'Dr. Horrible' crashed after 'insanely huge' traffic

"Dr. Horrible," which is now the No. 1 TV show (and TV season) on iTunes, is off to a roaring start.

Roaring so hard, in fact, that the DrHorrible.com site was down most of the day Tuesday because it couldn't handle all the incoming requests. 

The show creators said at peak, the site was getting 200,000 hits per hour. In fact, a representative from their web hosting company, Vireo Verio.com, called to tell them the site had crashed when, at one point, 1,000 people tried to access it in one second. 

According to "Dr. Horrible" writer Maurissa Tancharoen, the representative told the creators that the traffic to DrHorrible.com had been "insanely huge."

Though the creators had anticipated being able to handle the traffic loads with a large bandwidth plan, Tancharoen said they upgraded to the largest "monster" plan their provider offered, which comes with a backup server in case the primary fails.

In addition, the Hulu player that originally wasn't allowing international viewers to watch has been tweaked so the episode is now available everywhere. 

Also:

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success
Q&A: Whedon examines 'Dr. Horrible'
Whedon Expects 'Horrible' to break even
Photo Gallery: Behind the Scenes of 'Dr. Horrible'

Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is up to no good in his Horrible lab. (Photo credit: Amy Opoka.)

Dr. Horrible is good!

And that’s exactly his problem. The title character of the landmark new Web musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” played by the lovable and unmenacing Neil Patrick Harris, dreams of gaining admission to the vaunted Evil League of Evil, home of the baddest baddies in the land. But he’s kidding himself. Dr. H. is too skittish to harm innocents or wreak much havoc. The ray guns he invents never seem to work that well, and his cackle is so wimpy he’s hired a voice coach.

Plus, what kind of criminal mastermind has a blog?

Ask Joss Whedon. He’s the guy who’s built a career on bending genres. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he dreamed up a 16-year-old girl who sent vampires back to hell. And “Firefly,” Whedon’s short-lived 2002 TV show, was a Western, except, in space.

So it’s only fitting that Whedon would create a show like “Dr. Horrible.” He makes bad guys into good guys and good into bad, writes a superhero epic where every three minutes the characters break out in song, and most death defying of all, he puts the whole thing on the Internet.

Below is a short trailer for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," the much-anticipated three-part musical from "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.

"Dr. Horrible" stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion, and Whedon describes it as follows: “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

The series, comprised of three 10-minute episodes, is poised to premiere on the Internet--most likely next month. Whedon began working on it during the writers strike, and it represents his first major experiment with Web-original programming. 

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Last week, someone in the online video business gave me a simple tip.

"Fred," the guy said.

"Fred?" I said.

"Yes," he said. "Kids love Fred."

I had not heard of Fred, much less known that kids loved him. But that would swiftly end. As soon as I could, I searched for Fred on YouTube and found his video channel. There were plenty of videos, and I hunkered down to watch.

A warning before I continue: Fred is for immature audiences only. The following article may contain themes and language that are unsuitable for anyone over 16.

The first thing about Fred is that he brings new meaning to the word hyper. The fictional 6-year-old, invented and played by 14-year-old Nebraskan Lucas Cruikshank, is a fast-talking tyke with "temper problems," an absentee father and a propensity to screech if things don't go his way. If those traits aren't enough to dissuade you, Fred's voice is 'chipmunked,' raising it several octaves above Cruikshank's own to achieve, if not maximum verisimilitude, then certainly maximum annoyingness. Try to imagine a shrill, halting super-soprano bleating these lines from an episode called "Fred Goes Swimming":

"I'm ready to go inside the pool! Oh my God, it's cold. I love swimming. I love swimming! This pool is small. On TV I saw a pool that was really big . . . oh my God, there's a shark! I'm scared. Just kidding, it's just a toy shark. I got you!"

Doesn't sound like your cup of tea? That makes two of us. Let us say we are outnumbered; with nearly 250,000 subscribers, Fred's YouTube channel is the fourth most subscribed in the site's history. Meaning every time he posts a new video, nearly a quarter of a million people get notified.

Since he created his channel less than two months ago, Fred has racked up more subscribers than almost all of YouTube's old guard, passing up lonelygirl15, LisaNova, kevjumba, and sxephil. He's also got more subscribers than the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, Soulja Boy, and oh yeah, CBS.
   

Revision3 has made another high-profile acquisition by adding wine expert Gary Vaynerchuk to the fold starting June 23. Vaynerchuck's popular Wine Library TV, which Revision3 says brings in more than 60,000 viewers every day, stars the blue-streak-talking Jersey boy as he sniffs, swishes and spits his way through a bottle or three per episode. Vaynerchuk loves the Jets as much as he loves a good '82 Bordeaux -- he sometimes wears a wristband of the one while rotating a glass of the other. This unsnobby charm mixes well with his insistence that viewers trust their own palate rather than what the experts say, an approach that has won "GaryVee" plenty of fans and followers -- he's got more than 9,000 on Twitter alone. 

In the episode below, Gary gives a second chance to a Kosher Cabernet that he panned last year.

Digging further into the surprisingly diverse world of video game-based Web series, I found Jon Graham's "Arby 'n' the Chief," a highly amusing blend of machinima and live action whose two main characters are plastic action figurines from the "Halo" game series.  (Can't link because there's cursing, etc.) 

In a Toy Story-slash-Garfield sort of way, Arby and Master Chief come alive when their human owner Jon leaves for the day. The toys are bound by their passion for video games; Arby, the more mature and cerebral of the two, enjoys playing a variety of titles and prizes strategy and analysis over wanton violence. Chief just likes to blow dudes up.  In the show's funniest touch, the voices of both characters come from the '80s-era voice simulator built in to early versions of Microsoft Windows. Whereas Arby speaks in well-formed, thoughtful sentences, Chief speaks in 'l33t' -- the orthographic shorthand gamers use to type hasty messages while playing. So when Chief surprises a terrified in-game opponent who screams, "What are you?!" Chief replies triumphantly, "i r guy who gon t33ch u less0n." 

What the show gets at best is the way live, multiplayer games like Halo bring together disparate demographics, uniting pre-teens and 40-year-old bachelors in an uneasy alliance of mindless fun. 

As with a lot of other YouTube content, this works best for the very niche it tries to capture, which in this case is males who play video games.  "Arby 'n' the Chief" has consistently pulled in over 1.5 million views over its 11 episodes -- more evidence that the gaming subculture might be graduating from "sub"-hood as we sp33k.

Big Fantastic director Ryan Wise filming stars of "Foreign Body" (Photo by Anne Cusack / LAT)

By the time the new Web series "Foreign Body" premieres  May 27, Chris, Chris, Ryan and Doug -- the four-headed directing collective known as Big Fantastic -- will have delivered 230 episodes of Web TV in less than two years. "Seinfeld" barely managed 180 shows and it was on for a decade. True, these webisodes are exponentially shorter -- usually two minutes, tops -- but somehow that doesn't make the production schedule any less grueling, or their boss any less Michael Eisner.

Big Fantastic had a scanty 24 days to shoot all 50 two-minute episodes of "Foreign Body," a thriller set in the messy world of medical tourism, where the broke and adventurous unwell seek bargain surgery abroad. The production is shuttling from the bazaars of Delhi to the beaches of Malibu, to an L.A. hospital-cum-movie-set, which I dropped by last week to sneak a couple questions to the directors in between takes.

Being a four-headed monster helps keep everything moving fast -- the moment Chris Hampel is done with a shot, Chris McCaleb materializes to call the next one. Likewise before Ryan Wise is finished editing a scene, Doug Cheney has already started editing the next. And on and on, a constant, tail-chasing churn of planning and creation that perfectly suits the Internet's yawning appetite for content.

The perennial question, not just for these filmmakers but for anyone trying to make super-short-form serials is: Really now, how do you go about telling a story in two-minute increments?

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' is a site-crashing success

Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is up to no good in his Horrible lab. (Photo credit: Amy Opoka.)

Dr. Horrible is good!

And that’s exactly his problem. The title character of the landmark new Web musical, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” played by the lovable and unmenacing Neil Patrick Harris, dreams of gaining admission to the vaunted Evil League of Evil, home of the baddest baddies in the land. But he’s kidding himself. Dr. H. is too skittish to harm innocents or wreak much havoc. The ray guns he invents never seem to work that well, and his cackle is so wimpy he’s hired a voice coach.

Plus, what kind of criminal mastermind has a blog?

Ask Joss Whedon. He’s the guy who’s built a career on bending genres. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he dreamed up a 16-year-old girl who sent vampires back to hell. And “Firefly,” Whedon’s short-lived 2002 TV show, was a Western, except, in space.

So it’s only fitting that Whedon would create a show like “Dr. Horrible.” He makes bad guys into good guys and good into bad, writes a superhero epic where every three minutes the characters break out in song, and most death defying of all, he puts the whole thing on the Internet.

Below is a short trailer for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," the much-anticipated three-part musical from "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.

"Dr. Horrible" stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion, and Whedon describes it as follows: “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

The series, comprised of three 10-minute episodes, is poised to premiere on the Internet--most likely next month. Whedon began working on it during the writers strike, and it represents his first major experiment with Web-original programming. 

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Last week, someone in the online video business gave me a simple tip.

"Fred," the guy said.

"Fred?" I said.

"Yes," he said. "Kids love Fred."

I had not heard of Fred, much less known that kids loved him. But that would swiftly end. As soon as I could, I searched for Fred on YouTube and found his video channel. There were plenty of videos, and I hunkered down to watch.

A warning before I continue: Fred is for immature audiences only. The following article may contain themes and language that are unsuitable for anyone over 16.

The first thing about Fred is that he brings new meaning to the word hyper. The fictional 6-year-old, invented and played by 14-year-old Nebraskan Lucas Cruikshank, is a fast-talking tyke with "temper problems," an absentee father and a propensity to screech if things don't go his way. If those traits aren't enough to dissuade you, Fred's voice is 'chipmunked,' raising it several octaves above Cruikshank's own to achieve, if not maximum verisimilitude, then certainly maximum annoyingness. Try to imagine a shrill, halting super-soprano bleating these lines from an episode called "Fred Goes Swimming":

"I'm ready to go inside the pool! Oh my God, it's cold. I love swimming. I love swimming! This pool is small. On TV I saw a pool that was really big . . . oh my God, there's a shark! I'm scared. Just kidding, it's just a toy shark. I got you!"

Doesn't sound like your cup of tea? That makes two of us. Let us say we are outnumbered; with nearly 250,000 subscribers, Fred's YouTube channel is the fourth most subscribed in the site's history. Meaning every time he posts a new video, nearly a quarter of a million people get notified.

Since he created his channel less than two months ago, Fred has racked up more subscribers than almost all of YouTube's old guard, passing up lonelygirl15, LisaNova, kevjumba, and sxephil. He's also got more subscribers than the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, Soulja Boy, and oh yeah, CBS.
   

Revision3 has made another high-profile acquisition by adding wine expert Gary Vaynerchuk to the fold starting June 23. Vaynerchuck's popular Wine Library TV, which Revision3 says brings in more than 60,000 viewers every day, stars the blue-streak-talking Jersey boy as he sniffs, swishes and spits his way through a bottle or three per episode. Vaynerchuk loves the Jets as much as he loves a good '82 Bordeaux -- he sometimes wears a wristband of the one while rotating a glass of the other. This unsnobby charm mixes well with his insistence that viewers trust their own palate rather than what the experts say, an approach that has won "GaryVee" plenty of fans and followers -- he's got more than 9,000 on Twitter alone. 

In the episode below, Gary gives a second chance to a Kosher Cabernet that he panned last year.

Digging further into the surprisingly diverse world of video game-based Web series, I found Jon Graham's "Arby 'n' the Chief," a highly amusing blend of machinima and live action whose two main characters are plastic action figurines from the "Halo" game series.  (Can't link because there's cursing, etc.) 

In a Toy Story-slash-Garfield sort of way, Arby and Master Chief come alive when their human owner Jon leaves for the day. The toys are bound by their passion for video games; Arby, the more mature and cerebral of the two, enjoys playing a variety of titles and prizes strategy and analysis over wanton violence. Chief just likes to blow dudes up.  In the show's funniest touch, the voices of both characters come from the '80s-era voice simulator built in to early versions of Microsoft Windows. Whereas Arby speaks in well-formed, thoughtful sentences, Chief speaks in 'l33t' -- the orthographic shorthand gamers use to type hasty messages while playing. So when Chief surprises a terrified in-game opponent who screams, "What are you?!" Chief replies triumphantly, "i r guy who gon t33ch u less0n." 

What the show gets at best is the way live, multiplayer games like Halo bring together disparate demographics, uniting pre-teens and 40-year-old bachelors in an uneasy alliance of mindless fun. 

As with a lot of other YouTube content, this works best for the very niche it tries to capture, which in this case is males who play video games.  "Arby 'n' the Chief" has consistently pulled in over 1.5 million views over its 11 episodes -- more evidence that the gaming subculture might be graduating from "sub"-hood as we sp33k.

Big Fantastic director Ryan Wise filming stars of "Foreign Body" (Photo by Anne Cusack / LAT)

By the time the new Web series "Foreign Body" premieres  May 27, Chris, Chris, Ryan and Doug -- the four-headed directing collective known as Big Fantastic -- will have delivered 230 episodes of Web TV in less than two years. "Seinfeld" barely managed 180 shows and it was on for a decade. True, these webisodes are exponentially shorter -- usually two minutes, tops -- but somehow that doesn't make the production schedule any less grueling, or their boss any less Michael Eisner.

Big Fantastic had a scanty 24 days to shoot all 50 two-minute episodes of "Foreign Body," a thriller set in the messy world of medical tourism, where the broke and adventurous unwell seek bargain surgery abroad. The production is shuttling from the bazaars of Delhi to the beaches of Malibu, to an L.A. hospital-cum-movie-set, which I dropped by last week to sneak a couple questions to the directors in between takes.

Being a four-headed monster helps keep everything moving fast -- the moment Chris Hampel is done with a shot, Chris McCaleb materializes to call the next one. Likewise before Ryan Wise is finished editing a scene, Doug Cheney has already started editing the next. And on and on, a constant, tail-chasing churn of planning and creation that perfectly suits the Internet's yawning appetite for content.

The perennial question, not just for these filmmakers but for anyone trying to make super-short-form serials is: Really now, how do you go about telling a story in two-minute increments?

Joss Whedon's 'Dr. Horrible' trailer hits the net

Below is a short trailer for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," the much-anticipated three-part musical from "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon.

"Dr. Horrible" stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion, and Whedon describes it as follows: “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

The series, comprised of three 10-minute episodes, is poised to premiere on the Internet--most likely next month. Whedon began working on it during the writers strike, and it represents his first major experiment with Web-original programming. 

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Last week, someone in the online video business gave me a simple tip.

"Fred," the guy said.

"Fred?" I said.

"Yes," he said. "Kids love Fred."

I had not heard of Fred, much less known that kids loved him. But that would swiftly end. As soon as I could, I searched for Fred on YouTube and found his video channel. There were plenty of videos, and I hunkered down to watch.

A warning before I continue: Fred is for immature audiences only. The following article may contain themes and language that are unsuitable for anyone over 16.

The first thing about Fred is that he brings new meaning to the word hyper. The fictional 6-year-old, invented and played by 14-year-old Nebraskan Lucas Cruikshank, is a fast-talking tyke with "temper problems," an absentee father and a propensity to screech if things don't go his way. If those traits aren't enough to dissuade you, Fred's voice is 'chipmunked,' raising it several octaves above Cruikshank's own to achieve, if not maximum verisimilitude, then certainly maximum annoyingness. Try to imagine a shrill, halting super-soprano bleating these lines from an episode called "Fred Goes Swimming":

"I'm ready to go inside the pool! Oh my God, it's cold. I love swimming. I love swimming! This pool is small. On TV I saw a pool that was really big . . . oh my God, there's a shark! I'm scared. Just kidding, it's just a toy shark. I got you!"

Doesn't sound like your cup of tea? That makes two of us. Let us say we are outnumbered; with nearly 250,000 subscribers, Fred's YouTube channel is the fourth most subscribed in the site's history. Meaning every time he posts a new video, nearly a quarter of a million people get notified.

Since he created his channel less than two months ago, Fred has racked up more subscribers than almost all of YouTube's old guard, passing up lonelygirl15, LisaNova, kevjumba, and sxephil. He's also got more subscribers than the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, Soulja Boy, and oh yeah, CBS.
   

Revision3 has made another high-profile acquisition by adding wine expert Gary Vaynerchuk to the fold starting June 23. Vaynerchuck's popular Wine Library TV, which Revision3 says brings in more than 60,000 viewers every day, stars the blue-streak-talking Jersey boy as he sniffs, swishes and spits his way through a bottle or three per episode. Vaynerchuk loves the Jets as much as he loves a good '82 Bordeaux -- he sometimes wears a wristband of the one while rotating a glass of the other. This unsnobby charm mixes well with his insistence that viewers trust their own palate rather than what the experts say, an approach that has won "GaryVee" plenty of fans and followers -- he's got more than 9,000 on Twitter alone. 

In the episode below, Gary gives a second chance to a Kosher Cabernet that he panned last year.

Digging further into the surprisingly diverse world of video game-based Web series, I found Jon Graham's "Arby 'n' the Chief," a highly amusing blend of machinima and live action whose two main characters are plastic action figurines from the "Halo" game series.  (Can't link because there's cursing, etc.) 

In a Toy Story-slash-Garfield sort of way, Arby and Master Chief come alive when their human owner Jon leaves for the day. The toys are bound by their passion for video games; Arby, the more mature and cerebral of the two, enjoys playing a variety of titles and prizes strategy and analysis over wanton violence. Chief just likes to blow dudes up.  In the show's funniest touch, the voices of both characters come from the '80s-era voice simulator built in to early versions of Microsoft Windows. Whereas Arby speaks in well-formed, thoughtful sentences, Chief speaks in 'l33t' -- the orthographic shorthand gamers use to type hasty messages while playing. So when Chief surprises a terrified in-game opponent who screams, "What are you?!" Chief replies triumphantly, "i r guy who gon t33ch u less0n." 

What the show gets at best is the way live, multiplayer games like Halo bring together disparate demographics, uniting pre-teens and 40-year-old bachelors in an uneasy alliance of mindless fun. 

As with a lot of other YouTube content, this works best for the very niche it tries to capture, which in this case is males who play video games.  "Arby 'n' the Chief" has consistently pulled in over 1.5 million views over its 11 episodes -- more evidence that the gaming subculture might be graduating from "sub"-hood as we sp33k.

Big Fantastic director Ryan Wise filming stars of "Foreign Body" (Photo by Anne Cusack / LAT)

By the time the new Web series "Foreign Body" premieres  May 27, Chris, Chris, Ryan and Doug -- the four-headed directing collective known as Big Fantastic -- will have delivered 230 episodes of Web TV in less than two years. "Seinfeld" barely managed 180 shows and it was on for a decade. True, these webisodes are exponentially shorter -- usually two minutes, tops -- but somehow that doesn't make the production schedule any less grueling, or their boss any less Michael Eisner.

Big Fantastic had a scanty 24 days to shoot all 50 two-minute episodes of "Foreign Body," a thriller set in the messy world of medical tourism, where the broke and adventurous unwell seek bargain surgery abroad. The production is shuttling from the bazaars of Delhi to the beaches of Malibu, to an L.A. hospital-cum-movie-set, which I dropped by last week to sneak a couple questions to the directors in between takes.

Being a four-headed monster helps keep everything moving fast -- the moment Chris Hampel is done with a shot, Chris McCaleb materializes to call the next one. Likewise before Ryan Wise is finished editing a scene, Doug Cheney has already started editing the next. And on and on, a constant, tail-chasing churn of planning and creation that perfectly suits the Internet's yawning appetite for content.

The perennial question, not just for these filmmakers but for anyone trying to make super-short-form serials is: Really now, how do you go about telling a story in two-minute increments?

Fred's YouTube channel is programming for kids by kids

Last week, someone in the online video business gave me a simple tip.

"Fred," the guy said.

"Fred?" I said.

"Yes," he said. "Kids love Fred."

I had not heard of Fred, much less known that kids loved him. But that would swiftly end. As soon as I could, I searched for Fred on YouTube and found his video channel. There were plenty of videos, and I hunkered down to watch.

A warning before I continue: Fred is for immature audiences only. The following article may contain themes and language that are unsuitable for anyone over 16.

The first thing about Fred is that he brings new meaning to the word hyper. The fictional 6-year-old, invented and played by 14-year-old Nebraskan Lucas Cruikshank, is a fast-talking tyke with "temper problems," an absentee father and a propensity to screech if things don't go his way. If those traits aren't enough to dissuade you, Fred's voice is 'chipmunked,' raising it several octaves above Cruikshank's own to achieve, if not maximum verisimilitude, then certainly maximum annoyingness. Try to imagine a shrill, halting super-soprano bleating these lines from an episode called "Fred Goes Swimming":

"I'm ready to go inside the pool! Oh my God, it's cold. I love swimming. I love swimming! This pool is small. On TV I saw a pool that was really big . . . oh my God, there's a shark! I'm scared. Just kidding, it's just a toy shark. I got you!"

Doesn't sound like your cup of tea? That makes two of us. Let us say we are outnumbered; with nearly 250,000 subscribers, Fred's YouTube channel is the fourth most subscribed in the site's history. Meaning every time he posts a new video, nearly a quarter of a million people get notified.

Since he created his channel less than two months ago, Fred has racked up more subscribers than almost all of YouTube's old guard, passing up lonelygirl15, LisaNova, kevjumba, and sxephil. He's also got more subscribers than the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, Soulja Boy, and oh yeah, CBS.
   

Revision3 has made another high-profile acquisition by adding wine expert Gary Vaynerchuk to the fold starting June 23. Vaynerchuck's popular Wine Library TV, which Revision3 says brings in more than 60,000 viewers every day, stars the blue-streak-talking Jersey boy as he sniffs, swishes and spits his way through a bottle or three per episode. Vaynerchuk loves the Jets as much as he loves a good '82 Bordeaux -- he sometimes wears a wristband of the one while rotating a glass of the other. This unsnobby charm mixes well with his insistence that viewers trust their own palate rather than what the experts say, an approach that has won "GaryVee" plenty of fans and followers -- he's got more than 9,000 on Twitter alone. 

In the episode below, Gary gives a second chance to a Kosher Cabernet that he panned last year.

Digging further into the surprisingly diverse world of video game-based Web series, I found Jon Graham's "Arby 'n' the Chief," a highly amusing blend of machinima and live action whose two main characters are plastic action figurines from the "Halo" game series.  (Can't link because there's cursing, etc.) 

In a Toy Story-slash-Garfield sort of way, Arby and Master Chief come alive when their human owner Jon leaves for the day. The toys are bound by their passion for video games; Arby, the more mature and cerebral of the two, enjoys playing a variety of titles and prizes strategy and analysis over wanton violence. Chief just likes to blow dudes up.  In the show's funniest touch, the voices of both characters come from the '80s-era voice simulator built in to early versions of Microsoft Windows. Whereas Arby speaks in well-formed, thoughtful sentences, Chief speaks in 'l33t' -- the orthographic shorthand gamers use to type hasty messages while playing. So when Chief surprises a terrified in-game opponent who screams, "What are you?!" Chief replies triumphantly, "i r guy who gon t33ch u less0n." 

What the show gets at best is the way live, multiplayer games like Halo bring together disparate demographics, uniting pre-teens and 40-year-old bachelors in an uneasy alliance of mindless fun. 

As with a lot of other YouTube content, this works best for the very niche it tries to capture, which in this case is males who play video games.  "Arby 'n' the Chief" has consistently pulled in over 1.5 million views over its 11 episodes -- more evidence that the gaming subculture might be graduating from "sub"-hood as we sp33k.

Big Fantastic director Ryan Wise filming stars of "Foreign Body" (Photo by Anne Cusack / LAT)

By the time the new Web series "Foreign Body" premieres  May 27, Chris, Chris, Ryan and Doug -- the four-headed directing collective known as Big Fantastic -- will have delivered 230 episodes of Web TV in less than two years. "Seinfeld" barely managed 180 shows and it was on for a decade. True, these webisodes are exponentially shorter -- usually two minutes, tops -- but somehow that doesn't make the production schedule any less grueling, or their boss any less Michael Eisner.

Big Fantastic had a scanty 24 days to shoot all 50 two-minute episodes of "Foreign Body," a thriller set in the messy world of medical tourism, where the broke and adventurous unwell seek bargain surgery abroad. The production is shuttling from the bazaars of Delhi to the beaches of Malibu, to an L.A. hospital-cum-movie-set, which I dropped by last week to sneak a couple questions to the directors in between takes.

Being a four-headed monster helps keep everything moving fast -- the moment Chris Hampel is done with a shot, Chris McCaleb materializes to call the next one. Likewise before Ryan Wise is finished editing a scene, Doug Cheney has already started editing the next. And on and on, a constant, tail-chasing churn of planning and creation that perfectly suits the Internet's yawning appetite for content.

The perennial question, not just for these filmmakers but for anyone trying to make super-short-form serials is: Really now, how do you go about telling a story in two-minute increments?

Revision3 imports Gary Vaynerchuk's 'Wine Library TV'

Revision3 has made another high-profile acquisition by adding wine expert Gary Vaynerchuk to the fold starting June 23. Vaynerchuck's popular Wine Library TV, which Revision3 says brings in more than 60,000 viewers every day, stars the blue-streak-talking Jersey boy as he sniffs, swishes and spits his way through a bottle or three per episode. Vaynerchuk loves the Jets as much as he loves a good '82 Bordeaux -- he sometimes wears a wristband of the one while rotating a glass of the other. This unsnobby charm mixes well with his insistence that viewers trust their own palate rather than what the experts say, an approach that has won "GaryVee" plenty of fans and followers -- he's got more than 9,000 on Twitter alone. 

In the episode below, Gary gives a second chance to a Kosher Cabernet that he panned last year.

Digging further into the surprisingly diverse world of video game-based Web series, I found Jon Graham's "Arby 'n' the Chief," a highly amusing blend of machinima and live action whose two main characters are plastic action figurines from the "Halo" game series.  (Can't link because there's cursing, etc.) 

In a Toy Story-slash-Garfield sort of way, Arby and Master Chief come alive when their human owner Jon leaves for the day. The toys are bound by their passion for video games; Arby, the more mature and cerebral of the two, enjoys playing a variety of titles and prizes strategy and analysis over wanton violence. Chief just likes to blow dudes up.  In the show's funniest touch, the voices of both characters come from the '80s-era voice simulator built in to early versions of Microsoft Windows. Whereas Arby speaks in well-formed, thoughtful sentences, Chief speaks in 'l33t' -- the orthographic shorthand gamers use to type hasty messages while playing. So when Chief surprises a terrified in-game opponent who screams, "What are you?!" Chief replies triumphantly, "i r guy who gon t33ch u less0n." 

What the show gets at best is the way live, multiplayer games like Halo bring together disparate demographics, uniting pre-teens and 40-year-old bachelors in an uneasy alliance of mindless fun. 

As with a lot of other YouTube content, this works best for the very niche it tries to capture, which in this case is males who play video games.  "Arby 'n' the Chief" has consistently pulled in over 1.5 million views over its 11 episodes -- more evidence that the gaming subculture might be graduating from "sub"-hood as we sp33k.

Big Fantastic director Ryan Wise filming stars of "Foreign Body" (Photo by Anne Cusack / LAT)

By the time the new Web series "Foreign Body" premieres  May 27, Chris, Chris, Ryan and Doug -- the four-headed directing collective known as Big Fantastic -- will have delivered 230 episodes of Web TV in less than two years. "Seinfeld" barely managed 180 shows and it was on for a decade. True, these webisodes are exponentially shorter -- usually two minutes, tops -- but somehow that doesn't make the production schedule any less grueling, or their boss any less Michael Eisner.

Big Fantastic had a scanty 24 days to shoot all 50 two-minute episodes of "Foreign Body," a thriller set in the messy world of medical tourism, where the broke and adventurous unwell seek bargain surgery abroad. The production is shuttling from the bazaars of Delhi to the beaches of Malibu, to an L.A. hospital-cum-movie-set, which I dropped by last week to sneak a couple questions to the directors in between takes.

Being a four-headed monster helps keep everything moving fast -- the moment Chris Hampel is done with a shot, Chris McCaleb materializes to call the next one. Likewise before Ryan Wise is finished editing a scene, Doug Cheney has already started editing the next. And on and on, a constant, tail-chasing churn of planning and creation that perfectly suits the Internet's yawning appetite for content.

The perennial question, not just for these filmmakers but for anyone trying to make super-short-form serials is: Really now, how do you go about telling a story in two-minute increments?

Worth Watching: 'Arby 'n' the Chief' -- 'Halo' machinima

Digging further into the surprisingly diverse world of video game-based Web series, I found Jon Graham's "Arby 'n' the Chief," a highly amusing blend of machinima and live action whose two main characters are plastic action figurines from the "Halo" game series.  (Can't link because there's cursing, etc.) 

In a Toy Story-slash-Garfield sort of way, Arby and Master Chief come alive when their human owner Jon leaves for the day. The toys are bound by their passion for video games; Arby, the more mature and cerebral of the two, enjoys playing a variety of titles and prizes strategy and analysis over wanton violence. Chief just likes to blow dudes up.  In the show's funniest touch, the voices of both characters come from the '80s-era voice simulator built in to early versions of Microsoft Windows. Whereas Arby speaks in well-formed, thoughtful sentences, Chief speaks in 'l33t' -- the orthographic shorthand gamers use to type hasty messages while playing. So when Chief surprises a terrified in-game opponent who screams, "What are you?!" Chief replies triumphantly, "i r guy who gon t33ch u less0n." 

What the show gets at best is the way live, multiplayer games like Halo bring together disparate demographics, uniting pre-teens and 40-year-old bachelors in an uneasy alliance of mindless fun. 

As with a lot of other YouTube content, this works best for the very niche it tries to capture, which in this case is males who play video games.  "Arby 'n' the Chief" has consistently pulled in over 1.5 million views over its 11 episodes -- more evidence that the gaming subculture might be graduating from "sub"-hood as we sp33k.

Big Fantastic director Ryan Wise filming stars of "Foreign Body" (Photo by Anne Cusack / LAT)

By the time the new Web series "Foreign Body" premieres  May 27, Chris, Chris, Ryan and Doug -- the four-headed directing collective known as Big Fantastic -- will have delivered 230 episodes of Web TV in less than two years. "Seinfeld" barely managed 180 shows and it was on for a decade. True, these webisodes are exponentially shorter -- usually two minutes, tops -- but somehow that doesn't make the production schedule any less grueling, or their boss any less Michael Eisner.

Big Fantastic had a scanty 24 days to shoot all 50 two-minute episodes of "Foreign Body," a thriller set in the messy world of medical tourism, where the broke and adventurous unwell seek bargain surgery abroad. The production is shuttling from the bazaars of Delhi to the beaches of Malibu, to an L.A. hospital-cum-movie-set, which I dropped by last week to sneak a couple questions to the directors in between takes.

Being a four-headed monster helps keep everything moving fast -- the moment Chris Hampel is done with a shot, Chris McCaleb materializes to call the next one. Likewise before Ryan Wise is finished editing a scene, Doug Cheney has already started editing the next. And on and on, a constant, tail-chasing churn of planning and creation that perfectly suits the Internet's yawning appetite for content.

The perennial question, not just for these filmmakers but for anyone trying to make super-short-form serials is: Really now, how do you go about telling a story in two-minute increments?

Michael Eisner, Robin Cook join Web TV and novel in 'Foreign Body'

Big Fantastic director Ryan Wise filming stars of "Foreign Body" (Photo by Anne Cusack / LAT)

By the time the new Web series "Foreign Body" premieres  May 27, Chris, Chris, Ryan and Doug -- the four-headed directing collective known as Big Fantastic -- will have delivered 230 episodes of Web TV in less than two years. "Seinfeld" barely managed 180 shows and it was on for a decade. True, these webisodes are exponentially shorter -- usually two minutes, tops -- but somehow that doesn't make the production schedule any less grueling, or their boss any less Michael Eisner.

Big Fantastic had a scanty 24 days to shoot all 50 two-minute episodes of "Foreign Body," a thriller set in the messy world of medical tourism, where the broke and adventurous unwell seek bargain surgery abroad. The production is shuttling from the bazaars of Delhi to the beaches of Malibu, to an L.A. hospital-cum-movie-set, which I dropped by last week to sneak a couple questions to the directors in between takes.

Being a four-headed monster helps keep everything moving fast -- the moment Chris Hampel is done with a shot, Chris McCaleb materializes to call the next one. Likewise before Ryan Wise is finished editing a scene, Doug Cheney has already started editing the next. And on and on, a constant, tail-chasing churn of planning and creation that perfectly suits the Internet's yawning appetite for content.

The perennial question, not just for these filmmakers but for anyone trying to make super-short-form serials is: Really now, how do you go about telling a story in two-minute increments?