Tag: viral videos

The Funniest Cat Video In The History of Ever

Holly Payberg

BusterCan I just tell you how disheartening it is to spend the whole of your adult life honing your skills, perfecting your craft, then spending countless hours creating, writing and producing content for Youtube to the best of your entertaining abilities, only to be shown up by a cat? Lots of cats. Kittens even?

I mean, come on!!! Take that one little Black kitten with the white paws, how long has he even been alive? 8 weeks? And all he had to do was throw his cute little paws up in the air each time his owner quit tickling him and you people swoon. At least make him work for it a little bit. He didn’t even have to get up out of bed and boom! You’re giving him million of views.

He doesn’t appreciate it. He just goes on his merry little way never even acknowledging his millions of Facebook fans. He is completely unconcerned with the coveted gift of going viral you have bestowed upon him. I’d become his manager and embezzle all his ad dollars to get back at him but he wouldn’t care about that either.

Yes its a sad reality we content creators will have to face: the fact that in the ratings game of life we are simply no match for the, always entertaining, but eternally ungrateful, house cat.

Which is why in our game of one up-man-ship in Season 2, the one where Holster keeps torturing Tallulah with more and more co-hosts who she claims she has hired because they are trending, she can’t help but bring in the sure fire ratings maker, the almighty cat. Tallulah had asked for just one episode that she could do in the style that she wished the show to be, but Holster just couldn’t do it. She had to “cheapen it all with a cat”

Which brings me to…

Industry Tip #20
If you can’t beat em, join em.

And now, without further ado I bring you Episode 5 of Season 2. I’m not sure what I love most about this episode, the fact that Mhairi actually did do research about the tomato soup sandwich, the fact that both my daughter and my cat attempt to steal the show, the fact that yet again Mhairi challenged me to create/edit something I never would have created on my own but sincerely love (meaning that whole b & w segment,) or the barrage of epic insults Tallulah hurls at Holster, all I know is we packed a lot into this 5 minutes of fun and it ended up doing quite well for us on the Festival circuit.

Marge Takes Over the Twittersphere

Holly Payberg

Screen Shot 2015-10-10 at 10.16.56 AMWell that was the plan anyway. Mhairi and I had decided that Season 2 was going to be all about the very real pressure that web creators are under to have their videos go viral, to gain the coveted status of “trending.”

We figured if Tallulah has her own web cooking show, then her lack of trending status would surely be her biggest obstacle to gaining all the success, acclaim and hats she desires and it was Holster’s job as Producer to remedy this. The trouble was, Holster and Tallulah had very different ideas about what type of content would cause that success. Holster felt Tallulah needed a popular co-host to help her stir up ratings, and lets just say Tallulah disagreed.

We thought, “wouldn’t it be funny if Tallulah chose to have Marge on the show, because in her eyes Marge proves how important she is, after all she’s saved a life?” Tallulah figures this will get things moving, and give her the proper acclaim she deserves but in the end it backfires because Marge starts trending instead?” We knew this would bring out Tallulah’s green-eyed monster and add to all sorts of fun.

To go a step further, we thought “wouldn’t it be doubly funny if we could actually get Marge to trend on twitter? Like in real life”

Screen Shot 2015-10-10 at 10.14.33 AMSo that became the plan. We took to the twittersphere and created twitter accounts for Tallulah, Holster and Marge and then as the episodes started being released we started tweeting.

We had an awesome time tweeting back and forth in real time, in character, shared a lot of laughs, and even had quite a few fans join in on the fun, but in the end, as it turns out, you kind of need to already have a decent sized and engaged audience, for this kind of storytelling to really work.

While we may not have succeeded in making Marge trend, we did discover how much fun Improving with our fans on twitter can be, so you can expect much more of this behavior in the future. In fact if you enjoy a little Improv banter yourself you can always feel free to chat with Tallulah and the gang by following and tweeting to these accounts Tallulah, Holster & Marge now. Which leads me to….

Industry Tip #16
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. (cliche for a reason) Can’t tell you how many times this has proven to be true in this business. Persistence is everything.

And without further ado, here is Episode 2 of Season 2, featuring the triumphant return of the newly trending Marge #SaveMarge (and yet another slam dunk performance from Tami Hillberry & Mhairi Morrison who have proven themselves to be one take wonders, with Improv no less.) I love how Marge is suddenly dressed more like Tallulah, copying her every move. Little moments of genius, all found in the moment.

Not All Advice is Created Equal

Holly Payberg

Meme_S1E3_1After Mhairi and I had released the first season of Feathers and Toast, and were in our experimental year where we were playing around with social media and attempting to build an audience, we began receiving a lot of advice from many diverse sources about what we needed to do to enhance the show and get our numbers up, some we listened to and some we did not, because as I said before “Not all advice is created equal.”

Now I am not saying this in order to give myself and others an excuse to just throw away any advice you get that is not to your liking, in fact, I think you should listen very carefully to all advice, particularly the advice that’s hard to hear, there are gifts in there, I am saying this because advice is something you need to treat with caution.

The thing is, it is the rare person that can step out of their own life experiences, needs and wants, and listen to yours purely and deeply in order to give you unbiased advice tailored just for you and what’s best for achieving your specific vision.

More times than not the advice you are going to get will be based on the advice givers view of how things work, or the brand of success they themselves are seeking, their personal area of expertise, or the style of entertainment they like the best.

All of this information is very valuable and should not be overlooked, its just that when listening to it, it needs to be placed in the right context, particularly when you are a creator at the early stages of your vision.

The early stages are a precarious time for content creators. You haven’t even worked out all the answers yourself yet and already there are opinions about the direction you should go, opinions that are often presented to you with great confidence, as if they are fact, at a time when you are anything but confident, and if you are not careful they can alter your vision in a direction you never intended for it to go which leads me to…

Industry Tip #12

When receiving advice regarding your content (particularly in the early stages) it is important to remember 4 things:

1) Always be grateful to those who take the time to give you solicited advice. (those who give you unsolicited advice, you can do whatever you want with them 🙂 )

2) Always consider the source (what their personal experiences and biases are) so that the information they give you can remain in proper context.

3) Give yourself permission to trust your own gut. Regardless of the stature of the advice giver, if the advice given doesn’t jibe with the direction you feel you are going, give yourself permission to respectfully follow your own intuition.

4) If in following your own path, you discover that one of your former advice givers was right along, its okay and encouraged to admit that, readjust your course and become all the more grateful.

As some of you know, this particular topic became fodder for a good portion of Season 2 of Feathers and Toast as we delved into the age old battle between Art and commerce. But even earlier on it came into play with the clip I am about to show you that comes from our Holiday Tidbit series.

We had been given advice from a senior exec in the Youtube world who had suggested we needed to incorporate topics that were trending into our show, like twerking. Naturally the Tallulah side of Mhairi was like “twerking? Does he really expect me to twerk darling?”

But after much thought, we decided, yes, let’s have Tallulah twerk, but in her own Tallulah way. The result was our most viewed video to date. I guess that guy did have a point, particularly when it comes to increasing your views.