Monthly Archive for April, 2009

Mp3 Experiment Six – Save The Date

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photo by hotdogger13

The Mp3 Experiment Six will take place on Saturday, May 23 at 4:00 PM on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Save the date! You can RSVP on Facebook.

Mp3 download and complete instructions are now online. Learn about previous Mp3 Experiments.

Praise Steve!

CW 11 Files Copyright Claim

copyright

For April Fool’s Day we posted a video of a fake mission where it appeared that we had lost our judgment and crashed a funeral. We fooled thousands of angry YouTube users into thinking it was real. The biggest fools of all were the CW 11 news team who reported on the funeral as if it actually happened. They didn’t do one bit of research or fact checking, they simply broadcast a YouTube video and reported it as fact (a video from a prank group on April 1st!) I of course uploaded their story to my personal YouTube channel to show the world their lack of journalism skills.

Tonight I got a copyright notice from YouTube informing me that Tribune (the parent company of the CW 11) had filed a copyright claim against the video and that it had been removed. Clearly they want this embarrassment off of the Internets. What’s more interesting is the fact that their original broadcast used our content without permission. They simply put “YOUTUBE” on the screen to indicate that’s where they found the video. So it’s OK for them to air content that we shot and own, but it’s not OK for me to upload their footage of the content they took from me? It’s “fair use” for the news to take a video off of YouTube and broadcast it, but it’s not “fair use” for a citizen to expose their poor reporting on his own content?

Good thing the video has already been uploaded somewhere else:

And if you’d like to download it and keep a copy for safekeeping, you can do that too.

Continue reading ‘CW 11 Files Copyright Claim’

Best Funeral Ever Outtakes


(YouTube video link)
edited by Matt Adams

Now that the cat is out of the bag about our Best Funeral Ever April Fool’s Hoax, we figured it would be fun to share some of the behind-the-scenes video and photos from the project. Here’s how we did it, along with some of the more ridiculous things we cut for being just too over-the-top.

Continue reading ‘Best Funeral Ever Outtakes’

April Fool Funeral


(see photo full size)

If you haven’t figured it out by now, The Best Funeral Ever mission was staged for April Fool’s Day. The “family members” were all actors and friends of Improv Everywhere. Next week we will post a new report with photo and video outtakes from the day. We staged a few over-the-top moments that were just too ridiculous to keep the video believable. Our apologizes to those who were fooled into thinking we had lost our minds and done something this horrendous. If you haven’t read the comments yet, do yourself a favor and read a few. They are probably funnier than the hoax itself.

But the hands-down funniest thing about all of this is that tonight’s evening news on CW 11 covered this mission as if it actually happened. They think the prank is on the family (our actors) when actually the prank is on them:

So basically the extent of their reporting is watching a video on YouTube and then describing it as fact on air. They didn’t bother to email Improv Everywhere for comment, call the cemetery to verify, or try to get a quote from the “family.” They just watched the video and threw it on TV. Great journalism!

They featured the story on their website tonight, but then took it down a few hours later (I guess someone filled them in.) Don’t worry. I took a screenshot.

Update: The CW filed a copyright claim against us for posting their video of our video!

Check out the hilarious outtakes from this project.

Best Funeral Ever (April Fool’s 2009)

Note: This is a fake mission we staged for April Fool’s Day 2009. We posted it on April 1, fooling thousands of people into thinking we had lost our judgment and done something horrible. Everyone in the video is an actor. There was no funeral and no family. Be sure to check out the comments from the people who were fooled below.


(YouTube video link)
edited by Matt Adams / music by Tyler Walker

For our latest mission, 30 Improv Everywhere agents found a random funeral in the obituary section of the newspaper and turned it into the best funeral ever. We picked a man who had very few surviving relatives and then showed up to his funeral to make it truly awesome. Enjoy the video first, and then continue reading for photos and our report.

Continue reading ‘Best Funeral Ever (April Fool’s 2009)’