. Be a better viewer and be a savvy creator.

THE BUSINESS OF MULTIMEDIA STORYTELLING

New and digital media do not exist within a vacuum, and, as we learned with memes, when culture becomes shared and popular, it makes its way into the collective consciousness. Since the beginning of multimedia storytelling, the work of creatives in the digital space has been recognized with awards shows such as the Webby’s and the Streamys and real-life meet-ups such as ROFLCon and VidCon. While traditional media continue to attempt to co-opt the new media space, the authentic creators–from Scott Zakarin to Tyler Oakley—remain the leaders of the online platforms. If brands and traditional media want to play in the digital field, they have to play by the rules of those who master the space.

Joss Whedon easily crossed into the new media storytelling environment in 2007 on his reputation and knowledge of his fanbase. Whedon’s writing embodies the ideals of the beta person. His characters from Buffy and Firefly are human and recognizable to their fans. When the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike began, Whedon didn’t halt his creativity. Like Steven Tsapelas and Matt Sloan, he took to the new platform, one free of restrictions, notes, executives, and advertisers. The door he opened to professionals simultaneously inspired thousands of amateurs to produce in the digital space.

THE DIGITAL PLATFORM

Many traditional television shows were always aware of the web as an outlet, but many believed it was not a platform for profit. What the digital platform is designed for is as a platform to grow a brand—which later turns to profit through the longtail audience. The writers’ strike stirred the industry so much that television shows and films created companion material made for the web. The Office, Parks and Recreation, Portlandia, and Sesame Street all make companion programming for the web. On the other hand, some web series made the jump from the web to traditional programming. Shows such as Broad City on Comedy Central or Children’s Hospital on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim started as web series.

Today, the lines are blurring even farther, as television slowly moves to broadband delivery. Where do we draw the line between web television and television made for the web? If it is television created for Netflix, is it web TV, or is Netflix another television channel? If a show is sponsored by a company and produced with product profit, is it entertainment or a commercial? This last section of this chapter focuses on the new multimedia storytelling landscape and will make you a media-literate consumer, capable of analyzing new and digital media content.

WEB CHANNELS

In the early days of broadband, there were several web channels that debuted and hosted content and videos from around the web, and many still exist today. The early sites focused on animation and allowed UGC to thrive until the birth of YouTube. Some of the early channels were homegrown sites such as eBaumsWorld, Albino Blacksheep, and AtomFilms, which supported crude animation and short films that could compete in indie markets. After YouTube’s launch, these early web channels lost their audiences to the site, which could support much more content. The audience didn’t want to seek content from different sites; it wanted to get it from one place. After the success of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, many professionals from the traditional industry felt differently and got involved in the web landscape.

Figure 6.6

Rob Barnett.

Rob Barnett’s background is in traditional media. Rob Barnett was once a production and programming executive at MTV and VH1 and the president of programming at CBS Radio. In 2007, Rob Barnett created MyDamnChannel.com—an online web channel to support original and UGC. He found that the online space offered him more creative freedom and a quicker path to production, without any corporate “notes” or bureaucracy. My Damn Channel takes the idea of an entertainment studio and distributor of content from the traditional marketplace and transforms the concept for the online audience. From the outset, the channel created original content and supported independent talent.

My Damn Channel’s original programming content is extraordinarily niche, and Rob Barnett is aware of how the audience thinks. His skill set as a programmer aided him in the online space, but really what worked best was his trust in the creative producers who made original My Damn Channel content. One of the original series, You Suck at Photoshop, was a fictional narrative web series that can be considered a how-to vlog. The never-seen narrator Donny teaches his audience to use Photoshop while ridiculing the viewer and expressing himself, in a vlog style, as a depressed divorcee. If Barnett had pitched this series to a television network (“think tutorial video meets unseen depressed narrator”), it would never have been aired, but, in the online space, this is perfect content.

My Damn Channel hosts dozens of series and personalities and treats its talent like studio stars. The channels range from branded entertainment such as IKEA’s Easy to Assemble and SUBWAY’s Fresh Artists to comedians such as Mark Malkoff, Andy Milonakis, and Adam Carolla and personalities such as Grace Helbig (Daily Grace) and Sara Forsberg (Smoukahontas).

My Damn Channel was not the only outlet to create a channel in 2007: Will Ferrell and Adam McKay also became involved and created Funny or Die as an outlet for extra creative work. With original support from Sequoia Capital (the same venture capital firm that helped YouTube), Ferrell and McKay opened a web channel to support original programming in a competitive format. Relying on a Reddit-like voting system, where the user clicks “Funny” or “Die,” the site would allow users to choose what stayed on the site. Will Ferrell’s quirky humor and access to his comedic peer group helped the site grow in popularity very quickly. In 2008, Funny or Die partnered with HBO.

Figure 6.7

Sara Forsberg.

Funny or Die has hundreds of pieces of content, all aimed at niche audiences. In opposition to most of the content on My Damn Channel, many of the contributors to Funny or Die are recognizable faces, such as Steve Carell, Judd Apatow, and James Franco (to name a few of the dozens). Their series are irreverent and unique and get a lot of attention from both new and traditional audiences.

Quite possibly the most popular web series on Funny or Die is Between Two Ferns, with Zach Galifinakis. The show exploits Galifinakis’s already awkward beta character nature as a talk-show host on a poorly made set. It plays as both a comedy and a parody of online programming because of its low-cost approach. Zach interviews a different celebrity (between two ferns) for each episode. The actors interviewed are able to practice their acting as they play on the inside joke of Zach’s awkward, crude, and mean interview techniques. The show became so popular that President Obama appeared as an interviewee, to stress the importance of the Healthcare.gov website. After the episode appeared online, the show became the largest referrer to the government healthcare site.

HIGH-END WEB SERIES

When Steven Tsapelas and Matt Sloan created their web series, the idea of making a living from their product was not the first thing on their mind. In our present, web-series creators know that there is a definite possibility of profit, because the web is an open space for multimedia storytelling and allows homegrown producers to professional interlopers to create high-quality new media stories. People who create for both traditional and new media often say they like the online platforms better, because the audience is easier to define.

Professionally produced web series were around from the beginning of broadband video and, like the web itself, they have changed in aesthetic, storytelling, and technique. The earliest foray into the environment was lonelygirl15 in 2006. Created by a team of producers from California, the fictional series was designed to look like a young woman named Bree vlogging about her experience of being the target of a cult called “The Order.” The show was not originally revealed as fiction, but, as it gained popularity, savvy web users identified Bree as a New Zealand actress. At that point, the show’s creators opened the narrative to alternative storylines and more action sequences. This show is generally considered the beginning of the professional web series.

Not all high-end web series start with professional producers; sometimes, the homegrown content grows into professional work. Some of the homegrown content that has become very successful includes Video Game High School, Annoying Orange, and Epic Meal Time. There are also professional productions in the online space, such as Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Bryan Singer’s H+, and Bernie Su and Hank Green’s The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. And then there are traditional channels interested in the online space and developing original programming online, such as PBS with PBS Off Book and PBS Idea Channel.

Homegrown

Niche web series such as Video Game High School also provide popular viewing among large crowds, because Freddie Wong takes the imagination of gaming and uses the concept as a web series. Video Game High School takes the idea of gaming to a new level and interprets the act of gaming as a real-life education environment.⁵⁷ The series is considered an action-comedy set in a world where video gaming is the world’s most popular sport. The show’s Season 2 cost over $1 million to make!⁵⁸ Although that seems like a fair amount of money, in comparison with traditional television programming, this is very affordable. A sitcom could cost over a half a million dollars per episode.

If you are in the mood to be annoyed—and entertained—the aptly named Annoying Orange went from indie series to multimedia and product powerhouse. It’s a fairly simple premise, created by Dane Boedigheimer, the mouth/voice of the irritating fruit who sits on the counter and makes other fruit and vegetables miserable.⁵⁹ The immobile fruits in the show are actual fruit, with the mouths and eyes edited in to seem like they are talking, through savvy editing and storytelling. Ben Huh, founder of the Cheezburger Network (Chapter 4), explained the show’s success to the Wall Street Journal by saying, “the Internet today is like TV was in the 1950s, a new technology that changes the way we view culture.”⁶⁰ The show’s odd humor and morbidity (graphic fruit death) seem to be very attractive to young viewers. Although traditional critics panned the series, its popularity continued to grow, and the show grew into a video game and a series of toys and clothing, and it was picked up by Cartoon Network as a TV series.

In the realm of cooking shows, Epic Meal Time is a variation that most definitely could not exist in the traditional space.⁶¹ The show is a parody of the classic cooking show normally seen on a channel such as Food Network, except the meals made by cook Harley Morenstein contain thousands more calories through massive amounts of meat and bacon. Morenstein and his friends experiment with variations of cooking styles in order to create an “epic meal.” Some fine examples of their cooking are the 71,000-calorie fast-food lasagna made of layer upon layer of burgers, bacon, cheese, and homemade “sowce,” and their TurBaconEpic Thanksgiving meal made of “a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig,” clocking in at 79,000 calories. These meals are not meant to be eaten, but are a spectacle to watch as they are created by the inebriated cooks. The show has encouraged cameos by Tony Hawk and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s adult oriented, but enjoyed by anyone with a strong stomach.

Professional

Although professionally made, the style is clearly that of the web when Lizzie Bennet records her blog. Updating the Elizabeth Bennet Jane Austen wrote 200 years ago, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a reinterpretation of Pride and Prejudice made for today’s audience—rather than a written diary, Lizzie Bennet records her story on a vlog.⁶³ YouTube mainstays Bernie Su and Hank Green make the show. The story still includes all the characters from Austen’s classic, but now modernized to deal with the same themes (manners, morals, education, marriage) in a twenty-first-century style. The show has won numerous awards, including a 2013 Emmy Award.

It’s always interesting to see professional creators attempt experimental projects in the web-series space. Bryan Singer (X-Men, Usual Suspects) produced H+: The digital series by director John Cabrera about the idea of transhumanism—the act of outsourcing our minds to a microchip in our brain—and the possibility of it shutting down.⁶⁴ The show utilizes YouTube techniques in its storytelling process by allowing the audience to follow different storylines and seek hidden information in the plot when exploring the videos. The show was produced as a high-budget sci-fi series with Warner Bros. Studios as the distribution platform. The reason the show was on YouTube rather than another outlet was Cabrera’s idea. He wanted the viewers to participate in how they watch the series. Cabrera hoped that he would usher in a style of storytelling called “social distribution, where the actual audiences themselves become part of the storytelling process.”⁶⁵

In stark contrast to the heavily stylized H, Jerry Seinfeld (who played one of the most famous awkward beta characters on television) created a minimalist web series called Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.⁶⁶ The plot of the series is exactly the title. Jerry Seinfeld picks up a comedian (Jon Stewart, George Wallace, Aziz Ansari) in a classic car, drives them around a bit while they are recorded by numerous GoPro cameras, and then takes them out for coffee. When asked by the Washington Post if he’d ever move the show to television or a subscription streaming model, he said he would never do that. And that brings us back to our point as to why producers such as Seinfeld choose web series over traditional storytelling outlets: no notes, no pressure, no length—just “genuinely fascinating conversation.”⁶⁷

Alternative Television

Whereas many television channels use the web as a companion outlet to their standard programming, PBS uses the web to hold a series of alternative television program series. The nature of PBS as a public utility allows story-telling flexibility in the new and digital environment. PBS uploads nearly all its traditional television content to the web and also created PBS Digital Studios—the multimedia arm of the company. Two of the most popular series are PBS Idea Channel and PBS Off Book.^68,69 PBS Idea Channel is a fast-paced vlog-style show hosted by Mike Rugnetta, where he poses an idea (“Here’s an idea!”) and discusses it, blending pop culture, new media, philosophy, and literature in a 10-minute vlog. Similar to VSauce, Mike encourages user input in the form of comments and conversation. PBS Off Book asks a question about something cultural and assembles a short documentary to offer various opinions on niche topics such as Cosplay and emoticons.

MULTICHANNEL NETWORKS

As more creators take to the online space for creating content for profit, many users have become savvy as to how to make an income from their passion projects. YouTube’s Partner Program pays differently, based on a series of criteria, from views, to subscribers, to length of viewing of the content. This means that a variety of different shows—maybe a how-to and a web series and a vlog—all may get paid similarly, regardless of genre. In order to help newcomers to the online platforms, often web producers will assist with collabs or promotions. In some cases, the channels can team up and profit share, similar to a corporation.

In 2009, several YouTube personalities teamed up to profit share on YouTube. The team of channel holders such as Shay Carl, Philip DeFranco, and Lisa Donovan created a YouTube “subsidiary” studio called Maker Studios. Their goal was to ask channels to team up, share profit, and create new projects. Over the course of the next several years, Maker grew to contain over 1,000 channels and had a combined 1.1 billion views by mid 2012.⁷⁰ The Maker goal was to push its content to the top viewed shows on YouTube, and this did not go unnoticed by the traditional media executives. Time Warner invested $36 million into Maker to help it produce original content. Later, Disney made an offer to buy Maker Studios, if it met profit thresholds. After succeeding in its goals, Maker was purchased by Disney for $950 million.⁷¹

Some of the best web series available on the web have been a result of a multichannel network (MCN). The previously mentioned Video Game High School was made possible when Freddie Wong’s Rocket Jump Studios teamed up with Collective Digital Studio, an MCN that aims to gain a Millennial Generation audience. Collective also maintains the Annoying Orange’s network of channels, as well as Epic Meal Time. When YouTube aimed for the channel initiative that helped users become programmers and partners, MCNs also appeared as a result. When the MCNs focus their funds, they have been able to create collective productions such as the bigger-budget horror/sci-fi web series BlackBoxTV.

YouTube channels are finally being recognized as formidable competition to the traditional media networks—and they are taking notice. MCNs such as Defy Media (Smosh) and Fullscreen get support from several traditional outlets, such as Viacom and NBC Universal, respectively.

YOUTUBE AS NETWORK

As a platform, YouTube was created because a group of young men were in search of missing video content. In the outlet’s short life, it has become the inspiration for thousands of beta people to find a place to put their content or has encouraged them to create in the online space. We focused heavily on YouTube in this chapter because the majority of video content can be located on that site, and many of the external web channels cross-post to YouTube as well, in their effort to gain a larger viewing audience. Vimeo, Veoh, Daily-motion, and even Flickr offer video hosting and boast a range of phenomenal features for the user (password protections, higher quality). Our intention, with our focus, is to make you, the reader, a savvier web user and more aware of the platform of the characters online.

In 2014, YouTube made a bold move to pay millions to many of the most popular personalities, such as Tyler Oakley and Bethany Mota.⁷² YouTube’s intention is to recognize the hard work of promoting YouTube as well as their personal brand. YouTube will pay these personalities to work for the company to make new material and content that is produced by the YouTube studio. In a way, YouTube will compete with the MCNs to create studio-quality work. Additionally, this is a repeat of television networks paying stars to stay and not jump to other networks—like Milton Berle on NBC. The more recognizable Tyler Oakley or Bethany Mota become, the more likely they will be courted by traditional media, and YouTube would rather they stay on its network.

Create and Participate

Start participating now. Start creating and get your idea on the web. Read Tubefilter.com to keep up with the business of multimedia storytelling.

NOTES

1  Seward, Z. (2014). “Netflix Now Has More Subscription Revenue Than HBO.” Retrieved from http://qz.com/245763/netflix-now-has-more-subscription-revenue-than-hbo/ (accessed May 7, 2015).

2  Advertising Age (2005). “1950s TV Turns on America.” Retrieved from http://adage.com/article/75-years-of-ideas/1950s-tv-turns-america/102703/ (accessed May 7, 2015).

3  Yoshida, E. (2013). “Lost to the Ages.” Retrieved from http://grantland.com/features/looking-back-game-myst-20th-anniversary/ (accessed May 7, 2015).

4  Geirland, J. and Sonesh-Keder, E. (1999). Digital Babylon: How the geeks, the suits, and the ponytails tried to bring Hollywood to the Internet. New York: Arcade Publishing.

5  Ibid.

6  McDonnell, S. (1997). “Behind the Screens at AOL’s Entertainment Network.” Retrieved from http://partners.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/102297aol.html (accessed May 7, 2015).

7  Ibid.

8  Timoner, O. (2009). We Live in Public. (see www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/; accessed May 7, 2015).

9  VanDerWerff, T. (2013). “How Homestar Runner Changed Web Series for the Better.” Retrieved from www.avclub.com/article/how-ihomestar-runneri-changed-web-series-for-the-b-104146 (accessed May 7, 2015).

10  Fabric of Folloy (2006). “Top 20 Video Sites Rated.” Retrieved from www.fabricoffolly.com/2006/08/top-20-video-sharing-sites-rated.html (accessed May 7, 2015).

11  Reuters (2006). “YouTube Serves up 100 Million Videos a Day Online.” Retrieved from http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-07-16-youtube-views_x.htm (accessed May 7, 2015).

12  Grossman, L. (2006). “You—Yes, You—Are TIME’s Person of the Year.” Retrieved from http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570810,00.html (accessed May 7, 2015).

13  YouTube Press Statistics. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html (accessed January 26, 2015).

14  Ibid.

15  Rosenbloom, S. (2008). “The Beta Male’s Charms.” Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/fashion/07girlfriends.html?pagewanted=all (accessed May 7, 2015).

16  DiGiacomo, F. (2008). “The Game Has Changed.” Retrieved from www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/03/lucas200803?currentPage=2 (accessed May 7, 2015).

17  Rosenbloom, S. (2008). “The Beta Male’s Charms.” Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/fashion/07girlfriends.html?pagewanted=all (accessed May 7, 2015).

18  Kotsko, A. (2010). Awkwardness. Ropley, UK: Zer0 Books.

19  Ibid.

20  The Guild, Episode 1: “Wake Up Call.” (2007). Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=grCTXGW3sxQ (accessed May 7, 2015).

21  According to Rob Swartz, former executive of Cartoon Network, as explained at The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation in 2011.

22  Duggan, M. (2013). “Photo and Video Sharing Grow Online.” Retrieved from www.pewinternet.org/2013/10/28/photo-and-video-sharing-grow-online/ (accessed May 7, 2015).

23  Tyler Oakley’s channel: www.youtube.com/user/tyleroakley

24  Frontline (2014). “Meet Tyler Oakley: YouTube’s self-proclaimed Peter Pan.” Retrieved from www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/media/generation-like/meet-tyler-oakley-youtubes-self-proclaimed-peter-pan/ (accessed May 7, 2015).

25  The Trevor Project: www.thetrevorproject.org/

26  Jenna Marbles’ channel: www.youtube.com/user/JennaMarbles

27  Conlin, J. (2011). “Rendering Grinders Toothless.” Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/fashion/with-grinding-an-unwanted-advance-at-the-dance.html?_r=0 (accessed May 7, 2015).

28  Shane Dawson’s main channel: www.youtube.com/user/ShaneDawsonTV

29  Considine, A. (2010). “Shane Dawson, YouTube’s Comic for the Under-30 Set.” Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/fashion/04youtube.html (accessed May 7, 2015).

30  PewDiePie’s channel: www.youtube.com/user/PewDiePie

31  Grundberg, S. and Hansegard, J. (2014). “YouTube’s Biggest Draw Plays Games, Earns $4 Million a Year.” Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/articles/youtube-star-plays-videogames-earns-4-million-a-year-1402939896 (accessed May 7, 2015).

32  Hannah Hart (myharto): www.youtube.com/user/MyHarto

33  Smosh: www.youtube.com/user/smosh

34  Seabrook, J. (2012). “Streaming Dreams: YouTube turns pro.” Retrieved from www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/16/streaming-dreams?currentPage=all (accessed May 7, 2015).

35  Ibid.

36  Jacobs, H. (2014). “We Ranked YouTube’s Biggest Stars by How Much Money They Make.” Retrieved from www.businessinsider.com/richest-youtube-stars-2014-3?op=1 (accessed May 7, 2015).

37  Ferguson, K. (2011). Everything Is a Remix Part 1. Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/14912890 (accessed May 7, 2015).

38  Lessig, L. (2010). “Re-examining the Remix.” Retrieved from www.ted.com/talks/lessig_nyed?language=en (accessed May 11, 2015).

39  The Gregory Brothers YouTube channel Schmoyoho: http://youtube.com/user/schmoyoho

40  The Lion King Rises. Retrived from www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NRsPDhyHrc (accessed May 7, 2015).

41  Jensen, J. (2012). “The Dark Knight Rises.” Retrieved from www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20587555_4,00.html (accessed May 7, 2015).

42  “UpCeption.” Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1CvhkkWK9Q (accessed May 7, 2015).

43  “THE ORIGINAL Scary ‘Mary Poppins’ Recut Trailer” (2006). Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic]) (accessed May 7, 2015).

44  “WILLY WONKA—Recut Horror Trailer.” Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Cby33ZR98 (accessed May 7, 2015).

45  “Breaking Bad as Romantic Comedy” (2013). Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWrRPohom3I]) (accessed May 7, 2015).

46  “The Shining Recut” (2006). Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmkVWuP_sO0 (accessed May 7, 2015).

47  ThruYou: http://thru-you.com/

48  Pogo: www.youtube.com/user/Fagottron

49  Zaidi, S. (2014). “YouTube Briefly Suspends Blizzard’s Channel.” Retrieved from www.loadthegame.com/2014/11/27/youtube-briefly-suspends-blizzards-channel/ (accessed May 7, 2015).

50  Bad Lip Reading: www.youtube.com/user/BadLipReading

51  Brian Williams Raps “Rapper’s Delight.” Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CYJ73pVpVc (accessed May 7, 2015).

52  Elisa Kreisinger: www.youtube.com/user/ElisaKreisinger

53  Hampp, A. (2013). “‘Harlem Shake’: The making and monetizing of Baauer’s viral hit.” Retrieved from www.billboard.com/articles/news/1539277/harlem-shake-the-making-and-monetizing-of-baauers-viral-hit (accessed May 7, 2015).

54  US Copyright: Copyright basics. Retrieved from www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf (accessed May 7, 2015).

55  Berkman Center for Internet and Society: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/

56  Cohen, J. (2014). “Obama Meets With YouTube Advisors on How to Reach Online Audiences.” Retrieved from www.tubefilter.com/2014/03/02/obama-meets-with-youtube-advisors-on-how-to-reach-online-audiences/ (accessed May 7, 2015).

57  Video Game High School on RocketJump: www.rocketjump.com/VGHS

58  Gutelle, S. (2013). “Here’s What Goes Into a $1,339, 558 Web Series [Infographic].” Retrieved from www.tubefilter.com/2013/07/26/video-game-high-school-season-2-infographic/ (accessed May 7, 2015).

59  Annoying Orange: www.youtube.com/user/realannoyingorange

60  Fowler, G. (2010). “Now Playing on a Computer Near You: A fruit with an obnoxious streak.” Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703404004575198410669579950?mod=WSJEUROPE_hpp_sections_tech&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052748703404004575198410669579950.html%3Fmod%3DWSJEUROPE_hpp_sections_tech (accessed May 7, 2015).

61  Epic Meal Time: www.youtube.com/user/EpicMealTime

62  Klein, J. (2014). “YouTube Analytics Now Include by-the-Minute Updates.” Retrieved from www.thevideoink.com/news/youtube-anayltics-now-include-minute-updates (accessed May 7, 2015).

63  The Lizzie Bennet Diaries: www.pemberleydigital.com/the-lizzie-bennet-diaries/

64  H+: The digital series: www.youtube.com/user/HplusDigitalSeries

65  Katzoff, T. (2012). “Bryan Singer’s ‘H+ The Digital Series’ Shuts Down Hardwired Humans.” Retrieved from www.mtv.com/news/1691380/h-plus-digital-series/ (accessed May 7, 2015).

66  Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee: http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/

67  Yahr, E. (2014). “Jerry Seinfeld Has No Plans to Take ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee’ to TV. This is a good thing.” Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2014/06/19/jerry-seinfeld-has-no-plans-to-take-comedians-in-cars-getting-coffee-to-tv-this-is-a-good-thing/ (accessed May 7, 2015).

68  PBS Idea Channel: www.youtube.com/user/pbsideachannel

69  PBSoffbook: www.youtube.com/user/PBSoffbook

70  Cohen, J. (2012). “Maker Studios Gets One Billions Views {.} a Month.” Retrieved from www.tubefilter.com/2012/06/30/maker-studios-billion-views/ (accessed May 7, 2015).

71  Barnes, B. (2014). “Disney Buys Maker Studios, Video Supplier for YouTube.” Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/business/media/disney-buys-maker-studios-video-supplier-for-youtube.html?_r=1 (accessed May 7, 2015).

72  Wade, P. (2014). “YouTube Invests Millions to Keep its Top Stars Home.” Retrieved from www.fastcompany.com/3036020/fast-feed/youtube-invests-millions-to-keep-its-top-stars-home (accessed May 7, 2015).