We had the pleasure of being asked again by our long time friend, the uber talented Shane Dawson; to direct his Christmas short film, and after confirming he was sure he wanted us Jewish dudes to direct a Christmas video, we hit the ground running to continue our longtime collaboration of making long form, professional level content on YouTube that his cable sized audience can enjoy.
We put the entire 11 page production from conception all the way through uploading in under 2 weeks, which is crazy especially when you see the final product and how well it turned out. This project really sums up everything we passionately talk about when it comes to web video with keeping the crew small but talented and driven, and how to execute high production values on small budgets in a very short period of time, and not to mention long form! The video runs over ten minutes, and with Shane’s cable sized numbers, the video will approach 2 million viewers if not more by the time we get to Christmas.
We are so proud of the project. Before coming online we were feature filmmakers, and as such we’ve always believed in high quality long form content online, and happy to start seeing a shift in proving that it is indeed possible if you make the right business and distribution decisions. For our own personal online content right now we’re unable to bring such big ideas and lengths to fruition thanks to not having the budget and it being literally just the 2 of us working on the 6 different series we produce, so opportunities to have a small budget to create this short film not only allows us to show our abilities in a more “traditional” Hollywood format, but also makes a product that should be looked at as not only the future of YouTube content but web video at large, and proving more and more that the way many of us made the decision to use YouTube to build a business and true audience for ourselves was the right way to go.
We’re excited to helping lead the way for more opportunities like this to start showing up. The bar is raising higher on YouTube for long form comedy by Shane and ourselves, along with a handful of other filmmakers and top channels starting to take advantage of their large audiences to create strongly produced narrative content (WongFuProductions; and Reckless Tortuga)
Below is the short film, NSFW due to language