Funny Business Goes Online
Reich has found that doing that much work and doing it well means keeping a balance. "If you get too professional, I think you take out all spontaneity," he says. At the same time, he wants the site to grow up a little. "We want to finally abandon our frat boy, entirely sophomoric and chauvinist image and do some things that are funny and smart."
The CollegeHumor office is demanding—Reich says he’s in the office 60 hours a week and was doing 90 hours during the MTV shooting—but it’s obviously doing a lot right. Besides getting quite a bit of high-profile attention, his editorial team hasn’t lost one person since it formed.
"People tend to come here and stay here," Reich says.
The Format of a Hit
For online video professionals, formats, codecs, and compression settings matter. Up-and-coming online video stars, however, couldn’t tell Flash from Silverlight. If you want comedy with high production values behind it, give Funny or Die a try. Most work is shot with a Panasonic HD camera, says Farah, although sometimes he gets to use a Red camera, which he loves because it gives the video "more of a texturized film feel."
However, those who are just starting out and have no budget find that YouTube is a perfect host. It’s free (and even pays, if you’re popular), and the clips are easily embeddable. None of the young performers we spoke to were concerned about video quality. If they want free streaming, that’s beyond their control. What they can control, however, is how their work is shot.
"I think one thing that helped us is having a TV background, and the videos we made, we like to think they have a certain quality to them," says Stuckey. "It’s not just slapped together. It’s not just douche bags in an apartment room. I like to think that our videos are thought out."
"We both work in TV, so I think we tend to have a little bit higher production value for our videos most of the time, except for paper maché unicorn horns," adds Murray.
Barats and Bereta, Glover, and Carroll all say that their troupes post primarily to YouTube, but they often post to Vimeo as well for higher video quality. Glover and Carroll credit talented directors in their groups for giving their work the right professional look. Good direction can compensate for small budgets, Glover says.
"I think a lot of people have a lot of stigma around internet video, like, ‘Oh, it’s cheap, you shoot it like cheap,’" he says. "But we never spent a lot of money on them. I think it was all about having a good idea, having a good script, and having a director—our director Dan Eckman—who knew how to shoot them, who was really into shooting the ideas like they were film, as opposed to just like, ‘Oh, it’s an internet video, we can just shoot it willy-nilly or however we want, it doesn’t matter.’"
Relying on YouTube does mean working around certain restrictions. Barats and Bereta had to remove one video that used a copyrighted song, and Stuckey and Murray also got into trouble for a parody."We’ve only had one problem with their content restrictions and that’s because, it was sort of a stunt Murray and I did," says Stuckey. "We used some footage from a very popular movie in one of our videos and they told us to take that down. After it got about 40,000 hits in a couple days we took it down."
That movie was The Sound of Music, and the words the duo sang to their version of "My Favorite Things" were probably part of the problem.
"We had a version that got really nasty," says Stuckey. If that piques your interest, Murray says you can still find it online if you look.
Bright Futures
After getting noticed online, many performers are finding that doors are opening for them quickly. Glover, for example, was hired as a writer for 30 Rock just weeks out of college. It’s a job that he recently left, though, as he was cast in Community, a new series that begins on NBC in the fall.
"When I got hired at 30 Rock, I don’t think it was because of the stuff I put up, but they were definitely aware of me because of stuff I had put up online," Glover says. "It was available. It’s kind of like a ubiquitous resume that is always available to anybody who wants to hire you or know who you are."
He and the rest of the Derrick troupe have just moved to Los Angeles. It’s the right time, since they also just completed their first movie, an independent film called Mystery Team that was shown at the Sundance Film Festival.
"Without all of our online presence and support from people who had supported our sketches, I’m sure that movie would not have been made," Glover says.
Carroll found representation with United Talent Agency and recently participated in final-round auditions for The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live. She’s also auditioning for Los Angeles-based projects from the comfort of her New York City home, thanks to her skills in online video.
While Stuckey and Murray caution that internet success doesn’t always translate to mainstream success ("The little kid from the dentist office, he got 50 million hits. Is he going to get his own show?" asks Stuckey), they appreciate the bump that online notoriety has given their live shows. They’ve been asked to play at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival twice and are traveling to England two more times this year for other music festivals.
Barats’ and Bereta’s NBC pilot wasn’t picked up, but they were able to write a second pilot. They continue to pitch television and movie projects in Los Angeles. They’re also auditioning for acting roles, writing a screenplay, and continuing to make internet videos every 2–3 weeks. Plus, they’ve got a new project planned.
"There soon will be a live show," says Barats. "It’s a show we put on up in Washington a bunch and now we’re re-tooling it for down here in L.A. We hope to put it on in the next couple months here."
"We’re kind of wanting to dabble in it all, right now," says Bereta.Many of the people we spoke with echoed that sentiment: the desire to always work with different mediums and projects, and not only in front of the camera. However, wherever they go, the performers who started with online video see it as the hub that will hold everything together.
"We kind of always looked at it like the music business, the way it all has changed," says Glover. "Mix tapes rule the world. It’s all about your fans who care about you. If you keep giving them mix tapes, they’ll buy your album when it comes out. We want to keep doing the same thing for us with film. Keep making those shorts, and when we want to make our big project, they’ll come out and support us."
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