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Behind the behind the scenes at Kittywood Studios
Last week in The Linkdown, we mentioned “Kittywood Studios: Cat Videos Incorporated,” an Austin-shot video (shown above) suggesting that all the world’s “kitteh” videos were actually made by one big production company.
The Austin-based director of the short, Joe Nicolosi, has become a hit with the video in at least one area: it’s being featured by sites like I Can Has Cheezburger, Cute Overload and Laughing Squid, exactly the kinds of sites the video lovingly tweaks. It’s also been featured on CBSNews.com and Huffington Post Comedy.
Nicolosi, who might have previously been best known as the director of several bumper videos for the South by Southwest Film festival including “Mario,” says the “Kittywood Studios” short only cost a few hundred self-financed dollars to shoot and took just a few days to cast, rehearse and shoot.
“It was extremely low budget. It was pretty much all spent on food for the crew,” Nicolosi said.
Burnie Burns of Austin’s Rooster Teeth Productions offered studio space and appears in the video along with other Austin actors.
In just five days the video has earned more than 153,000 hits on YouTube and is spreading quickly.
Nicolosi, who has worked in freelance motion graphics and animation out of the Arts + Labor offices in town, has been spending the last year trying to work as a full-time filmmaker. He says the idea for the short came from his sadness over how many things in our lives is owned by corporations. “I was trying to think of something not part of a corporate machine. The only thing I could come up with was cat videos.”
“Kittywood” is one of three original videos he plans to release over the next month aimed at the Funny or Die and CollegeHumor.com crowd.
“I’m making films I think are hilarious and making shorts I think will have an audience online,” Nicolosi said.
Below: Director Joe Nicolosi. Photo by Isaac Solomon.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW 2011
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By AnnD
August 16, 2011 8:17 AM | Link to this
I think creative people are so fun and cool! This is great!