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.

Previous editions of Upload Cinema have included “The Perfect Speech” (just before the American elections), “Video Gastronomy” (pretty self-explanatory), and of course “Pussy Galore” (which, for the dirty-minded out there, is the mandatory focus on YouTube feline celebrities).
Just like the videos it screens, Upload Cinema has gone viral and the brand has been exported to 15 Dutch towns, but also beyond national borders (e.g. Barcelona and Madrid). Cohen said they’re not going Pecha Kucha-style yet (by which I mean franchising their format) in order to preserve the quality of the selection, but they have been having collaborations and special events apart from the usual monthly meeting.
The most successful of this latter type, titled quite grandiously “The Canon of YouTube” (which gives you an idea of how serious they are about selecting the highest-quality stuff), culminated in a live dancing performance involving the audience and the ever-green YouTube hit “the Numa Numa song”.
As Cohen said, sometimes viral is something very physical.

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.

Criticizing taste-based evaluations of content such as Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, Clay took notice of the most successful video genres – that is, comedy and entertainment-enhanced news. What seems to be the most interesting aspect of the phenomenon to the British professor, though, is the community and the networking possibilities that it enables. Top YouTubers not only partake in the same superstardom, amplified by increasing collaborations with each other, but also have the capacity to engage the audience in a participatory media space, as well as casual crowds.

Apart from the YouTube-specific discourse, Clay put the platform in relation to other preexisting media – like Mtv, once the mainstream source for edgy content – and pondered on future developments. For example, it is clear that the website wants to get more and more involved with television, while maintaining and extending its online supremacy even by schooling and workshops in less media-savvy countries – a bit like Current TV did in its early days.

If YouTube’s merit has been that of bringing niche into the mainstream – narrowing the technical gap between professionals and amateurs – according to Clay there is a deeper, hidden purpose that drives people to struggle in order to establish their niche presence on the internet giant’s surface. Quoting German philosopher Martin Heidegger, he argues such focus on inauthentic lives is a human attenpt to scare death away. We don’t know if the Annoying Orange will be forever remembered, but it might definitely survive its author.

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.

Palacio Salvo tower, Montevideo's most famous landmark

But we know Peter Jackson is the New Zealand-born father of wacky pop-culture-bludgeoning underground gems such as Meet the Feebles, and I personally think (wish?) some of that has survived despite his later mainstream exploits (read: King Kong). Rephrasing that: he's not the Industry.
On the other side we have Sam Raimi and his Hollywood-based company. Although the Evil Dead-father has himself been toying and experimenting with genres, famously ranging from horror to comedy in the span of one trilogy, the production background is different than Jackson's and definitely Alvarez's flick will be likely to have a different kind of peer-pressure to begin with.

Will the next alien invasion be an opportunity to extend the sci-fi map and have a fresh look at Uruguayans having to deal (for once) with aliens, or will the rare low-budget prologue to the movie remain a signal for the entertainment industry and commercial strategies 2.0, with Alvarez's robots bombing (yet one more time) the Statue of Liberty?

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.