The rise of the guerrilla director
By Mike DavisonBrowsing iFilm today, I felt impelled to watch ‘Come to the prom with me’ again. It is currently sitting at over 560,000 views from the site. Wow.
Viral video is thriving thanks to a healthy dose of additional bandwidth and technological progress. Coupled with the vlogging phenomena which is about to hit big time, it feels as though web video’s day has come.
Thing is, its so easy to produce video content for the web and advances in mobile technology mean that the technology is always with you. A guy called Kaganoff has taken it to a logical conclusion and actually shot a whole feature movie on a K750i. Coming soon here.
Enter the guerrilla director, low budget content creators with little more than a DC, internet connection and screw loose in the head. Have a look here, here and here to see what I mean. I know I would be impelled to send this stuff on, despite being reluctant to spam my friends in the same way I did two years ago with web tittle tattle.
There’s often a stark contrast between branded viral efforts and this kind of wild abandon. The reason is obvious. Marketing managers want to stay ‘on brand’ and are often too scared to push the envelope that little bit further than comfortable. But that’s exactly where it starts to work.
However there may be an answer. Brands should start to sponsor these lunatics. Why aren’t more brands championing these guys? I’d love to see Numa Numa man sponsored by Ocean Records or promoting the Eurovision Song Contest – or even the artist who created that mess of a tune. Why not?
