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

Musician Bert Brown creates imaginative music videos for his own innovative band Red Abbott. In his latest red-and-white mini-opus, set in a space-age geometric fantasy world filled with mechanized robotic creatures, each figure in the animated piece is representative of the individual band members. "I'm the crowned and bearded chap," says the 26-year-old Brown, who grew up in Massachusetts with his fellow bandmates, and now lives and works in Queens, New York doing motion graphics design for RelaTV Media.

Brown, who was previously spotlighted at The Daily Reel with his video for "These Walls," crafted his "Reversed Sides" video from scratch: hand drawing, composing, storyboarding, directing and animating it all in After Effects. He also produced the song's drums and synths, with the contributions of his fellow Red Abbott musicians Chip Means (guitar, vocals) and J.A. Madera (piano, vocals).

The Sarah Lawrence College grad's original 2.5D animated work is mirrored by his unique musical approach. Each band member of Red Abbott lives in a different city (New York, Portland, Maine; and Charlotte, NC), so their album was formed "by one person coming up with a track for a song, sending that track to the next person who would add to it and send it to the next, and so on until the song was ready to be given a full arrangement with all its new parts," explains Brown. "We completed 12 tracks and our album is now waiting to be printed. It's an electro/rock/indie kind of thing, but with the care given that was allowed from the lack of needing coordinated studio time."

-Anthony Kaufman read more >>

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

How does one break into music videos? According to USC masters film student Brooke Hanson, 28, you contact a band you like and ask them if they want to make a music video: "That's what I did," she says. After Hanson found indie musician Laura Jansen's MySpace page through the website of a venue called Hotel Cafe, she sent Jansen a MySpace message saying, "Hey can I make you a music video?" Jansen messaged her back, saying, "Yes! yes! yes!" They met for coffee, found an instant creative connection, and the rest is do-it-yourself video history.

The duo's charming collaboration called "Bells" combines stop-motion animation, live-action, clever theatrical staging and witty lo-fi special effects. Although the video was inspired by a USC class, Hanson says she produced it independently, as she wanted to own the rights and have the ability to stream the video online. "USC is particularly restrictive of students showing their work online," she confesses, "and I was just 'over' doing material that I would invest thousands of my own dollars in only to see it subsumed by the University."

Shot in a warehouse in South Central Los Angeles with built sets, the film was inspired by Olivier Gondry's Hot, Hot Heat "Goodnight" video (where the guys are animated and sing on their T-shirts). "I thought printing out frames and re-photographing in stop motion would be a good way to make something look cool on the cheap," she says. "I thought of the postcard because the concept Laura and I were working with was 'communication,' and it seemed to make sense."

"On the whole," she admits, "the work of both the Gondry brothers has both intimidated and inspired me."

Currently, Hanson is finishing up her thesis film, "Borderless," which she says is about a college student and illegal immigrant, who has resorted to living in the university's 24-hour library.

-Anthony Kaufman

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

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."

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

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

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."

From Spite Your Face Productions's Tony Mines, the London-based director of our favorite lego-film "Spider-Man: The Peril of Doc Ock," comes this rocking animated video for The Errorplain's new single "Learn 'Em." Inspired by old Nintendo 8-bit hand-held video games, "because it just looks cool," Mines writes on his blog, the project was made as an experiment with 2-frame animation.