Years ago I had a VHS tape in my possession about the history of the New York Knicks (NBA basketball team for anyone unaware). I watched this tape dozens of times, as I was an absolute die-hard Knicks fan (until they abandoned Patrick Ewing and the owners ran the team into the ground, but that's a story for another time). On this tape was an interview with Bill Bradley, who played the position of small forward and was a core member of two championship Knicks teams in the early 1970's. Bradley was discussing the two championships in 1970 and 1973 and remarked about something that always stuck with me: what he was most proud about was being a member of a special team for a period.

EPIC FU recently won its second Webby Award over the past three years, with four total nominations during that time. This year it was the People's Voice Award for Best Reality/Variety Host (yay, Zadi!). It's great to win awards, but what made me really proud about this one was that it meant that we have been a quality show for a period. It's hard enough doing anything successful in the entertainment business, and on the web things move at a pace that makes everything else look like it's standing still. So to have been a part of building something that has been special for a period stands out in my mind and makes me very proud.

EPIC FU is about to undergo a transition, something on which we've kind of cornered the market in our three years of producing the show. I'm hoping that our new approach and format will will keep our fans excited and cultivate the same kind of loyal, generous audience we've enjoyed so far. EPIC FU is the kind of show that can go on for 20 years under the right circumstances; we still feel like we have such a long way to go.

We had a great creative team in 2008, who I mention all the time but can't seem to thank enough: producer Rick Rey, editor Mike Ambs, co-producer Sarah Atwood, production assistant Annie Tsai, and editor Daniel Merlot. We also have to thank Barrett Garese of UTA for working so closely with us and being anything but a typical agent.

Online video has taken some stiff blows to the chin over the past few months, but we're all hanging in there because we still believe that this thing can really change the landscape of media. Now that the big entertainment companies are in the water with us, independent creators need to stay fast and lean, take the opportunities when they come, and try to build something that will last.

Huge thanks to everyone who voted for us in the 2009 Webby's!

Someone up there is smiling on us, because last Tuesday we woke up to discover that we were nominated for the Webby Awards on Online Film/Video for the third year in a row for EPIC FU. Not only that, we received two nominations, one for Best Reality/Variety Host, and one for Best Variety series.

In case you're not familiar with the Webby Awards, this is the 13th year of the event. The gala will be hosted by Seth Meyers from Saturday Night Live for the second straight year. Here's a snippet from their website:

Hailed as the "Internet's highest honor" by The New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobile web sites. Established in 1996, the 13th Annual Webby Awards received over 10,000 entries from all 50 states and over 60 countries worldwide. The Webby Awards is presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

Needless to say, we're very honored. I think what I'm most proud of is having created a show that has been of a high enough quality to be consistently recognized over the three years we've been creating it. The company we're keeping is first rate. In the categories in which we are nominated this year, we're extremely proud to be alongside Boing Boing, David Pogue from The New York Times, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon from NBC, The Best Short Films in the World from Next New Networks, Moblogic from CBS, Matty Blake from NBC Sports, and Rocketboom.

Screenshot of the Webby Awards People's Voice voting form

The Webbys have two types of awards: People's Voice and the Judges' Award. The People's Voice winner is a result of online voting, so we can really use your vote! Luckily it's very easy!

1. Register (it takes 30 seconds) or Login if you have already registered this year.
2. Click this shortcut link to jump to the Online Film/Video » Best Reality/Variety Host category. Submit your vote and come back here.
3. Click this shortcut link to jump to the Online Film/Video » Variety category. Submit your vote.

Thanks so much for the support and love!

Photo by The Bui Brothers.

There was a red carpet, lots of press coverage, and a ceremony that looked very much like something you might see for the Emmy Awards. There were celebrities, new content creators, and familiar faces from our travels that looked energized, surprised, and in some cases, not entirely sure what to make of the whole thing. In fact, it's taken me a couple of days just to process everything and get a perspective on the evening.

Zoe Bell and Rosario Dawson. Photo by The Bui Brothers.

Somewhere in the course of the evening, EPIC FU won one of the awards for which we were nominated, Best Hosted Series. I can sincerely say that we did not expect to win, given the quality and popularity of the shows nominated in our category (all of them friends). I can remember the moment when the presenters of our category, Jace Hall and Bob Kushell, announced EPIC FU as the winner. Zadi and I just looked at each other and said, "Holy shit!" Then we took a breath and realized we needed to get up and get on stage.

Photo by Wm. Marc Salsberry.

We're tremendously proud to be recognized by our peers in The International Academy of Web Television, and we share the honor with the people who worked with us on the show in 2008, namely Rick Rey, Sarah Atwood, Annie Tsai, Mike Ambs, and Daniel Merlot. We also have to thank Barrett Garese, our agent at UTA. In 2008 we also worked with two of the major digital studios, Next New Networks and Revision3, good people all, so we want to be sure they are acknowledged for their help in producing EPIC FU, particularly Tim Shey and Fred Seibert at NNN, who have been more than just business partners, they have been mentors and friends.

Above all, we have to thank our amazing audience, fans, and community members, who have stuck with us through the years, through a name change, through a sometimes erratic schedule, and still contributed piles of huge awesomeness to everything we do. You guys are the BEST.

Photo by George Ruiz.

Zadi was also honored to present an award, Best Writing in a Dramatic Series, which went to the writers of the Battlestar Galactica: Face of the Enemy mini-series. She looked fantastic up there, especially considering she was wearing four-inch heels. If you know Zadi, you know that's not the norm. :)

Photo by The Bui Brothers.

After the awards we went over to the Palomar Hotel for the after-party, which was packed to the gills and full of schmoozing of epic proportions. I emptied out a pocket full of business cards when I got home, and I thought about how enthused everyone seems in the world of online video right now. You would have never thought we were in the worst economic climate since the Great Depression of the 1930's. I think that means the second half of 2009 will be better than the first for everyone.

Photo by Kodak@Flickr.

I've always looked at awards shows from both sides of the coin: they can be of great value in building an entertainment property, but no one is ever happy with the way everything is put together. While I think that the Streamys had some problems -- not quirky enough, missing categories to separate studio productions from indies, missing categories for videobloggers -- all in all it was an epic success that will do wonders to raise awareness of online video creators in the larger entertainment world. My hat is off to Drew Baldwin, Brady Brim-DeForest, Joshua Cohen, Marc Hustvedt, and Jamison Tilsner for everything they put into making this thing work. It did, and you guys should be proud of it. Nothing will be the same from here on out.

We came, we interviewed, we edited! During the three days of PBS's SXSW online video studio, we shot 31 interviews, featuring an all-star assortment of filmmakers, online video creators, and social media visionaries. They're all handily embedded above in the YouTube playlist player (click the control button to the right of the "play" button to bring up a menu). Our interview with Felicia Day has nearly 70,000 views alone!

Zadi Diaz, Felicia Day, Steve Woolf from a photo by George Ruiz on Flickr

Big thanks to all the folks at PBS we worked with to help put everything together -- Jeannine Harvey, Kevin Dando, Jayme Swain, Jasmine Bullin, Laura Hertzfeld, Thomas Crenshaw, and the Docubloggers for their help with equipment! We're very proud to have spent this weekend with them!

And an extra-special thanks to Rick Rey, the producer in charge of post-production for our adventures at SXSW, who spent long days juggling importing, editing, and exporting/uploading duties from three workstations set up in a hotel room!

It's conference season, and this week both Zadi and I will be on a panel at NXT STAGE 09. If you're in L.A. and interested in digital entertainment, they have a nice lineup of speakers and two days worth of panels.

Tubefilter's Brady Brim-DeForest was kind enough to ask us to join a panel he is moderating called "Transforming Organic Community into a Sustainable Brand." We'll be paneling it up with two other awesome people, Kim Evey, the producer of the ridiculously popular The Guild and the hilarious Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, and Miles Beckett, Co-founder & CEO of EQAL, the studio behind the lonelygirl15 universe of shows, and the forthcoming Harper's Globe created with CBS. Nice company!

If you'll be at the conference, please stop by and say hello! Here's the info for our panel:

Transforming Organic Community into a Sustainable Brand
March 25th at 2:45pm

Renaissance Hollywood Hotel & Spa
1755 N. Highland Ave
Hollywood, CA 90028
Phone: 800-769-4774
Fax: 310-551-3395

This an industry conference targeting specifically pre and post-production executives as well as programming executives from the film/tv production sector. The premise of the conference is that there are significant number of trade shows/conferences that address the commercial and technical aspects of the content markets yet very few that focus on the creative/production aspects. Think about Digital Hollywood and the number of panels that were dedicated to the pure logistics of ad serving! As a result, while the business models and technologies have rapidly evolved, the creative process has been left lagging behind. The writers, producers and programming executives have not been told that they, too, are stakeholders in this new digital world. This is the opportunity for the platform solution providers and the distributors to bring the creative production community into our evolving digital world.

The Streamy Awards are designed to recognize outstanding achievement for shows produced originally for broadband distribution, and we're thrilled that EPIC FU is nominated in two categories, Best Hosted Web Series, and Best Host!

This is the Streamy's inaugural year and they held an open nomination process that received over 100,000 submissions. Three of the top industry blogs that cover online video are behind the Streamy's, GigaOm's NewTeeVee, Tubefilter, and Tilzy.TV. They've done a bang-up job with the site, and the official nominees were announced on March 14.

The International Academy of Web Television is the voting body behind The Streamy Awards, and Zadi and I are extremely honored to be among the inaugural Academy Members. Our fellow members are all very accomplished and influential in their respective fields, and we are all pleased that online video is taking bold steps forward as it gains more and more notoriety in the mainstream.

Kudos to Drew Baldwin, Brady Brim-DeForest, Joshua Cohen, Marc Hustvedt, Liz Shannon Miller, and Jamison Tilsner for their tireless work to put all of this together. Join us at the ceremony and gala on March 28th at the Wadsworth Theater in Los Angeles!

We're really excited to be working with PBS this year for SXSW!

From Zadi's blog post about it:

We'll be working with PBS and partying it up at the PBS Interactive Social Media and Online Video Studio, so make sure to drop by! We'll be interviewing and hanging out with filmmakers, interactive visionaries and online producers, and generally people who are doing awesome stuff! We'll also be running around the convention floor, so if you see us, pull us over and say hi!

PBS HQ for this year's SXSW will be at 406 E. 6th Street (2 blocks from the convention center). We'll be there Saturday, March 14th - Monday, March 16th, from 12-6pm. Happy Hour starts at 6pm, and at 6:30pm we'll have Live performances by Paul Dateh, David Kitchen, and Alejandro Escovedo

If you can't make it to SXSW, don't worry, we'll be streaming it ALL Live at http://pbs.org/sxsw. We'll also be tweeting throughout our stay, so you can get updates of our adventures at http://twitter.com/pbsengage, http://twitter.com/zadi, and http://twitter.com/stevewoolf.

Zadi will also be on two panels. Friday at 3:30pm, Room 18BCD: How to Rawk SXSW: The Basics, and Saturday @ 5:00pm, Room 12AB: The Ten Worst Social Media Campaigns. We're also glad to have the help of Rick Rey to help us keep our head above water with the PBS interviews!

Hope to see you there!

Check out a new series we created for Next New Networks' WePCtv network, called Hacking Hollywood! It's sponsored by Asus and Intel, and we had a great time shooting it.

We wanted to take a look at some of the ridiculous (or awesome) tech shown in Hollywood movies and tv shows and get some savvy online peeps to sit down and give us their thoughts about it. If you've ever seen Best Week Ever or I Love the 80's on VH1, you'll quickly recognize the format. It works really well on the web, especially when you're lucky enough to have smart and funny people on camera being themselves.

Hacking Hollywood will run for 6 episodes on the WePCtv network, and we'll cover clips from Star Trek, The Terminator, The Net, CSI, 24, and The Dark Knight. If you follow online video, you'll recognize many of the rock star people who will appear on camera (alphabetically by last name):

• Sarah Atwood - Epic Fu, Her website
• Sean Bury - Invisible Engine, His Tumblr
• Chris Cantwell - Invisible Engine, His Tumblr
• Zadi Diaz - Epic Fu, Her website
• Clint Gage - Team Tiger Awesome, His Tumblr
• Rudy Jahchan - Galacticast, His website
• Jeff Macpherson - Tiki Bar TV
• Casey McKinnon - Galacticast, Her website
• Nick Mundy - Team Tiger Awesome, His Tumblr
• Kent Nichols - Ask a Ninja, His website
• Rick Rey - Epic Fu, His website
• Jessica Mae Stover - Artemis Eternal, Her website
• Michael Truly - Team Tiger Awesome, His Tumblr
• Matt Wyatt - Invisible Engine, His Tumblr

Big shout out to Rick Rey for producing the series and Mike Ambs for helping edit everything! And thanks to Felicia Williams and Kathleen Grace at Next New Networks for getting us involved and keepings things chugging along! Please check it out and leave a comment if you dig it!

We don't post often to the Smashface blog because we're usually busy making content and staying involved with the online video community. But when we do post something, it usually has to do with a major event or announcement. This falls into that category.

Seems like we just posted the announcement about EPIC FU joining forces with Revision3 in a web licensing deal, but about a week ago Revision3 let us know that despite a year of record revenue and viewership, they are feeling the effects of the economic crunch and need to make some urgent and tough decisions. As of the end of 2008, Revision3 will no longer be the web licensing partner for EPIC FU, and we'll be leaving their network of shows. We wish Revision3 luck in the coming months and remain a fan and supporter of their shows.

There's been some well-documented contraction in the tech world lately, and the online video sector is feeling the effects. A harsh fourth quarter downturn in advertising sales combined with the decrease in licensing revenue for EPIC FU means that Smashface has also had to scale back by laying off three members of our production team. If you're looking for talented production personnel, Zadi and I heartily recommend getting in touch with Rick Rey, who produced 30+ episodes of EPIC FU and has been involved in creating the show for over a year. We will also miss Sarah Atwood, who co-produced over a dozen shows with us, and Daniel Merlot, a talented and versatile editor.

As we have since June 1, 2006, we will continue to produce the show each week and our long-term goals remain the same: find the best partners to grow and expand the EPIC FU brand across different mediums. With over 30 million views across the web since we launched, we know we've only scratched the surface of what we can do with this show. Although this economic climate is likely to stay with us for an extended period, the future of online video is too large to be permanently affected by this tough time.

On August 16 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Zadi and I are privileged to have been invited to give a keynote address for the 2008 New Media Expo, now in its fourth year.

Big thanks to Tim Bourquin and Emile Bourquin, the founders and organizers of the Expo (a.k.a. the Podcast Brothers). We've attended the past two years and watched the video community assemble from across the country and chat it up in the halls. Now that the event is being held in Vegas, it should be quite the party, and we should see tons of new faces descending into Sin City to find out more about this whole new media thing.

Our friend and colleague Sunny Gault of L.A. New Media will interview us on stage for the keynote, so it'll be more casual than a traditional address. And we'll leave time at the end of the keynote for questions from the audience. Sunny is working on setting up a live video stream of the interview, and I'll post an update here as we find out more about it.

If you have any questions for us, you can have it presented via video and answered at the keynote. Just record yourself asking the question and post a link to it in the comments below (or email it to us). I also posted a thread on MIX asking the EPIC FU'ers for any video question submissions. I'm not sure how many Sunny will be able to use, but anything that we don't answer at the keynote we will answer here. :)

Hope to see you in Vegas! Here are the details for our keynote:

9:00am - 9:50am (open to all attendees)
Keynote Guests: Zadi Diaz and Steve Woolf of Epic Fu
Keynote Host: Sunny Gault of L.A. New Media
Location: N250
Description: Zadi Diaz and Steve Woolf are the minds behind (and in Zadi's case, the host of) Epic Fu, the groundbreaking video podcast about art, culture and all things Internet. Sunny Gault will interview these two new media mavens and discuss how they are building a loyal community of fans around their content. Find out how they are creating shows around subjects they are passionate about and at the same time, generating revenue as a business. Sunny will also ask them about their recent business developments and what they see as the opportunities for podcasters and online video creators in the year ahead.

I'm pleased to announce that Smashface signed an agreement with Revision3 to exclusively licensing and distribute EPIC FU across the web! Wait, what -- oh -- you mean, you've already heard? And saw it here, here, and here???

Yeah, I guess you can call this blog post long overdue, but we are thrilled to be working with the folks at Revision3! They've been doing the online video thing going all the way back to 2005, and the core fans they brought with them from TechTV have built a really passionate audience.

The deal between us got finalized very quickly, and we've been so busy creating two shows a week that we've barely had time to keep up with everything else! I've had this blog post on my to-do list for 3 weeks already.

But now we're starting to scale our show, with Rick Rey as a full-time producer, Sarah Atwood co-producing, Annie Tsai as our production assistant, and a couple of freelance editors pitching in, too. We have big, big plans, and we're glad to have a company like Revision3 on the same page with us, helping us get to our mutual goals.

Ok, enough talk. Back to work! http://blog.smashface.com/2008/07/omg1_epic_fu_revision3.html http://blog.smashface.com/2008/07/omg1_epic_fu_revision3.html epicfu revision3 Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:54:22 -0800

Judging by the number of inquiries we get every day asking about EPIC FU from our truly amazing viewers, a lot of you have noticed that we haven't posted a new episode of the show since late March. We'll be back in about a week, but the hiatus we've taken has allowed us to refuel the creative gas tanks and think about the future of the show.

As we come up on the two-year anniversary for EPIC FU in early June, we can't help but think about how much the show has changed over the years. The early JETSET episodes were constituted as a variety and sketch show. We spent those first nine months identifying our viewers and transitioning into the format that became a resource and hangout for so many more people than we could have expected.

In March of 2007 we entered a licensing partnership with Next New Networks, and in the past year EPIC FU has come into its own. We benefitted from the advertising relationships they created and from their super-distribution strategy, which helped us bring in audiences at video hosting sites across the web. We were always on the same page about the importance of creativity, community, and interactivity as core elements of everything related to the show.

We spent a lot of time talking with Tim Shey, Fred Seibert, Jed Simmons, Herb Scannell, and their very talented team. The amount of knowledge they were willing to share with us about building brands and developing business strategies helped expand our thinking and made us examine what we are creating in ways we had not considered previously. We are fortunate to have people like them as mentors and friends.

After much consideration and discussion with NNN, we've decided to go our separate ways. As Tim wrote on the NNN company blog, it's no secret that we're good friends and really enjoyed our time working together. You know a partnership has been a success if each side comes out stronger for it. With NNN racking up something like 30 million video views a month across their networks these days, we fully expect them to continue to be viewed as leaders in our young industry.

The next stage for each of us is more focused than it has ever been. With so many strong brands and entertaining shows, NNN has something for everyone. And EPIC FU will be back soon with new shows, great guests, and plenty of Zadi snaps. :)

We're really proud to be able to say that EPIC-FU is nominated for a 2008 Webby Award in the Variety category of Film & Video! It's really exciting because we won the People's Voice Webby Award in 2007 for JETSET, which would eventually evolve into EPIC-FU.

Zadi, Rick, and I have all worked very hard to make a show that strives to be consistently creative and entertaining, as well as a resource of information and a tastemaker for our audience. We have some very tough competition this year, including our friend Alex Albrecht's show The Totally Rad Show, along with Tom Green, The NY Times, and our friends at Good Magazine.

If you watch the show and you like EPIC-FU, please take a couple of minutes to vote for us for the People's Voice award. If you're registered and logged in, you can click this link to go directly to the form. Otherwise you can find us by going to pv.webbyawards.com and going to Film & Video and voting in the Variety category. Thanks!

And a special thanks to Rick Rey, our erstwhile associate producer who gets very little of the credit for his work on the show, but has a lot to do with its content and creativity. Rock on, Rick!

A couple of weeks ago an EPIC-FU episode was featured on the home page of YouTube thanks to the generous selection of their editors. We expected to get a nice amount of views, but we never expected the episode to move past 3 million views when all was said and done. In fact, the episode is still compiling about 10-20,000 views per day as of the time of this writing.

We're obviously very happy that the show is resonating with the largest community of web video aficionados on the Internet. It's gives us a great sense of validation to know that we created a weekly show that can generate those kinds of numbers. Not easy to do these days.

What was especially interesting to us was to watch this video run away from all the other videos that were featured on YouTube at the same time as us. No other video crossed the million mark during the week we were featured. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about why that happened to try and understand the dynamics that affect viewership on popular video hosting sites.

For one thing, we've been producing regular content for a year and a half with JETSET and now EPIC-FU. So to some extent we can call the built-in audience a factor in the video's explosive views. But we didn't have a significantly greater number of YouTube subscribers than many other shows that have been featured and did not experience such a high number of views.

Another possible factor is that we always place a frame strategically in the exact middle of the upload so that when YouTube generates its preview thumbnail, prospective viewers are given a sense of the tone and personality of the show when reviewing the myriad choices for them to watch. However this image is quite small, and some videos that typically experience large view numbers have scantily clad women or mainstream celebrities as their preview image. Our preview image of this video is shown at left.

Then there's the title of the video: taking no sh1t, internet love song, writer's guild. A very typical title for us since we cover so much ground in each episode. It's somewhat provocative, but is definitely less so than many other videos.

Finally we come to the content of the video. We touched on a number of politically charged stories that engendered a great deal of discussion in the comments under the video. In particular we said some things about the Writer's Guild of America strike that is currently taking place. These statements seemed to provoke a really strong reaction from many viewers on both sides of the issue. Given the timing of the strike and the topical nature of the commentary in our video, this seems to be a strong factor in people watching the video and then passing it along to their friends to see, which is the really important factor in generating huge view numbers.

So without getting more scientific about it, it seems like we had a combination of factors that led to the breakout number of views. Good title, solid preview image, passionate existing fanbase, and provocative content. This is the kind of formula we strive to have in every show so that when the opportunity comes along to be promoted on a place like the YouTube home page, we are able to take maximum advantage of that exposure.

Are there any other major factors that I've missed? Why do you think this video has 4X the number of views of any other EPIC-FU video on YouTube?

I don't want to turn this blog into solely Smashface media mentions, we've just had a few more than usual lately. This was a really nice cover story in L.A. Weekly about our friends at UTA. Zadi and I are mentioned a couple of times in the piece when Gendy Alimurung came by to be present for the live show (then JETSET) we did back at the end of July.

It's a nice inside look into a typical week in the life of these guys, who are all trying to figure out the online video landscape with the rest of us. Agents typically get a bad rap, but Barrett Garese (the "nerd" in the article, on the right of the picture below) has been our main representative for the past year and he's been a good friend and contributed a lot of creative thinking to Smashface.

A lot of other content creators ask us about our experience with an agency like UTA, and this is a good view of what things are like. The notable exception is the out-of-context quote from Ryan Reber, who is *not* always schmoozing someone.

Congrats on the awesome article, guys!