From The Dandy Dwarves, a production company originally based out of the Savannah College of Art & Design, comes this inspired, wacky fable about a dying man lost at sea and plagued by a foot with evil intentions. Directed by 24-year-old Christian Simmons, a 2005 Broadcast Design and Motion Graphics SCAD grad, "The Sailor" came about as a result of the group's desire to do a piece involving the water.

"I tend to gravitate toward pieces with a fanciful ugliness to them," explains Simmons, "and I thought it could be reminiscent of an old legend or folk tale." Simmons also wanted the video to seem as if it was part of a much longer project "and only get a brief glimpse of it," he says, "while at the end still feeling satisfied."

The short cleverly combines live-action with an animated speaking foot, complete with a large, teeth-y mouth, voiced by Simmons himself. "On the day of the ocean shoot, our actor J.R. had tracking points painted onto his foot," says Simmons, explaining how they conceived of the talking appendage. "Later, we'd analyze the movement of his foot and then I'd have to match the movement of J.R's foot from the boat so that there wouldn't be any discontinuity with the angle of the mouth as compared to the angle of the foot." Then their visual effects supervisor Andrew Cook painted off Simmons' mouth and artfully stuck it onto J.R's foot. "Then he'd color correct and add a slight morphing to the skin to create the effect of it stretching as the lips speak," he explains.

In the Bay Area, the Dwarves are hoping to continue to make more short-form videos, but "nothing is set in stone," says Simmons. "We loved documentary work as well as -- who knows -- feature films in the future. While we have a somewhat large body of work beneath us right now, I'll go out on a limb and say this is just the very beginning."

You can read more about SCAD's shorts program and watch a making-of video for "The Sailor and Fiendish Foot" at the link.

-Anthony Kaufman

The creators of Hipster Olympics travel back in time to bring modern-day America this one surviving single from The Poykettes, the best 1950s doo-wop band to expound upon the fine art of fellatio. For, whether you live in the 1950s or today, life is complicated for a woman -- thankfully, there's one little maneuver that can get a girl out of nearly any jam.

Originally written by Nadia Wahhab and Jenn Lyon in late 2004, live performances of "Bee-Jay" were a staple of their comedy folk music group Summer's Eve, but when Wahhab and Lyon split up to pursue other projects, the song went unrecorded. Until 2007, that is, when Lyon (now one of the six members of Poykpac) and Wahhab (now a solo act performing under the name Summer and Eve) reunited to help Poykpac produce this video, a tribute to the 1950s doo-wop era.

To recreate the big 50s sound, Poykpac's Taige Jensen used a combination of reverb, as well as stripping out the low end to make it sound like an older recording. "The rest was the style of the songwriting and singing -- the Ronettes were a clear inspiration," he says. "We also tried to get the girls to simplify their approach to singing the song -- it's a somewhat modern trend to overstylize vocal performance, so we attempted to prevent the singing from becoming in any way 'Aguilera-esque,' if you will. No big runs, et-cetera."

This same attitude was a key part of production as well. "Unfortunately, music videos didn't really exist during that era. The closest were the filmed live studio performances they did on shows like The Ed Sullivan Show. So in the end, we tried to make a hybrid, sort of imagining what a music video might have been like had they made one back then," says Jensen. "We kept the cinematography very traditional. Everything was locked down. No handheld. No steadicam. Lots of dollies. A TV studio style. And we kept everything pretty old school in editing as well, sticking to traditional wipes and long dissolves."

In the future, Poykpac will continue looking to the past -- their next online video will be "an aggressively homoerotic 1980s wrestling commercial parody." They also have a few pieces in the works for CollegeHumor.com, and aspire to become the #15 Most Viewed Comedian of all time (they currently come in at #16). What happens in that rosy future? "We'll probably move into an apartment with running water and a bathroom. Or at least a kitchen."

-Liz Miller

Did you know that Bill Murray drinks milk before he goes to bed? Such are the unproven rumors that plague the hard-working men of FCU: "Fact Checkers Unit." Created by the New York based comedy duo of Pete and Brian (Peter Karinen and Brian Sacca, of "Knock Knock" online fame) and director Dan Beers, an associate producer on Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, "FCU" was born out of the trio's desire to lampoon the popular crime show CSI, says Beers, with "two fact checkers who work with the intensity of homicide detectives." Working at the fictional Dictum Magazine, the two intrepid truth-seekers must contend with Wikipedia (a fact-checker's worst villain) and the multiple vagaries that plague them every day. When the Bill Murray fact hits them, they set out to find his house and spy on him to check the fact.

The project, of course, couldn't have gone forward without the participation of Murray, so Beers, who met the actor while working for Wes Anderson, faxed him about the short and asked if he would play himself. "I later ran into him and he said he liked the idea and that he would do it -- and that was it. That's the kind of guy Bill is," says Beers. "Extremely generous." Written over a few months, Beers, Karinen and Sacca were adding and deleting scenes up until the week before the shoot. ("Bill made fun of us that it took three guys to write ten pages," write Karinen and Sacca via email.)

But the short film's most priceless moments were spontaneously improvised during the production, including a bit of deadpan hilarity when Murray improvises "chopsticks." "We knew we wanted that piano shot, but right before we shot it we realized none of the three of us could play piano," writes Karinen. "So Brian and I had a PA teach us chopsticks right before the shot, and Bill improvised the entire thing without a rehearsal."

-Anthony Kaufman

This send-up of pretty much every Internet fad ever stirs up nostalgia for the distant past -- well, as distant as 2005, anyway. "Internet People" is the perfect time capsule of the early YouTube boom, clever animation and a jaunty tune bringing to life eeriely accurate animated likenesses of Internets Celebrities like Tay Zonday and Lonelygirl15.

Animator and illustrator Dan Meth has become an established name in the world of viral web cartoons, featured by The Daily News, TimeOut NY, Entertainment Weekly, Tech TV, and Howard Stern. "Internet People" is the first episode of the Channel Frederator series Meth Minute 39, a 39-episode series of Meth's animations, each as original as they come. Phat beats were provided by sound designer and music producer Micah Frank.

Just released on Sept. 6th, "Internet People" stands a real chance of going viral. Whether it will feature itself in a potential "Internet People II" remains to be seen.

-Liz Miller

In this lively satire of American materialism, 23-year-old Atlanta-based filmmaker Brandon McCormick sends up our gluttonous ways via an exuberant song-and-dance, somewhere between Busby Berkeley and Saturday Night Live. With funny original lyrics ("I'm the king of excess, the sultan of sales"), high production values, impressive choreographed dances across various strip malls and department stores and a gleeful performance by one large consumer (Atlanta-based casting agent Justine Carter, who has Will-Ferrell-like energy), "Consumerism! The Musical" is a smart and catchy video that's making waves across the net.

McCormick, who has produced several videos for his company Whitestone Motion Pictures (whitestonemotionpictures.com), including "Smiling Addiction" and "Alabaster," made up a visual storyboard for "Consumerism!" first; then he encoded the material onto his iPhone to watch it for reference while he was shooting.

There are very few monogamous fans around these days -- most ultimately serve many masters, loving anime and sci-fi and sitcoms with differing, but no less significant, amounts of passion. Animator Rich Cando is no exception to this rule, and so in 2003, he took that passion and began combining two of his favorite franchises, skillfully recreating the iconic Simpsons opening for the Star Wars universe. The result is a perfect mesh of pop culture, well-animated and with humor to spare.

A graduate of the UCLA Animation Workshop, Cando has been creating Flash animation for the web since 1999, launching his career with his first Star Wars spoof, Star Dudes. "With every internet short I ask myself the questions 'Would I want to see it?' and 'Is it possible to create?'" he says. "With Simpsons Star Wars, the geeky side of me wondered what Empire would look like if it was 'Simpsonized.' Instead of waiting around for the Simpsons creators to release that type of episode, I decided what could I design that wouldn't be too ambitious that I couldn't complete it."

Using Macromedia Flash for all aspects of production except sound (which was mixed using Audacity), Cando began working on the cartoon in 2003, but due to his work schedule would have to stop and start, only finding time in the evenings after work or the weekends. "I would guess that I logged in over 1,000 hours," he says. But it was a labor of love; despite what the ending card might say, Cando prefers to look at this as an homage to both properties. "Both represent brands that I was consumed with at different parts of my life. My attention has moved on to other things with age, but they both hold sweet spots in my heart."

Cando's big hope for Simpsons Star Wars is that it reaches the eyes of those who inspired it. "I always like to think that my cartoons can pass under the nose of the original properties's creators during their busy schedules. It would be nice to know that both Matt [Groening] and George [Lucas] got a quick look at it and know that their work is appreciated." In the meantime, he's focusing on developing his own properties, including the book series History Dudes and more animation projects. "I strive to keep working creatively. It would be a dream to create a property that has the cultural impact of The Simpsons or Star Wars, but even if I just reach a tiny percentage of their success, then life is a fun ride."

This hilarious viral phenom depicts, as promised, a sporting-event in which Williamsburg-based 20-something slackers compete, sort of, for nothing at all. With a wittily written running sports commentary that's so funny because it's so true, the American Apparel sponsored contest is a pitch-perfect parody of Brooklyn hipster-ism, with its rundown of events such as picking hip T-shirts ("so ironic it's not, so un-ironic it is"), taking MySpace photos, music selections that were once cool and have now sold-out (Bruce Willis, "The Return of Bruno"), and judging other people meanly.

Created by POKYPAC (pronounced poyk-pack), a six-member Bushwick-based comedy troupe -- Jonny Gillette, Ryan Hall, Ryan Hunter, Taige Jensen, Jenn Lyon, and Maggie Ros, some of whom graduated from the North Carolina School of Arts -- "Hipster Olympics" hit the web just a week ago, and already has more than 225,000 views on YouTube alone. (On the group's very own MySpace page, the video has received more than 86,600 views.)

A shameless tribute to Monty Python's famous skit "The Upperclass Twit of the Year," the video follows the success of the gang's previous YouTube sensation "Mario: Game Over" (4,474,664 views), which imagines the video-game icon as a Brooklyn screw-up having domestic troubles.

According to their MySpace page, POKYPAC has "a sole commitment to entertainment, original humor, and feeding the children of the world with food (preferably their own)."

While POYKPAC's members were unavailable for comment, they state on their YouTube channel that "the actors who appear in their videos are also doing the writing, directing, producing, editing, special FX, and everything else," they write. "We eventually want to end up doing all this on a larger scale."

-Anthony Kaufman

One of the reasons The Daily Reel loves John Romeo is because he does our work for us. Along with finding and hosting some of the best original content on the Web via his Romeo Theater Web site, he also gets the filmmakers to explain the secrets of their craft after their film finishes. John Romeo is a lazy journalist's dream.

The latest well-made viral vid to screen on Romeo is Matt Cassatta's clever Polaroid. it's the story of five friends who discover a mysterious Polaroid camera that predicts the future. Sometimes the results are good (a dream weekend in Vegas chock full of strippers in cash), and sometimes they're a little gruesome. All in all, it's a well-made, well-acted clip that's perfectly suited for online viewing.

Polaroid is one of four shorts Casatta and his cohorts from the ThesePeople comedy troupe made last year for a "Shocktoberfest" series. "Polaroid was the first one we released and has remained the biggest hit of the series," says Cassatta. "It is a parody of a Goosebumps book and a Twilight Zone episode." The shoot took seven hungover hours to pull off. "We were all kind of low on energy as we traditionally go out on the town the night before a shoot, leaving us almost useless on the day [of the shoot]." They could have fooled us.

Romeo found ThesePeople thanks to their exposure on NBC's It's Your Show, a $100,000 contest. "I would love to have some ReeledIn members submit their movies," says Romeo. "They seem to be a group that is more professional than the kid videotaping a friend on his skateboard with a cell phone, and then editing it with a copyrighted song and posting it on YouTube. I want the quality of the movies to keep increasing, with independent directors using my show as a way to promote themselves and their work."

-Matthew Ross

The story behind this special effects extravaganza is epic indeed. A long time ago (2003) on a message board far far away (Fanfilms.com, a site devoted to Star Wars fan films), Ryan Wieber and Michael "Dorkman" Scott decided to participate in the forum's first-ever Lightsaber Choreography Competition. Playing upon their reputation as rivals within the Fanfilms.com community, the two friends spent three weekends choreographing and shooting the fight, using Premiere and After Effects to create an Jedi battle for the ages.

Ryan vs. Dorkman won the competition, but never really found an audience outside of the Fanfilms community -- until the advent of of YouTube several years later. "We had always intended to do a sequel eventually, but the audience for such a thing was small and stable, and so it had been on the backburner for several years," says Scott. "But after the original RvD was featured on dozens of high-profile web culture sites, we realized that the time had come to make a follow-up/sequel if we wanted to reach this larger, more fickle audience."

Ryan vs. Dorkman 2 went into production in August 2006, shooting for eight days at the Los Amigos Tortilla Factory in Atlanta, Georgia and then spending several months in post-production. "When we set out to do the film we put a request on our website for donations, so that we could add that much production value to the film," says Scott. "Ultimately we were able to afford not only the film's production, but also a professional score recorded with a 60-piece orchestra at Capitol Studios, Hollywood. The budget was about 40% donations, 60% out of pocket, and it wouldn't have been the same film without the help of our generous fans." The process behind RvD and RvD 2 is detailed thoroughly on the official website, including a fascinating making-of featurette and an extensive FAQ. (On the question of how they do the lightsaber effects: "We used Adobe After Effects to rotoscope the prop blades and add glows to them. Essentially the same way ILM does it.")

Both Scott and Wieber now work within the industry: Scott as a freelance DP and filmmaker, Wieber as a Emmy-nominated compositor and visual effects artist. It was actually RvD that helped Wieber break into the business -- the short attracted the attention of LucasArts, who eventually hired him to work as an effects artist on Knights of the Old Republic II and the Star Wars: Episode III game.

Despite being big fans of the Star Wars franchise, neither Scott or Wieber had had any martial arts or sword training when they began work on Ryan vs. Dorkman. "[We] just watched a lot of movies."

-Liz Miller

How best to describe Trapped in the Closet? In fact, why describe it all. The media coverage on the latest installments of R. Kelly's ongoing schizolodeon has been remarkably positive and grossly academic. It can't be denied any longer that there is something more to his musical soap opera than a good laugh at his expense, proven by IFC's incredibly respectful online distribution. While still hilarious, these new chapters entangle the Trapped web to a point of such socio-political hullabaloo that R. Kelly is practically throwing those laughs right back in our face.

Without giving anything away, this season sees Kellz' alter-ego Sylvester finding more sex, violence and arguments, not to mention a bit of old time religion. The music and lyrics may not be as tight as the original installments, but when the songs return to their old chord progressions it feels even more deserved and exciting. As the tension builds throughout the new arc to its provocative and game-changing conclusion, we actually even stop thinking of R. Kelly as a musician and start thinking of him as a storyteller.

Whether or not Trapped in the Closet is a big joke, or an incendiary commentary on dishonesty in black culture is still too tough to call. But that is what precisely makes it worthwhile. In a story where no character is honest and one-faced, we shouldn't expect the teller to be. What you should expect though is one of the most unique meetings of perplexity and entertainment in recent years. Why attempt to describe it when it's so fun to be Trapped?

-Spencer Somers