Whether David Wain or his followers are aware, it must be stated that Wain is probably one of the biggest influences on internet comedy. The Stella Shorts, of which he held a guiding technical hand, and his 2001 feature, Wet Hot American Summer set somewhat of a standard for the irrational, random and abstract humor that so many have attempted to duplicate. His return to online video, Wainy Days, part of the recently launched My Damn Channel, reflects all the inexplicable whatnot we expect from him, and even shows the kiddos a thing or two about web series development.

"I like that there are really no rules," Wain says of working in the web idiom, "and that you don't have to reach any specific running time. I also like the webisode idea - really enjoying telling an ongoing story." And with so few web series actually living up to their genre with a connective thread, he seems to be taking an original albeit traditional approach, although seemingly out of necessity. "I'm also in prep in L.A. for a movie I'm shooting, so haven't been able to do everything myself - so I've gotten some of the best writers and directors I know to shoot some Wainy Days pieces."

Running his episodes like a traditional TV series with various talent taking the reins is a new approach, and with ten episodes planned, it'll be exciting to find something dynamic each week. But as always with Wain's work, don't think too far ahead. "I like that there are not a lot of set conventions for webisodes - we're inventing the format as we go."

As much as Wain has been part of many collectives and collaborations, with Wainy Days we're finally getting a chance to see what Wain as an individual has brought to each of these. What remains are the random outbursts of filth, the more-than-anything-can-happen riffs on the conventions of Hollywood cheese, and surprisingly, the genuinely huggable characters with arcs, as bizarre as they can be. For his fans and followers, worry not, he promises much more lunacy, in the form of "cross dressing, sperm donating, street singing."

Happy to have him back online.

-Spencer Somers

Few online documentaries seize The Daily Reel's short attention span, but this mind-expanding, evocatively animated look at the state of the earth is a gripping piece of nonfiction. The first in a series of short animated films presenting new techniques for social and ecological transformation, "Post Modern Times" evolved out of concepts in the best-selling book "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl" by Daniel Pinchbeck, who also narrates the web installments. But opposed to some bland talking-head, the videos communicate Pinchbeck's ideas through wildly inventive stream-of-conscious animated sequences, pioneered by Curious Pictures' Joao Amorim.

"In the animation I wanted to develop a language that was accessible to many people, hip, fun but also psychedelic," says Amorim, who also created The Daily Reel favorite "Ferrets for Freedom." "Usually people, when talking about this subject, tend to use a very cheesy 'New Age' language. I think that limits the audience, so I approached the whole project with the idea of creating a hip graphic language, where symbols take multiple meanings, and their meaning evolves with the film. The main concept behind all of the Graphics is the 'Golden Section' and 'Spirals,'" he explains. "It is pretty much in every animated shot."

Future segments of the series will focus on shamanism, sustainability, alternative energy systems, the Mayan Calendar, quantum physics and synchronicity, human sexuality, and a host of other subjects. Amorim and his team are currently looking for investors to take the project forward. For more info, check out: http://www.postmoderntimes.com.

The concept for this short seems like a sure-fire studio pitch. Sometime in the near future, technology has become so evolved that it has become possible to edit, copy, paste, and cut events from reality. The possibilities are endless, especially in matters of the heart. Case in point this scenario, in which a lovestruck dude tries -- and tries again -- to convince a girl to take the plunge from friendship to something more.

Directed by Kiyjong Kim, edit>love is a sweet, clever story of geek love that takes full of advantage of its $200 budget. What it lacks in crisp dialogue and pacing, it more than makes up for in its technical and the fact that its premise is a true comedy gem.

Kim, who still holds down a day job as a graphic designer, came up with the idea after learning that Intel and Atomfilms would be sponsoring contest for stories that had a "magic wand" theme. "I had been playing around with the idea of a guy interacting with computer interface elements for a while, so I thought I could use that idea for the contest," says Kim." My initial ideas were darker though, like one version had the girl becoming more corrupted and pixelated as he tried to alter her. In the end I decided to go with a lighter tone."

Kim's explains edit>love's creative, no-budget brand of CGI as follows: "I did some preliminary tests where I made paper mouse cursors of different sizes and took still pictures of myself holding them. Then I sized them and added the computer interface to make sure the mouse and also the text would be big enough to be legible when seen at the small size of most web videos. I definitely wanted to test before I started shooting so I didn't waste time. Once I saw that it could work, I built the interface in Photoshop, and then composited in After Effects."

He clearly knows his subject material. Is it any surprise that he ended up winning the contest?

This music video, produced by the band Ice Core Scientist, blends still imagery and surprisingly effective text to be both music video and polemic. By emphasizing both the massive scale and relative smallness of our planet, it's four minutes which leaves you thinking about the rock we all take for granted, and how we might preserve it.

"Pale Blue Dot" draws specific inspiration from the work of Carl Sagan, whose 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space attempted to give man perspective on their literal place in the universe. "There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world," says Sagan -- a concept that Ice Core Scientist animates skillfully.

Based out of Ireland, Ice Core Scientist is an independent band with an environmental focus. According to their website, they are "named after the intrepid scientists who live and work in the arctic circle painstakingly collecting core samples of ice, so that we can learn how our fragile eco system has worked over hundreds of thousands of years. They are quite clearly mad. Which helps."

Enter the fantastical universe of French computer-graphic artist Yannick Puig, where manta rays fly through the air and three-tailed monkeys inhabit the moon. A freelance director who currently lives in Valencia, Spain, where he works at Keytoon Animation Studios, Puig set out to make his latest independent animation "I Live on the Moon" based on the music of French band Kwoon, who in turn, contacted Puig after seeing his last short "Krapooyo," a whimsical CG fable about evolution.

Not only was "I Lived on the Moon" inspired by Kwoon's song -- with its two movements, first calmer and then more fast-paced -- but Puig says he also derived the magical story about a boy and his father visiting the moon from a comic book he painted in the late 1990s.

The concept, he says on his website, was to mix the world of deep sea with deep space. "Two worlds we think so different, but are very close in a lot of ways... the atmosphere, the light, the gravity [and]...stars like bubbles in the sky." He was also inspired by artists like Tim Burton, and Japanese anime guru Hayao Miyazaki and the colors and patterns of both Tibetan and Nepalese art.

To make the film, he used 3Dsmax 8, Photoshop, and AfterEffects (and also plugins for particles and old film effects). "My methodology," he explains, "was at first to cut the 4min30 of the music into different parts. And then I drew the story-board to help me compose plans of cameras." The entire film took about a year to complete.

For more information about "I Lived on the Moon," check out Puig's website.

What the heck are those wild and woolly black-and-white animated characters and what are they doing? Drunk, unruly, violent and spectral, they're entirely unpredictable, self-replicating and strange – a hallucinogenic vision from the minds of New York-based Shilo.

Like many professional design houses that occasionally need to blow off some artistic steam, the production studio has crafted its first creative publication: "We Make it Good," a monograph of what Creative Directors Jose Gomez and Andre Stringer call “design infused storytelling.” Not simply a reel of their commercial work (for MTV, Showtime, Cingular, Scion, and others), the book and DVD also offers four original short films inspired by Shilo's logo – a sad-to-happy face that is the culmination of the animated video.

Stringer calls the short "a chain-reaction of emotions,” he says. “The constant traveling and transformation of all these eccentric characters was the primary motivator for us to create this running, fast-paced piece."

"‘City of Good’ is a very simple concept and story about good and evil, happy and sad, but told in a very different and unusual way," he explains. "For all of these pieces, we have the common theme of emotional transformation; the idea that even in the darkest hours, there is the chance for evolution. That said, however, we weren’t out to change the world when we created these visions. We were just out to have fun and experiment.”

Visit Shilo online at http://www.shilo.tv and check out their equally crazy animated ad spot for the automobile Scion called "Deviants."

You ever wonder about the poor, unloved children that dispense soda cans from vending machines or live inside the office copier, working hard for you every day? This under-reported issue comes into stark light in Jonathan van Tulleken's brilliantly dry comic faux-PSA short.

Shot in only seven hours, the film was made as a cinematography exercise at Columbia University's Graduate Film program, and was inspired by wise words from the filmmaker's father. He was "always telling me to say 'thank you' to ticket machines in parking lots," says van Tulleken, a 26-year-old British-Canadian who currently resides in New York. "This was because, as he rightly claimed, there were small lonely men inside who worked all bloody day without any gratitude."

Van Tulleken roped in veteran actor Kevin Spacey to do the voice over "after I had sent him the script knowing that he was in New York performing on Broadway and that he is a huge supporter of aspiring actors and directors," says van Tulleken. Without a recording studio, he ended up taping Spacey simply using a boom mic attached to a DVX100 camera and then later removing the background noise with the help of sound mixer Jesse Ehardt.

As an Oxford University undergraduate in Psychology and Philosophy, van Tulleken directed and acted in plays and co-directed and co-produced the popular short live-action/animation, "The Unsteady Chough," based on a poem by Monty Python's Terry Jones. Currently, Van Tulleken is diligently focused on "building up a reel of extremely short comedy pieces that attempt to combine humor along with highly polished images," he says. Apparently, the hard work is paying off. One of his latest shorts "Bumblebee" was recently accepted into the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival.

With "Hairspray" big at the box office, campy musicals are back in style. And Mike Sobo’s candy-colored 1950s-set musical comedy about the forbidden love between a butcher and a vegetarian seems like it couldn't have arrived at a more perfect time.

Sobo's thesis film at New York University, "Bye Bye Burger" was a multi-student collaboration: His brother Dan Sobo wrote and composed the hilarious musical numbers ("take one dead cow/slice him up from his tail to his brow/clear out the cud and throw out the entrails and rain of blood/you get beef") and Preston Spurlock co-wrote the witty script and animated sequences. The entire film – short-listed for a Student Academy Award -- runs 22-minutes long, but Sobo and his team at Greencard Pictures realized they should break it up into shorter installments in order to explore alternative forms of distribution. We have the first installment here; subsequent webisodes are also now live at their REELEDin page.

"Up until recently, it seemed that the only way to get a short film out there was to go through the traditional, festival route," says Greencard Pictures' Emily Wiedemann, "but we wanted to utilize the web for distribution to a more immediate audience. By making it episodic, we were able to keep with the general practices of today's online media watcher."

Straight out of Chicago comes a fresh approach to making stand-up both visual and viral. Here, comedian Mike Bridenstine tells the tale of a girl too high class for bargain-basement plastic surgery. The mixture of narration and reenactment does a great job of preserving the rhythm of stand-up, while adding some delightful sight gags and interaction.

Chicago is legendary for its improv comedy, but a few years ago the stand-up scene was nonexistent -- save for a few struggling independent clubs, where the ten comedians who form the core of Blerds.com initially met. Blerds.com was originally meant to be primarily a blogging site (the name originated as a mashup of "blogging nerds"), until filmmaker Jordan Vogt-Roberts met Bridenstine after a variety/comedy show. "[Mike] showed this really crappy but funny short film and I approached him after the show," says Vogt-Roberts. "They gave me 10 days or something to get some shorts done before their launch party. None of the ideas for original content that they had at the time were fully developed and so we stuck with the material that we knew worked and was funny - their acts."

For "Upscale Plastic Surgery," the production's biggest complication came down to assembling the hilarious cast, including Brady Novak and Nick Vatterott, Second City's Robyn Norris, and Renee Gauthier, who was just seen as the personal assistant in last week's Victoria Beckham NBC special. Says Bridenstine, "The whole thing didn't take too long in terms of actual time spent on it. It was just a matter of getting those people to have the time to do it."

As a entity, Blerds is keeping busy with both more stand-up pieces and original content, including web ads for a major agency, and two webisode series for different studios/entities. Also, according to Vogt-Roberts, "Individually we're all working on our own stuff. Blerds is our Wu Tang clan."

The recent winner of a Student Academy Award in the animation category, Nashville native Bevin Carnes' charming CG short "A Leg Up" combines the narrative poignancy of Pixar with the adorable qualities of an old Disney classic. The film follows a cute robot, whose leg takes on a mind of its own, but the movie takes on greater themes of conformity and individuality.

Recently graduated from the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, Carnes chose to make "A Leg Up" after her Ringling thesis project, because she felt she could tell a more compelling story.

Using such software as Maya, RenderMan, Photoshop, Shake and Premiere, Carnes has said that the biggest challenge of the film wasn't the top-notch-looking computer animation, but telling the story in two minutes. "It's hard to even get a story to make sense in a film that is two minutes or less, much less try to say something meaningful with that story," she told Animation Magazine. "Also having a lot of characters was a big challenge technically. To all you students out there, I'm sure you've heard it before, but don't have six characters in your thesis!"

Carnes is currently working as an apprentice at Rhythm and Hues Studios in Los Angeles (responsible for visual effects on The Chronicles of Narnia and The Golden Compass) and hopes to make her own feature films some day. She is also interested in gaming, and "how games might merge with film someday," she said. "I think there is tremendous potential in interactivity as far as conveying emotion, and I think that someday gaming could become a high art form that could explore a broad range of meaningful topics, just as film does today."

For more Carnes, check out her website: http://www.bevincarnes.com