PHIT & NMSS' 30th St Station FREEZE

This past Monday PHIT made it's first foray into the world of Improv Everywhere style flashmob stunts. We had been thinking about stuff like this for a couple years, but I had always felt like we'd just be repetitive. However, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society got in touch with us last fall and wanted us to replicate the Grand Central Station Freeze that was done in NYC a few years ago as a way of raising awareness about MS (a disease which keeps people from moving eventually). It seemed like a good cause.

We had a lot of people signed up, and our actual group ended up being smaller due to the weather - a huge snowstorm - on Monday, but NMSS did still edit together the following video so you can get a feel for it. Check it out:



One really cool thing coming out of the event is people's interest in doing more stunts like this. So we may be doing one again soon. If you've got ideas for good stunts that are original, post them below... so far the best thing I've heard is a Snuggie flashmob.

What can PHIT do for you?

One thing the theater hasn't done a great job of is tracking what our students do after they leave our classes. Sometimes we get the random email thanking us or promoting something, but it's not all that often. Certainly a number of people have seen some pretty serious success - whether it be getting published, winning comedy related contests, or making music videos. We got this one last week and we're happy to claim we taught George everything he knows:



If you're a former students who has also done something cool, we'd love to hear about it in the comments section!

internet killed the video star

It seems like I only ever post articles on here, but there's another great one from yesterday's New York Times... YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money. I was pretty amazed to learn that 1) YouTube has introduced ads around some of it's videos (yay for them getting user consent everytime) and 2) that some of the people who are agreeing to have ads and splitting the profits under the partner program are making over $100,000/year. Made me wonder how much Secret Pants would have banked this year if they were participating...

It also brought me back to thinking about how IMPROV can be effectively disseminated on the interweb. YouTube has been a double-edged sword for a lot of sketch groups. It does allow sketches to quickly be released to a mass audience, but on the downside there is a lot of stuff that should never see the light of day getting posted. For improv, videos pose a challenge. A place like YouTube has limits on file length that prevent posting a full improv set, and sites like vimeo which don't tend to be less heavily trafficked.

So what's an improv theater to do? I'm especially curious about this, because looking at the partner program on YouTube I saw an opportunity for the theater to start generating content that could create money for our capital fund - the bank account that is saving up for a permanent space. A few years ago PHIT registered www.phillyimprovtheater.tv and we haven't used it yet... but I would love to see a site that embeds videos of shows (especially for the groups we've created).

Anybody know how we can get longform improv up on the web in a digestable way?