[Cross-posted on the Video Vortex website]

Upload Cinema is a monthly video spree that quite literally takes the most valuable YouTube gems to the big screen. That is, the not-so-big one of the Uitkijk, the smallest and coziest movie theater in Amsterdam.
Dutch creative director Dagan Cohen and cinema programmer Barbara de Wijn started the initiative because they thought (the best) YouTube videos deserved a bigger screen. So, to make sure they selected only the most compelling, they made the format of their cinematic get-together strictly editorial and topical, with a monthly theme explored with the help of experts and, of course, crowd-sourced suggestions from the users of their website. (more…)

[Cross-posted on the Video Vortex website]

A media theorist and lecturer at Leicester’s De Montfort University, Andrew Clay has been investigating online video for some time. As an opener of the sixth edition of Video Vortex, his intervention explored YouTube and effectively went a bit beyond, as the Reader tagline suggests. The British theorist raised several compelling questions about the popular video sharing platform, inspiring the audience to ask quite a few questions at the end. In particular, his analysis of the top YouTubers – the ones who got rich by putting serial sketches online and engaging the community – took stock of the YouTube experience so far, focusing on the blurrier and blurrier distinction between amateurs and professionals. (more…)

I originally published this article on Ymag.

As you might have read somewhere (like here, here or here), Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez has just signed a deal with Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures for a future feature sci-fi movie. Raimi was impressed by a short clip Alvarez created and posted on YouTube (see video above), immediately becoming a hit on the video-sharing platform. AtaqueDePànico shows some giant robots attacking the city of Montevideo and destroying all its landmarks, eventually exploding and reducing everything to rubble in a surprisingly good FX spree.

Little else happens in the short movie, which has nonetheless been compared to Neill Blomkamp's Alive in Joberg, the one that eventually led to District 9. Which one is better and YouTube's exact role in hi-jacking the attention of the Hollywood industry's talent scouts are debates I'll leave for other occasions. What I'm really curious about is: where will Alvarez's feature film be set?
As we've seen before, Peter Jackson's support to District 9 has been rather invisible and not patronizing, allowing Blomkamp's movie to become an unprecedented example of sci-fi imagery going global and enriching itself with unexpected locations and social actuality. Seeing Johannesburg taking the place of New York as the theater of human-alien confrontation was one of the reasons why I think the movie is significant: it was also an opportunity to legitimate the ascension of local geographies to the status of global imagery. (more…)

This is a video I made last year. It’s a tribute video to american stand-up, to the wide range of subjects it tackles with the most varied approaches, from crass swearwords to the noblest spiritual investigation and purposes. I’m sorry the quality sucks so bad, but (as you’ll be able to tell) i’m not a pro at video-making.