What can we say: there's something magical about a dancing robot. Keepon, a robot built and designed by Hideki Kozima, first appeared on YouTube in March with this video for Spoon's "I Turn My Camera On." In the clip created by robotics scientist and Keepon programmer Marek Michalowski, the simple Kyoto-based bot, composed of two yellow ballish shapes fused together, simply gets down and boogies for three-and-a-half minutes. The vid received more than 1.3 million views.

Now Keepon is back with another Spoon song, and another, more elaborate video commissioned by WIRED magazine. Scheduled to appear at WIRED's NextFest in LA in September, Keepon was asked to reteam with Spoon in Tokyo for a new video to be made under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license (for others to reuse and mash as they please).

"This all started with a research project (beatbots.org) in which we're developing technologies that allow robots to interact smoothly with people by synchronizing with the rhythms of our social behaviors," explains Michalowski, "and dance is a good place to begin."

Melanie Cornwell, WIRED's Editorial Projects Director, says in its nascent stages, the new video was originally going to be "like an homage to 'Lost in Translation,' with Spoon as Bill and Keepon as Scarlett, silly stuff like that," she explains. "Frankly, at the time, the video seemed a bit like bar talk. But then all the Wired planets aligned so perfectly— the band was into it, Keepon’s keepers were into it, and the timing was right."

Director Jeff Nichols was brought on to the project just after his debut feature Shotgun Stories had been making the rounds at film festivals. "Jeff lives in Austin, which is also Spoon’s hometown," explains Cornwell, "so Jeff’s talents and sensibility seemed like a great fit for the project." And along with Nichols came a team of collaborators: cinematographer Adam Stone, editor Chris Walldorf, and sophisticated CGI work from the guys at Edit at Joes.

"We communicated to Jeff that we wanted a video that began where Marek’s video left off," says Cornwell. "We always knew that we wanted the first shot to be a close-up of Keepon in the lab starting to dance. Where it would go from there was Jeff’s challenge. So he produced a couple of treatments that we ran by the band and the roboticists and tweaked until we had the perfect story.

"And to me," continues Cornwell, "the best part about that story is that it stars Hideki Kozima (the roboticist and child psychologist who designed and built Keepon) for his clinical research with autistic children."

A man peers at the moon. The man on the moon waves back. Blink, and the man on the moon is by you at the beach. And he's leading you towards the ocean...

In case you missed last week's coverage of Room 401's increasing bizarre web presence, a brief recap: Room 401 is Ashton Kutcher's Punk'd-esque reality horror series, airing to little notice on MTV this summer. But astute viewers began noticing subliminal clues planted within the episodes by Kutcher himself, and in following the clues uncovered a tangled network of websites leading to a much larger game, full of videos and secrets and clues.

We don't know what is happening here, and we don't know who made it. But there's an eerie quality to this video's beauty. And we're looking forward to getting some answers.

Permanent markers may look all fun and colorful and stuff, but in the wrong hands and noses, they can be a dangerous drug. In this clever, well-acted parody of A&E's "Intervention" -- in which people confront their darkest demons and seek redemption -- actor-writer-director Mike Rose lampoons the serious documentary format of such earnest self-help shows, providing a hilarious look at Jeff, a marker-sniffing addict and the friends and families who want to save him.

Originally from addiction-central Orange County, Rose, 28, currently resides in Studio City, CA. He studied improvisation and sketch comedy at The Groundlings for many years and performed there regularly as a member of the Sunday Company. In keeping with his background, "Stop It" features a combination of improvised and scripted material.

"I basically write a skeleton of how the episode will go, locations, character breakdowns, what will be said and by who," he explains. "But then we do a lot of improv and based on that I might direct the scene in a particular direction."

Rose and his team have already produced an equally funny second episode of "Stop It," about a chronic crank caller.

-Anthony Kaufman

This beautifully crafted montage by Pittsburgh-based 10-person creative agency Carney-Fireman captures the emotional power and poignancy of PostSecret, Frank Warren's mail-in art community project and weblog, which collects the secrets of strangers on postcards. Produced for publisher William Morrow to promote the PostSecret books, the video was posted on YouTube two weeks ago and has already received over half a million hits.

While showing the secrets on the web offers "immediacy," in book form "a narrative" and in art exhibitions "tangibility," Warren explains, "the nice thing about the video was to show the cards in another, more animated way, tapping into the story behind the secret in a more emotional and visceral way. And it was a new way to allow the secrets to touch people."

"The challenge of representing the written word on the web in a compressed video box eliminated some cards, because graphically they'd be too difficult to decipher on the web," he explains.

Both Warren and Fireman also wanted a wide cross-section of secrets. "So that it wasn't just sexual secrets or funny secrets, but touches on all human emotions: the joyful, the confused, the anguished," says Warren. "That's when the project is at its most powerful; it's a full-bodied opera, and you can go from something funny to tragic in a microsecond. It adds something more to have the sum of these secrets."

For the video production which took about three months to complete, Fireman's crew, upon the recommendation of Warren, cut the images to Sia's "Breathe Me" -- and added a human aspect to the material by videotaping people approaching mail boxes and giving the footage an old nostalgic home-movie effect, "because most of the cards are handmade," Fireman says. He also highlights the image and cutting by Jim DiSpirito, former percussionist for the multi-platinum-band Rusted Root, who has a wonderfully rhythmic touch to the edits.

Warren admits he had tried video clips before, but was never satisfied with them. But he's finally warming up to the format. "It's really exciting to work in the field of blogs and internet videos," he says. "What we're seeing on the Internet now is not tapping into the vastness of the potential of the web," he adds. "I hope that people can appreciate the Internet for sincere, soulful purposes, too."

-Anthony Kaufman

This dry take on a not-so-hot app captures perfectly the tone of self-promoting software "demos," while invoking the Facebook generation's childhood memories of the classic graphics program. Inspired by "the beauty and limitations of the MS Paint program," comedy sketch team FreeLoveForum create a fond memorial to obsolete technology -- that isn't afraid to mock its failings.

The six members of FreeLoveForum (Jeremy Beiler, Paul Dorfman, Jared Gramstrup, Gabe Gronli, Dieter Klipstein, and Anne Johnson) began working together in high school, when they united to start a cable-access sketch comedy show. Afterwards, they continued to collaborate sporadically until after college, when they reunited full-time. Based in New York, the team has produced multiple stage shows and an independent TV pilot, with individual members producing videos for The New York Times and The Colbert Report.

"Paint" was inspired by the very software used to create it: group member Jeremy Beiler liked the tone of the videos Apple had produced to promote the new Final Cut Studio, and thought it would be great to apply that same treatment to a more archaic program. Says group member Gabe Gronli: "Paint seemed to be the perfect counterpoint to the overly sleek, shiny and efficient world of the apple promos." Each character was created through on-set experimentation with accents and dialogue; the only thing uniting them being a single pair of glasses, worn by every actor featured.

On the appeal of the short, Gronli says, "It's hard to tell exactly who's responding to the video. It's definitely been linked on a fair amount of tech blogs and online communities, so I think it probably has a certain appeal to tech people. But, then again, since everyone is viewing it online, the whole audience already has some familiarity with computers and probably the Paint program, since it's so ubiquitous. We've all used Paint. It's not a bad little program. We really have no ill will towards [it]. Like all programs, it's inanimate and has never harmed us."

-Liz Miller

In this combo live-action/animated indie music video for Scottish-born rocker Ben Jelen's "Where Do We Go," 25-year-old director Sean Donnelly and Indonesian producer Lydia Budianto -- who make up the New York team, Awesome and Modest -- create a dark and whimsical story of a relationship gone bad.

"I had a roommate once who got an artsy gothic girlfriend," explains Donnelly, who says he's been making videos since the 8th grade. "He would do anything for her because he was completely in love. He'd drive her everywhere, help her with any art projects she was working on, and pay for everything that she wanted. She began to take advantage of the situation. After not receiving anything in return for months, the spell was broken and he dumped her. After the ordeal, he learned the piano right afterwards and wrote a bunch of great sad songs. I imagine that this song was a product of a similar relationship." Donnelly envisioned the magic show theme as a way to evoke the relationship of a master magician and his able-bodied assistant.

As for the animated characters, which were created using simple stop-motion techniques, Donnelly says they are a "visualization of her madness, and the things that drive her to treat Ben this way without noticing that his love for her is fading."

"We did it against a green piece of paper so we could key them out in the computer," he explains. "Eric Epstein, our compositor, then tracked them into the real chairs. (He put red stickers on the chairs in real life to help him.) They were all bright white too, so the color corrected them a little to look like they were actually in the environment."

Ironically, the titles and drawings that narrate the story were taken from Donnelly's original "sloppy storyboards he did on the subway," he says. "Ben and his team liked them a lot and wanted them to be in the actual video. So it's kind of like a 'making of' the entire time," he adds. "You get to see the original sketch and idea, and then what became of it."

Donnelly continues to make video and commercial work, but he's also making a feature-length documentary called "I Think We're Alone Now," about two obsessed Tiffany fans. Check out the scary trailer here.

-Anthony Kaufman

If Back to the Future met The Fast and the Furious met Asian Extreme action, it might look something like the wildly inventive, exuberantly nonsensical Overdrift, a crazy concoction from the Duncan Brothers, Los Angeles-based filmmakers who originally hail from Seattle.

With swinging cameras, fast cuts, creative effects and a mashed-up plot involving everything from "drift racing" and paleontology to cross-dimensional travel and the bond of two brothers, Overdrift feels like Hollywood conventions hopped up on acid and made on a shoestring budget.

Overdrift was inspired by a Japanese anime TV series called "Initial D" as well as "Channel 101 and its many creators and our own inability to take anything seriously," Ian and Brant write via email, as well as Sickanimation.com's Marc M., "dinosaurs, beards, Werner Herzog, and Koreans."

"We go over story and major plot points, all the scenes and the general flow of things," the Duncan brothers explain about their improvisational process, "but specific dialogue is kinda hashed out when we are shooting. We certainly value the benefit of a good script, but these kind of things can be done on the fly."

Ian Duncan, 24, graduated from USC film school, while Brant, 22, got a filmmaking degree from San Francisco State University. "We basically spent all of our money at school, so now we can't afford to do anything else," they say. "We're scrappers and would rather pull the trigger on a gun in our mouths then stop making movies."

While the dynamic duo are content working on their own projects (check out previous wacky D.I.Y. wonders such as the sci-fi cyberpunk "Burn/N.E.N.E.R" and the buddy-cop action-thriller "The Deepening"), they have "bigger projects on the horizon," they say. And we'll be watching out for them.

-Anthony Kaufman

Welcome to the world of Dudes in Bed, where if you're a straight man, any topic is fair game as long as your pants are off. In this first episode of the ongoing web series, Dan Bialek and guest stars Ryan O'Neill and Jeff Danis sprawl across a queen-sized bed (beloning to Bialek's girlfriend Amanda) and discuss Jeff's recent haircut. It's not quite as gay as it sounds. Well. Maybe.

Dan Bialek held any number of odd jobs, including covering city council meetings for the Hermosa Beach Easy Reader and interviewing extreme sports stars for ESPN (the hardest part of which, he says, was "asking them to stop smoking pot so we could interview them on camera"). But five years ago, Dan began his career in the world of stand-up comedy, starting as The Comedy Store's doorman and eventually working his way up to regular performance and hosting gigs at the legendary club.

When asked to develop a comedy series for NBC Universal's Dot Comedy.com, Bialek turned to the Internet for inspiration, and realized what was popular: naked people. Specifically, naked girls. "When I was looking around, it seemed like every show had a half-naked girl or a girl in a bikini hosting it," Bialek says, "but nothing with guys. So I thought it would be funny to shift the paradigm the other way, by having guys sitting around talking guy stuff."

What constitutes guy stuff? "Not what you'd think. I mean, I don't know anything about sports. When guys get together, they usually end up talking about their dads, because everyone has a story about their dad doing something crazy. Like, my dad chased the school bully with a hammer in his Corvette. Ryan's dad illegally raised a falcon in Indiana." The only topics that haven't come up so far are sex or pornography, because "with three guys in their underwear on a girl's bed, it gets way too weird way too quickly." Bialek observes that while at first the guys find the situation a bit uncomfortable, eventually everyone relaxes. "It's kind of like hanging out in a jacuzzi. The first five minutes are really strange, then everyone gets used to the water and it's fine."

Bialek is excited for future episodes of "Dudes in Bed," which he says he can literally produce forever. "I've got a lot of extroverted stand-up comedy friends. So it's just a matter of luring them over to my house with pizza and beer and X-Box. Once they're there, I ask if they're wearing underwear or not -- and if they say yes, I'm like, 'guess what we're doing for the next 20 minutes?'"

-Liz Miller

A live-action Ratatouille with a romantic twist, Dan Brown's "Pierre: A Hole with a View" is a delightful, narrative short about the unrequited love between a French mouse and his gorgeous new human roommate. The Grand Jury Prize winner at the South by SouthWest Film Festival's recent online "SXSWclick" event, the 35mm film also won an Audience Award for best short at the recent 2007 Seattle International Film Festival.

Inspired by old Warner Bros. "Looney Tunes," Disney animated cartoons and Tex Avery shorts, "Pierre" is set in a nostalgic art-deco Parisian milieu, featuring high-gloss locations shot in Seattle. Brown won a Spotlight Award from the Independent Feature Project based on the screenplay, which amounted to free film, transfer, audio and camera equipment. With $20,000 raised from family and friends, Brown says he was "forced" to make the film.

Brown never went to film school, but he learned After Effects and motion graphics while at Seattle art school; and worked at design house Digital Kitchen for more than three years.

"Pierre" was a true labor of love, taking two years to complete. "Finding someone to do music, make a 3D mouse, and a free or nearly free voice actor to work on it, took some time and put me at their mercy to finish it," he admits. "You can't really enforce a timeline when someone is doing you a favor."

After the success of "Pierre" (two major awards + two free Macs, "no complaints from me," says Brown), he'd like to leap from motion graphics to a directing career. "I have a few scripts I'd love to turn into films," he says. He'd also like to turn a faux-trailer he made for SXSW's Grindhouse Trailer Competition into a feature film; it just so happens that Brown's trailer -- called "Maiden of Death" -- was one of the best of the bunch. The creme really does rise to the top.

-Anthony Kaufman

The wild wild west meets the urban noir jungle in Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Lieberman's online debut "The West Side," a slick and stylish black-and-white narrative drama about New York cowboy-gangsters.

Bilsborrow-Koo, 26, went to film school in Vermont, returned to his native Durham (where he produced marketing and training videos for a North Carolina nonprofit), and then started http://nofilmschool.com, which landed him a job in the New York entertainment industry. Lieberman, 23, a recent USC grad (where he received a liberal arts degree), grew up in the Pacific Northwest.

The aspiring filmmakers met while working at MTV last year. While neither are New York natives, they've taken to the city like bees to honey, crafting an expressionistic vision of Harlem they say was inspired by black-and-white westerns, such as High Noon, Dead Man, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. "Certainly Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns also influenced our style," adds Bilsborrow-Koo. "But mostly what drove our high-contrast black-and-white look was the idea of creating an alternate universe; we couldn't have 'The West Side' look like New York City, circa 2007."

"The idea behind the aesthetic was to make 'The West Side' always feel dark, even in broad daylight, and to give the world as harsh a feel as possible," continues Bilsborrow-Koo, who explains they did shot-by-shot color grading in After Effects to elevate the contrast. They also kept the depth of field as narrow as possible, obscuring recognizable background details like street signs and advertisements.

While the duo's DIY production looks impressive, "extreme low-budget productions do carry their inherent risks," he adds. "We just recently lost all our data in a hard drive crash and are spending a chunk of change on rebooting with a more robust data storage system in place." Even with their setbacks, expect episode two in September.

-Anthony Kaufman