The hellish monotony of office work has been a potent theme ever since Melville penned Bartleby the Scrivenor in 1853. If Bartleby was killing time in a 21st Century cubicle, it might resemble Jacob Reed's Day Job.

Filmed in one wide master shot, Day Job records the lonely routine of an shlub (Alec Owen), who procrastinates by banging on various office supplies that surround him. That footage was then cut together to create a percussive beat.

Day Job is not the first time that unedited footage has been scrambled together in post to create music -- Norway's Lasse Gjertsen took care of that with his wildly popular clip, Amateur. Reed says that he hadn't seen Amateur until after Day Job was made. Rather, he got the idea from the same clip that inspired Gjertsen -- Michel Gondry's I Am Twelve Forever, which appeared on a Palm Pictures Directors Label DVD.

The shoot took place over two hours, and was made as part of Reed's Cinema 290 Production class at the University of Souther California. "We set Alec up with a metronome in his pocket, and wired an earbud up to one of his ears so that everything he did could be on the same beat, which I thought would make it easier to edit," says Reed. "I ended up only using a tiny fraction of what we shot, and at some point I'd like to recut the film to come up with some different sounds. The shoot was a lot of fun, because Alec is someone I do comedy with - he's great to work with, and he also happens to be a musician so he came up with the sounds very easily."

Reed's currently working on shorts for his comedy troupe Tremendosaur. Check them out on Tremendosaur.com or in iTunes with the Tremendosaur Comedy Podcast.

-Matthew Ross

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Saying everything you wanted to know about the deep-sea bioluminescent Lantern Fish (but never thought to ask), this ichthy-rific animated piece has taken art websites by storm, heralded by many fans of the form and posted on YouTube by three separate admirers. The simple, but beautifully drawn video chronicles several types of the fish, observing them morph from one into another in scientific sequence, and climaxing in a psychedelic coda.

"The project came about as an experiment, really," explains Adam Gault, 30, who has worked as a professional motion-graphic artist for television for the last seven years. He met his collaborator, illustrator Stefanie Augustine, while they were both studying at the Rhode Island School of Design. They crafted a similarly poetic graphic-driven piece called "Holiday" (definitely worth checking out) a few years ago.

"Last summer I was in between big projects and looking for something quick and easy to animate," he explains of his fishy friends. "I came across an old print of some lantern fish in an antiques shop, and thought it would be fun to try and animate them. It was fun," he adds, "but unfortunately it wasn't quick."

While Gault complains that it took him almost a year in between paying gigs to complete "Lantern Fish," he also suggests this process may have ultimately benefited the film. "Because I didn't get bored or rush to finish for a deadline, and because it was a personal project, I was able to work way longer on some of the sequences then I might have been able to if it was for a commercial client," he says.

Gault animated the project, while Augustine designed the environments, plants, and fish bones. But Gault credits the piece's dreamy atmosphere to musicians Chris Villepigue and Shelly Bajorek. "I love how it sounds dark and mysterious but still a little whimsical," he says, "and to me it really feels like we're deep under water."

-Anthony Kaufman

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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.

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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

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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

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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."

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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."

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One day, Barcelona-based Swedish filmmaker Erik Eliason received a 38 pistol, designed to fire SOS-rockets from boats, and a box of 9mm blanks. The weapon made him curious about the mixing of real gunfire and smoke with rotoscoped actions. "Would the effect be as cool as I thought?" We thought so.

This slick, hallucinogenic short featuring angry figure-drawings, bloody gunshots, and a hip soundtrack came together after Eliason played around with After Effects and Photoshop. "I had ideas I was burning to realize before I got my first computer," says the self-taught filmmaker. "Most of my tech-knowledge is earned by self-studying softwares and finding solutions to mirror my ideas."

But what does it all mean? "Enjoy the visual trip," he says. read more >>

Even the most basic editing software offers some kind of low-rent CGI. But filmmakers Leo Bridle and Leo Powell isn't having any of it. In his short Ultimate Media Center, everything's analog, and in these Leos' hands, analog kicks ass.

Filmed in two long-take shots, UMC takes the viewer (via the camera's P.O.V.) inside a computer, where robots, old film strips, and other media peacefully co-exist to create, well, a pretty ultimate media center. Bridle says they were going for "Tron meets Fischl and Weiss via an early 90's rave" -- and when you see the clip, his description somehow makes perfect sense. Not so shabby for a budget of £300.

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This fake commercial, supposedly made in 1984, would be a worthy extra on the Revenge of the Nerds 25th Anniversary Special Edition DVD when it gets released in 2009. (We have no confirmation that the aforementioned release will ever see the light of day, but we're praying our hearts out that it does). Ladies and germs, we present old-school geek culture in its pure, most unadulterated greatness.
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