Tag: web series

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.

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.

The return of the kale darling

feathersandtoast

Dear Summer-timers,

Hope this finds you well. Well darling the same cannot be said for me I’m afraid. I have been hauled out of shooting for the next few weeks in order to focus on pre production of season 2 of Feathers and Toast despite a trip yesterday to the hairdressers to enhance my red highlighted hair.

So darling, to be honest, my freckled nose is slightly out of whack as I like to be camera ready and miming my way to you on a weekly basis. One needs a 2 minute mime to cheer one up come rain or shine, I would have thought. But the powers that be have decided otherwise, and as I am only 5ft 3 in stature I cannot tackle them physically; one needs to be reasonable when sizing up the odds of winning such scuffles.

But darling, they cannot prevent us from watching re-runs. In true summer style lets have a few weeks of season one and relive the classic kale moments, tomato squelching and neon fusion cooking in order to best prepare for the imminence of season 2. (please do remember at this point to refrain from wearing crocs while watching)

Pull up your cocktails and un-croc’d feet and settle in for 4 minutes of kale cooking splendor in action,

Yours in re-run feathers,

Tallulah

CLICK HERE TO WATCH

Feathers and Toast to premiere on Tuesday January 28th…

feathersandtoast

Dear January survivors,

Hope this finds you well and relaxing with some sort of suitable juice or smoothie. I am thrilled to announce that we will be releasing the very first episode of Feathers and Toast on Tuesday January 28th at 10pm EST and the very very first episode of Tallulah Talks Back on Thursday January 30th at 10pm EST.The episodes will be sent quietly and with suitable stealth to your inboxes for your viewing convenience. Please make suitable notes in your diaries in gold pens to remind yourselves to tune in.  In this wonderfully digital age if one is indeed sleeping during those release times, one will be able to access the episodes of course in ones waking hours.

Yours in January Feathers,

Tallulah

Meme_Jan_1