“The Last Exorcism”, a film from LionsGate about—what else?—a girl possessed by an evil spirit has an interesting viral campaign making its way around Chatroulette. Though not personally a fan of Chatroulette, I have to tip my hat to LionsGate for crafting a campaign that fits the space really well.

Check out the following video of the campaign and the reactions it provokes. Note: Video contains strong language, so if that sort of thing is taboo in your home/office consider this yourself forewarned.

If you’re a true geek like me, then you should get a chuckle or two out of this video. YouTube filmmakers Rated Awesome have imagined what the trailer for David Finch’s upcoming movie The Social Network (aka “The Facebook Movie”) might look like had Mark Zuckerberg created Twitter instead of Facebook.

Note: your geek factor is directly proportionate to your level of amusement with this video.

The landscape of competitors and strategies in the TV and video market has experienced considerable change over the past 10 years.  While Blockbuster and Hollywood Video used to rule the map, the emergence of Youtube, Redbox, and others have forcefully taken over as prime contenders in the industry.

I know what you are thinking, this was so 2005, right?  Well, even though social and streaming video sites have been main stage for quite some time, new developments by the now big time players are looking to take things to another level.

Netflix, the movie by mail juggernaut, has offered consumers the ability to stream certain film titles and TV shows online for quite some time.  This has proved to be an extremely popular feature that users have flocked to.  However, due to copyright issues, Netflix has been limited in their available streaming titles.  Personally, I find this frustrating, especially when all I want to do is kick back and throw a quality film on the computer and my best options to pick from are Confessions of a Shopaholic or Dora the Explorer: Season 3.  As much as I love Spanish speaking cartoons and watching other people purchase clothing, somehow I am still always in search of a better option.

Soon my worries will be lessened since Netflix has announced a deal it has signed with Relativity Media for the rights to stream their content.  While not a groundbreaking deal, Relativity does produce an upwards of 20-30 big screen titles a year, giving Netflix a launching pad to expand their streaming collection.  The implications of this agreement may be bigger than what is on the table at the moment.  While pay-movie channels such as HBO and Showtime have held the bulk of the revenue for subscription service movie and TV, the future of this market may exist within streaming video.

Similarly, Hulu (a free online video and TV streaming site), has debuted its Hulu Plus service.  Hulu allows users to watch select TV shows and movies online for free, but with a $9.99 a month subscription will now let customers view entire TV seasons in a higher 720p resolution.

Will Neflix and Hulu’s new business decisions trigger the end of cable TV and pay-movie channels? Not likely, at least for a good while.  Although, in a digitally networked age, I believe that the future of television and video is online, in one capacity or another.  As these two video and TV streaming companies work to expand, they will be slowly chipping away at the traditional TV fortress.  I am anxious to see what the future of streaming video holds, and where these companies take it.  In the meantime, while you are waiting for the revolution to come on TV, it is probably already streaming online.  

The world is a huge place filled with tons of people. 6.7 billion, but you already knew that.  Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you could get a snapshot of the day in the life of many of these people from around the world? Google did, and thus has recently announced their upcoming “Life in a Day” project.

The premise is simple yet extraordinary; on July 24^th (appropriately 24/7) anyone and everyone is invited to use a camera and film something from their life in that 24 hour span.  Your choice of what to film is up to you whether it be your day at work, playing with your kids at home, or watching a beautiful sunset from your back porch.

After the day concludes, users will be able to upload their videos to the “Life in a Day” channel until July 31th.  All videos will be available to view online, but several enthusiasts will be lucky enough to have their clip as part of the ‘”Life in a Day” documentary that will debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.  Not only that, if your cinematic masterpiece makes it into the final film, you will be credited as co-director and have a chance to be selected to attend the premier.

This innovative project is being directed by Oscar-winning Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland, One Day in September), while Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Black Hawk Down) will take the reigns as executive producer.

As always, Google isn’t losing a step in breaking new ground in the media world.  Come July 24^th, make sure you grab a camera, charge the batteries, and prepare for what may be a defining feat in the realm of documentaries.  I know I’m excited.

Here’s a fun campaign from TomTom promoting its new partnership with LucasFilm Ltd. Yes, it’s now possible for you to get your GPS directions from some of your favorite “Star Wars” characters. Darth Vader is available now, with C-3PO, Yoda, and Han Solo slated to release this summer.

The campaign is supported by an augmented reality game, which encourages you to use The Force in order to win a TomTom To-Go personalized with Yoda’s voice. The premise of the game is simple enough and the creative is well-executed, although I did feel that the actual gameplay is harder than it should be if TomTom’s goal is get people to enter the contest.

This is a wonderful time lapse video of the building of Ellis Square in downtown Savannah, Georgia taken over five years from December 2005 to March 2010.

Ellis Square was one of the original squares in Savannah when the city was laid out by General James Oglethorpe in the 1730’s, but over the years it had become a farmers market and then a very unsightly downtown parking structure.

The city decided to return the square back to its original glory with a lot of contemporary features added such as fountains and a visitor center (they also put the parking garage under the square and this slowed construction for a while as engineers ran into issues as they were digging deep into this rather sandy, loose soil).

The square officially opened a few weeks ago and is now full of people, day and night, enjoying the beauty that is downtown Savannah.

Ellis Square Timelapse Savannah, Georgia from andy young on Vimeo.

If there were one message from today’s SXSW panel How To Create A Viral Video, it would be that it’s all about the content.

Jonathan Wells from Flux moderated the discussion and was joined by Margaret Gould Stewart of YouTube, Jason Wishnow of Ted, and Damian Kulash of the band OK Go.

The panel began by breaking down viral video into two groups. One is where the video is viral by accident. The creator was in the right place at the right time and caught something extraordinary. These folks aren’t likely to go “viral” again. The second category is much broader and the creators are people who made the viral video on purpose and will make more.

The question is what can you do to make sure your content is seen by lots of people over and over. The answer is it’s all about the content. It’s also about creating content for your audience and making sure the production value is where it needs to be. For Wishnow’s Ted audience, it’s important for the videos to look amazing, which explains their multiple camera angles, hi-def shooting and tight camera angles. For Kulash and OK Go, the production quality should be on the lower end. “If my videos looked good, people wouldn’t watch them,” Kulash said.

Kulash of course can prove that this type of content and production is effective. The first video OK Go posted was their Backyard Dance Video, which obtained more than 300,000 views in its first month–more records than the band had sold at the time. Fast forward from that first video to their many others, including the well known Treadmill Dancing video and their most recent, which was sponsored by State Farm.

The State Farm sponsorship of the video is an interesting story from the band as well. Kulash explained that State Farm initially wanted to run the video exclusively on their website, something the band didn’t agree to. “Exclusivity online just doesn’t work,” Kulash said. That can work in the real world but online, “the point of something spreading is that it’s supposed to spread. You can’t just drive traffic to one place. Only our diehard fans would have gone to State Farm’s site.”

The band did agree to put State Farm in the video but made sure the brand was part of the story. A State Farm branded truck gets the action started in the video, which works since State Farm’s dollars made the video happen. The band also gives them a thanks at the very end of the video. Was it worth it for State Farm? I’d imagine so. Kulash said people tend to watch the video four to five times as opposed to just once.

So then, what about video content for non-music videos? Positive content works well. Negative or depressing content doesn’t get spread, according to Gould Stewart. Content that has an element of surprise also tends to be successful, like this Rammstein vs. Cookie Monster video:

Other tactics include focusing on your audience and interacting with them, allowing your videos to be embedded, distributing them on multiple platforms and tweaking your metadata. “It’s so frustrating when you see great content with crappy metadata,” Gould Stewart said.

If all else fails, include kittens in your video to make it go viral.

Most music videos are kinda ho-hum, but occasionally one pops out that takes the medium to another realm. Check out the visual feast in the new video for the Massive Attack song “Splitting The Atom” as it is truly striking to look at in that “how’d they do that?” kind of way.

The song is also cool in that groovy, downbeat Massive Attack style.

If you use Twitter, you can go to this site, log in with your Twitter account and watch more Massive Attack vids from the groups new album Heligoland. It sends out a tweet when you watch the vids. Definitely a good way for a band - or any one for that matter that is using video to promote something - to utilize Twitter.

Allegations of plagiarism have yellowed the snow at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, threatening to expose the rotten underbelly of Park City—and the movie reviewing business as a whole. Oft-quoted critic Paul Fischer has emerged from this year’s festival as a sort of noir villain, after being branded a hack by filmmakers demanding legitimate reviews.

In a story published in the Vancouver Sun, reporter Chris Parry cites multiple instances of Fischer lifting chunks of verbiage–nearly word-for-word–from press materials and dropping them into his own reviews.

Take, for example, this snippet from Fischer’s review of Animal Kingdom, a film that recently scooped up a Sundance jury prize:

“When tensions between the family and the police reach a bloody peak, Josh finds himself at the center of a cold-blooded revenge plot that turns the family upside down.”

Now, compare that to this blurb from the official synopsis that was published in this year’s festival guidebook:

“When tensions between the family and the police reach a bloody peak, ‘J’ finds himself at the centre of a cold-blooded revenge plot that turns the family upside down.”

Identical save for one word, “Josh,” Fischer’s review was published at DarkHorizons.com—a popular site that has seen its plaudits woven into film trailers and DVD covers.

In Perry’s article, Sundance Film Festival associate director of media relations Brooke Addicott says that the repurposing of studio- or filmmaker-penned marketing language is rife among bloggers, in particular. With no editor to vet their work, bloggers, according to Addicott, often take the shortcut to glory; favorable “reviews,” in turn, play directly into the hands of the studios.

“We’ve seen some people do that, take the press notes and just print them as part of their work. Generally online bloggers tend to do that because they feel like those are the official descriptions and they can go with them. We’d obviously prefer they didn’t. If you’re going to review a film, you should probably see it and come up with your own take on it.”

And since professional media critics are often the first on the chopping block at contracting print publications, movie bloggers have begun gaining more visibility and traction as legitimate sources for reviews. The moral of this story? All those grains of salt being scattered across Park City’s slippery streets might be put to better use in reading film reviews.

When I think of a love story featuring a pair of robots called I’m Here and directed by none other than Spike Jonze, I immediately think of vodka.

Well, not really, but ABSOLUT Vodka is betting I’ll associate their brand with the 30 minute film, which is having its debut this week at the Sundance Film Festival.

“It was a pretty incredible opportunity,” says Jonze. “They (ABSOLUT) didn’t give me any requirements to make a movie that had anything to do with vodka. They just wanted me to make something that was important to me, and let my imagination take me wherever I wanted. And it wasn’t like working with some huge corporation where I had to meet with committees of people. It was just a small group, and it seemed like creativity and making something that affected them emotionally was the only thing that really mattered to them. I got to make my first love story. It’s about the relationship between two robots living in Los Angeles”.

Making films, even with all the new technology, can be expensive, even if you are Spike Jonze. Getting funding and being given total creative control with that money rarely go hand in hand, but in this case it seems the vodka maker wanted Jonze to kind of do his thing and they’d roll with the results. ABSOLUT has always prided itself through its extensive partnerships with artists of all stripes over the years who’ve made designs for the iconic bottles and ads and have probably learned that if you want to work with the best at what they do, it’s best to not put too many constraints on the work.

This is not the first time that ABSOLUT has found robots associated with its vodka, in 2008 they teamed up with some brainiacs at MIT and a Swedish research development company and made a robot that played music and that could be interacted with online.