From The Dandy Dwarves, a production company originally based out of the Savannah College of Art & Design, comes this inspired, wacky fable about a dying man lost at sea and plagued by a foot with evil intentions. Directed by 24-year-old Christian Simmons, a 2005 Broadcast Design and Motion Graphics SCAD grad, "The Sailor" came about as a result of the group's desire to do a piece involving the water.

"I tend to gravitate toward pieces with a fanciful ugliness to them," explains Simmons, "and I thought it could be reminiscent of an old legend or folk tale." Simmons also wanted the video to seem as if it was part of a much longer project "and only get a brief glimpse of it," he says, "while at the end still feeling satisfied."

The short cleverly combines live-action with an animated speaking foot, complete with a large, teeth-y mouth, voiced by Simmons himself. "On the day of the ocean shoot, our actor J.R. had tracking points painted onto his foot," says Simmons, explaining how they conceived of the talking appendage. "Later, we'd analyze the movement of his foot and then I'd have to match the movement of J.R's foot from the boat so that there wouldn't be any discontinuity with the angle of the mouth as compared to the angle of the foot." Then their visual effects supervisor Andrew Cook painted off Simmons' mouth and artfully stuck it onto J.R's foot. "Then he'd color correct and add a slight morphing to the skin to create the effect of it stretching as the lips speak," he explains.

In the Bay Area, the Dwarves are hoping to continue to make more short-form videos, but "nothing is set in stone," says Simmons. "We loved documentary work as well as -- who knows -- feature films in the future. While we have a somewhat large body of work beneath us right now, I'll go out on a limb and say this is just the very beginning."

You can read more about SCAD's shorts program and watch a making-of video for "The Sailor and Fiendish Foot" at the link.

-Anthony Kaufman

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

Most environmental news coverage takes one of two approaches: terrifying "the world is about to end" propaganda, or jargon-heavy science updates. So, as the health of the planet becomes an increasingly important issue, perhaps what's needed is a lighter approach. That's the theory behind ZapRoot, an engaging new podcast launched last week by ViroPOP.

Covering the world of "the new environmental pop culture" with bright graphics and a cheerful approach, host Jessica Williamson reports on stories like bee colony collapse disorder with flair and charm (in case you're wondering, the accent comes from growing up between New Zealand and Utah). According to producer Damien Somerset, "ZapRoot was created in response to the way I and the people I know feel about modern environmentalism. We don’t look counter-culture, we don’t act counter-culture, there’s no club that you have to be part of to care about environmental issues. You don’t have to be counter-culture to be green."

"Environmental pop culture makes caring about our planet cool -- we try to cover stories that our viewers can relate to and might have impact on the way they think or live," says producer Sarah Szalavitz. And that's the most striking thing about Zaproot: its positive mindset, promoting opportunities for environmental improvement on a large and small scale. It's enough to make you think the world's not about to end. Maybe.

-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 >>

Given the way the U.S. government has responded to the tragedies of 9/11 and Katrina, I've found myself more or less desensitized to conspiracy theories. We're living in a world where anything -- from manufacturing intelligence and outing CIA agents, to hiring nincompoops to run our most critical relief organizations -- is possible.

Then I saw The Shock Doctrine, and my jaw has yet to pick itself up off the floor. If there was ever a short that made you want to click through to Amazon and buy the book on which it was based, this is it.

Based on the book of the same title by Naomi Klein and overseen by Jonás Cuarón's auteur dad Alfonso Cuarón, The Shock Doctrine covers the connection between the radical theories of economist Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate and close advisor to countless heads of state, and the activities of the CIA. To crudely paraphrase Friedman's thesis: disasters, whether they be natural, economic, political, or war-related, are the ideal opportunity to institute extreme economic policies that favor big business. The aftermath of a tsunami, for example, is an ideal time to privatize land, and a military coup is a great way to take over a poor country's oil business. "This is the secret history of the free market," states the film's narrator. "It wasn't born in freedom and democracy -- it was born in shock."

Utilizing a combination of archival footage, animation, and superimposed statistics, Cuarón illustrates his point by presenting a number of examples (Chile, the Falklands, etc.) of how Friedman's theories have been put into practice. It's a stunning piece of agit-prop filmmaking that owes much to the current master of the form, Adam Curtis.

But the filmmakers cleverly steer clear of the most obvious point, namely, how the Bush administration has used Friedman to their advantage. (Iraq, anyone?) That, dear viewer, is up to you.

For more on The Shock Doctrine, visit Klein's Web site or purchase her book. The short is currently screening at this year's Toronto Film Festival.

-Matthew Ross

The hellish monotony of office work has been a potent theme ever since Melville penned Bartleby the Scrivenor in 1853. If Bartleby was killing time in a 21st Century cubicle, it might resemble Jacob Reed's Day Job.

Filmed in one wide master shot, Day Job records the lonely routine of an shlub (Alec Owen), who procrastinates by banging on various office supplies that surround him. That footage was then cut together to create a percussive beat.

Day Job is not the first time that unedited footage has been scrambled together in post to create music -- Norway's Lasse Gjertsen took care of that with his wildly popular clip, Amateur. Reed says that he hadn't seen Amateur until after Day Job was made. Rather, he got the idea from the same clip that inspired Gjertsen -- Michel Gondry's I Am Twelve Forever, which appeared on a Palm Pictures Directors Label DVD.

The shoot took place over two hours, and was made as part of Reed's Cinema 290 Production class at the University of Souther California. "We set Alec up with a metronome in his pocket, and wired an earbud up to one of his ears so that everything he did could be on the same beat, which I thought would make it easier to edit," says Reed. "I ended up only using a tiny fraction of what we shot, and at some point I'd like to recut the film to come up with some different sounds. The shoot was a lot of fun, because Alec is someone I do comedy with - he's great to work with, and he also happens to be a musician so he came up with the sounds very easily."

Reed's currently working on shorts for his comedy troupe Tremendosaur. Check them out on Tremendosaur.com or in iTunes with the Tremendosaur Comedy Podcast.

-Matthew Ross

Did you know that Bill Murray drinks milk before he goes to bed? Such are the unproven rumors that plague the hard-working men of FCU: "Fact Checkers Unit." Created by the New York based comedy duo of Pete and Brian (Peter Karinen and Brian Sacca, of "Knock Knock" online fame) and director Dan Beers, an associate producer on Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, "FCU" was born out of the trio's desire to lampoon the popular crime show CSI, says Beers, with "two fact checkers who work with the intensity of homicide detectives." Working at the fictional Dictum Magazine, the two intrepid truth-seekers must contend with Wikipedia (a fact-checker's worst villain) and the multiple vagaries that plague them every day. When the Bill Murray fact hits them, they set out to find his house and spy on him to check the fact.

The project, of course, couldn't have gone forward without the participation of Murray, so Beers, who met the actor while working for Wes Anderson, faxed him about the short and asked if he would play himself. "I later ran into him and he said he liked the idea and that he would do it -- and that was it. That's the kind of guy Bill is," says Beers. "Extremely generous." Written over a few months, Beers, Karinen and Sacca were adding and deleting scenes up until the week before the shoot. ("Bill made fun of us that it took three guys to write ten pages," write Karinen and Sacca via email.)

But the short film's most priceless moments were spontaneously improvised during the production, including a bit of deadpan hilarity when Murray improvises "chopsticks." "We knew we wanted that piano shot, but right before we shot it we realized none of the three of us could play piano," writes Karinen. "So Brian and I had a PA teach us chopsticks right before the shot, and Bill improvised the entire thing without a rehearsal."

-Anthony Kaufman

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

In this lively satire of American materialism, 23-year-old Atlanta-based filmmaker Brandon McCormick sends up our gluttonous ways via an exuberant song-and-dance, somewhere between Busby Berkeley and Saturday Night Live. With funny original lyrics ("I'm the king of excess, the sultan of sales"), high production values, impressive choreographed dances across various strip malls and department stores and a gleeful performance by one large consumer (Atlanta-based casting agent Justine Carter, who has Will-Ferrell-like energy), "Consumerism! The Musical" is a smart and catchy video that's making waves across the net.

McCormick, who has produced several videos for his company Whitestone Motion Pictures (whitestonemotionpictures.com), including "Smiling Addiction" and "Alabaster," made up a visual storyboard for "Consumerism!" first; then he encoded the material onto his iPhone to watch it for reference while he was shooting.

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