Made for the Net:3 Short Films

#1



This is the best example of how effective and wide-reaching an independently-produced and internet-delivered video can be. Footage featuring the "Free Hugs" campaign, started by an Australian man named Juan Mann, became world famous back in 2006 when it became the music video for the song "All the Same" by Australian band Sick Pupies. First uploaded onto the internet via YouTube, it has become the most watched video of all time (emassing nearly 50 millions plays since) on the world's biggest video-sharing site. Not only did it spark the "Free Hugs" campaign as a social movement worldwide, it also boosted the career of Sick Puppies to worldwide recognition but like all things good, it had to come an end. Maybe proving that the band wasn't very good at all. Maybe that last sentence was biased. Moral of story: upload a cool video with your band's music and pray to a higher power (or the internet) that it becomes viral.

#2

The Longest Way 1.0 - one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

The style of "time-lapse" video (images captured at a rate much slower than it will be played back, thus appearing faster) has been overdone countless times in the internet age, but this particular short clip has a fresh take. It's basically a film of a guy who has taken one photo everyday for a 365 days whilst on his voyage through China (with the majority of travel taking place on foot) and like alot of human time-lapse video, you see him change from a day to day basis and in the process grow an awesome beard. What makes this cool is that every single shot has the location of where it's taken, from "middle of NOWHERE" to "36000 feet above sea level" along with the number of km's he has travelled. In reality, as cool as this short film is, the only place for it to be exhibited is on the Internet via video-sharing sites such as Vimeo and YouTube.

#3



These types of "fan-edits/fan films" are also becoming increasingly common nowadays. The premise is that the original content (i.e a music video or film clip) is re-edited and/or re-interpreted to give it a new meaning, most of the time becoming satirical. Usually these type of films cater to a "niche market" and only appeal to those within the same market but such fan edits/films like this one appeal to a widestream media-conscious audience. Entitled "Hitler's Reaction to Taylor Swift Winning Best Female Video at VMA's-Worse than Kanye", the video is a excerpt of the 2004 German film "Downfall" (about Hitler's last days) which has had its subtitles edited in order to make it seem that Hitler is furious about Taylor Swift winning the award over Beyonce. Perhaps the clip's strongest point is it's timeliness due to its reaction with current events, something that has been a benefit of the internet: to constantly produce timely content.