Art of Bleeding has just launched their new video series “Gory Details”, featuring recreations of real-life medical emergency stories. Episode #1 features a gruesome story by Ed Buhr about Mango Flies and their maggot offspring.

Abram the Safety Ape, RT the Robot Teacher, and the wise old hand-puppet Dr. Moody discuss a nasty larval infestation picked up by a student traveling in Africa. With the assistance of the alluring nurses of the Magic Ambulance and a pinch of Magic Safety Dust this true-life story is recreated in all its grisly splendor.

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The San Francisco Ballet is having a Magical Memories Nutcracker Video Contest in celebration of 65 years of “The Nutcracker” in America where they are inviting people to create Nutcracker inspired videos for a chance to win some great prizes.

EDW Lynch created a wonderful contest promo video featuring “Senior VP for Nutcracker Operations, Sugar Plum Fairy, admitting to a severe shortage of magic (in excess of 2 million cubic dazzlemeters) due to the global magic market downturn”.

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John Gruber puts the call out to “bring back the two-arm gesture for ‘fuck you’”. Seoul Brother accepts the challenge, delivered in the form of a video.

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Art of Bleeding presents a remix of one of those classic Halloween Safety films.

At of the height of the razors-in-apples hysteria, films like these ruined Halloween in classrooms everywhere. (Or did the fear make the holiday more exciting?) Now it’s Art of Bleeding’s turn to slash and adulterate these questionable cinematic treats.

Art of Bleeding will be premiering their special Halloween show “The Spirits of Safety” on October 25th at the California Institute of Abnormal Arts (CIA) in Los Angeles.

The Art of Bleeding presents the LA PREMIERE of special Halloween show, “The Spirits of Safety,” the latest installment of Magic Ambulance Theater, in which Abram the Safety Ape and RT the Robot Teacher discover Halloween’s connection to True Safety Consciousness through the unnatural use of a CPR mannequin, ectoplasmic mishaps, and the siren charms of the Art of Bleeding nurses. The evening also features a squirmy Breast Cancer Awareness Tutorial and the burn ward comedy of Art of Bleeding’s resident “funmaker” Dr. Sunshine. Guest internCreekbird contributes his unique brand of musical quackery, and Polly Peabody stops in with a burlesque tribute to the good old days of mail-order morphine. The evening will begin with a sneak peek at “GORY DETAILS” our YouTube video series based upon first-person medical emergency stories recorded in the AoB ambulance. Each episode recreates a different true-life story with the help of costumed characters, puppets, and animation. (Doors 7pm, Videos 8pm, Live show 9pm).

At the show they will be giving a preview of the new Art of Bleeding YouTube series “Gory Details”, based on true medical emergency stories.

The “Gory Details” videos are based on true medical emergency stories solicited on public streets from random passersby and recorded in the group’s “magic ambulance” or via the Gory Details hotline. Each episode recreates a different account with the dysfunctional kid’s show characters and a cast of inappropriately clad cast of nurses. Art of Bleeding also performs lives shows featuring these same and similar characters.

Here’s the Art of Bleeding performance “Crawl Away Kids” from How to Destroy the Universe Festival 6 which took place in Oakland back in April.

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A security camera captures a man struggling with the Earth’s gravitational pull to purchase beer in a convenience store. Some blogs are calling him the “drunkest guy ever”, but I think there’s something else at play here. What do you guys think?

Know Your Meme, I’m counting on you guys to get to the bottom of this one.

UPDATE: Mustache and Monocle have created a silent movie remix of the video.

via Viral Video Chart & Boing Boing

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guest post by Chuck Cirino

Before the quintessential quick-cutting and fast-paced techniques overused in television today Shadoe Steven’s Fred Rated television commercials broke this new stylistic ground back in the mid-1980s.  Smashing prices, and expensive audio and video gear was Shadoe’s trademark technique for driving media-crazy customers into the many Federated Group home entertainment stores scattered around Southern California at the time.

It was a race for pace by jam packing three minutes of mundane ad information into edgy, entertaining and explosive thirty second commercial spots.  My pleasure and honor was to have collaborated with Shadoe on these commercials as his director and editor.  Over a three-year period we made over 1000 television commercials together.

Cut to:  PRESENT DAY

A few weeks ago Shadoe approached me about a new advertising collaboration.  Shadoe’s task 25 years later was to sell a wheelchair.  What?  A wheelchair?

Oh, but this isn’t just a wheelchair, the Standing Powerchair is an affordable way to bring dignity to those of us who don’t have the full use of our bodies… and Shadoe’s good friend Mark Shedlin, a victim of MS is one such person.  Mark purchased this Powerchair only to discover it was not well-known by doctors and most insurance companies.  Marks mission soon became to get the word out so more people could benefit, and he enlisted Shadoe to help him.

This time for Shadoe the commercial was personal, and once he introduced me to Mark it became personal for me too.  So of course leave it to Shadoe to wildly entertain while getting his message across.  Once again he smashes the traditional and we created this ad…

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guest post by mikl-em

Please note, several real sneezes were filmed during the making of this video!

Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage (@donttrythis), the guys from Mythbusters, shot the above public service announcement as part of a larger campaign to inform about H1N1 flu virus (of which swine flu is a subset) which stars in the current flu pandemic that is sweeping the globe.

The Discovery Channel campaign includes a Mythbusters website that explains five myths about the virus.

Adam tweeted that it was directed by our good friend Carl, who made that Trader Joes film. There are 2 versions of his fake TJ commercial actually; go ahead and watch the long one cuz it’s great!

You can see those videos and more on Carl’s website or his YouTube channel. He also directed the MB guys in the Intel commercial below.

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Werner Mehl of the German ballistics measurement company Kurzzeit made an amazing slow motion video of bullet impacts at recorded 1 million frame per second.

via Ed Hunsinger

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guest post by Doctor Popular

Cyriak has created “Meow Mix, a bizarre music video using audio and video from his cat. Obviously this sort of thing has been done a million times before, but Cyriak’s video is a little more… visually intense… than most videos. Cyriak has also made the mp3 file available for download.

See Previously: Bizarre & Surreal Animation by Cyriak Harris

Thanks Unwoman.

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Here’s an amazing video shot from a helmet cam of a skier who was trapped in an avalanche in Haines, Alaska. The video shows rescuers digging him out of the snow. Chappy, who was snowmobiling nearby that day, tells the story of what happened.

via NewTeeVee

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guest post by mikl-em

Dylan Moran levels a characteristically petulant critique of California and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wherein the Irish comedian demonstrates his personal aversion for “lifting up heavy things”.

You might recognize Moran from the film Shaun Of The Dead. He also starred in a great, lesser-known (in the US) sitcom on Britain’s Channel 4 called Black Books which he co-created with Graham Linehan (who later created the show The IT Crowd).

Black Books ran from 2000 to 2004 and co-starred Tamsin Greig and Bill Bailey. It’s a great show, worth seeking out if you’re looking for a Brit comedy fix (NetFlix has it). You can see clips on YouTube, and if you are in Britain you can watch episodes online (no access from the US).

Bill Bailey has a very different style, he’s a trained musician who incorporates more than a dozen instruments into his routines and parodies the likes of Jean Michel Jarre and Phillip Glass; he’s also a confirmed nerd who jokes about Doctor Who, LOTR, Star Trek, and hosted a Stonehenge documentary; he’s also fond of making surreal erudite rants with references to literature, science, and philosophy.

Here’s Bailey in action, with a very close reading of the “Acts of God” clause in a car rental agreement…

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guest post by Violet Blue

Comedy is truth: While some of us scratch our heads and wonder how an environment for jobs like “social media guru” and pay-per-Tweet advertising can exist, others create scathingly brilliant and hilarious videos about an environment that is so very ripe for parody. As of today, no one’s done it better than Markham Nolan and his public service announcement video The Social Media Guru. It’s also a promo for Xtranormal Beta, text-to-video moviemaking software that we hope will be available for Mac users sooner than later. Still, the truth hurts. Telling us he’ll gladly give us a special offer for advice on our Twitter accounts (translation: “I’ll sit on your Facebook and whack you up the Twitter. Financially.”) Nolan peels back the rich tapestry of bullshit and delivers line after line of painfully familiar, nonsensical promises that the douchiest of exploitative social media consultants seem to be offering. We OH, and we weep.

We hope you watch this video and learn many ways to monetize your Twitter followers.

via edrabbit

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100 Greatest Hits of YouTube in 4 Minutes. Check out the YouTube description for the complete list of videos. The song is “M.A.D” by Hadouken.

via Tim Pratt

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guest post by mikl-em

A classic song from The Electric Company in the 1970s Morgan Freeman & Rita Moreno perform The Menu Song by Tom Lehrer. The song was arranged by Joe Raposo (a classmate of Lehrer’s at Harvard, who himself wrote the classics Bein’ Green and C is for Cookie).

While several of Lehrer’s children songs on the show have become classics, he is otherwise known for his often dark and always funny compositions that often appeared on the Dr. Demento radio show such as Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, The Old Dope Peddler, and The Masochism Tango…

Like few other performers, Lehrer had to make the difficult choice between being a full-time recording artist and teaching math. Until 2001, when he retired, he was on the faculty at UC-Santa Cruz.

Below Lehrer in action more recently (1997), as he revisits some of his more advanced math songs, Calculus specifically, written in the 1940’s. This and other videos are available on archive.org.

See also these lyrics for various Tom Lehrer songs including Silent E and L-Y from The Electric Company.

via Sherilyn Connelly

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UPDATE: VideoCamp SF has been postponed until early 2010.

Schlomo Rabinowitz and Jeffrey Taylor are organizing VideoCamp SF, a two day conference taking place October 16-17 in San Francisco for people interested in developing their web video skills and knowledge. Here’s the schedule, list of speakers and information on how to register.

VideoCamp SF is a “hyperlocal” event to be held on the 16th and 17th of October. By bringing seasoned web video creators together with people who are seasoned in “something else”, we intend to train and develop various communities and individuals in utilizing the “Best Practices in Online Video” to help them excel in whatever “something else” they are up to. From understanding how to document the world, to how to get their Big Idea onto the web, VideoCampSF will help participants focus and achieve their online video goals.

Laughing Squid is one of the media sponsors of the innugral VideoCamp SF.

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guest post by mikl-em

From the finishing what I started department…

The original “Chessboxing” is not the weird sport I posted about a few months back. Are you surprised that there’s more than one way to crossbreed Boxing and Chess?

Mystery of Chess Boxing is a Kung Fu film from 1979 (aka “Ninja Checkmate”) and it has everything you want in a 70’s Kung Fu flick, and nothing more. All the hallmarks of the genre are here: bad dubbing, slapping-tin-pan-fight-sounds, zooming closeups on the eyes of the villian, and some mad eyebrow hair in the bargain. It also features something called “double horse style”, which sounds smutty (though there’s also a hybrid astrological equivalent).

The movie is also an inspiration for the Wu-Tang Clan rap group (whose Da Mystery of Chessboxin’ on the album Enter the Wu-Tang features samples from the film). Wu-Tang member Ghostface Killer even took his name from the film’s villain.

Here’s the video for the Wu-tang tune:

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Ikea Heights is a online video series directed by David Seger on Channel 101 that is shot entirely inside the Burbank Ikea without the store’s knowledge.

Here’s the series so far: Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3 & Episode 4

See Previously:

- Scotty Got an Office Job, A Video Series Featuring Subversion At Work

- Will Crum & Band Performs Stealth Show In An IKEA Kitchen

via EPIC FU

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Magma, a new site for exploring and tracking online video from all over, has just officially launched. It was created by the people behind Rocketboom and Know Your Meme.

The Magma home page is comprised of video charts for the most popular videos being watched, right now. Every video is given a score from a low of 1 to a high of 11, an indication of how popular the video has become. This is determined by the amount of related videos, views, comments and social media activity from all around the web.

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Here’s raw video shot by KGO ABC 7 of San Francisco’s famously crooked Lombard Street in San Francisco being converted into a life-size version of the children’s board game Candyland, in honor of Candyland’s 60th anniversary.

photos by Steve Rhodes

SFist has been posting photos of Lombard Street being converted into Candyland, like this series of photos from Steve Rhodes.

Here’s more Lombard Street Candyland video by David Newman.

photos by BerDerp

BerDerp has been shooting a bunch of great Candyland photos.

UPDATE: Here’s more Candyland coverage from SFAppeal.

Thanks to Felix for the tip about the video!

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