Nothing earth shattering here. No crazy production. No trick camera skills. No dancing babies or flash mobs. While there are some very cool skateboarding tricks, I’m not a particularly big fan of skateboarding. So why did this video appeal to me? I probably just like it because the skateboarding tricks ARE cool, the tempo of them follow the music well and it’s set to one of my all time favorite rap songs. There I said it. Sometimes it’s all about the music and how it moves you or grabs you.

This is the first time I’ve featured an “amateur” produced video on Buzzworthy Wednesday. I use the term “amateur” loosely…but its for a good reason. The video I selected this week is an amazing and beautiful single shot video of the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan. The “Kuroshio Sea” (as this aquarium is called) is the second largest in the world as evidenced by the huge whale sharks, manta rays and large schools of fish swimming.

The song featured, which really sets the tone for this video, is “Please don’t go” by Barcelona. Barcelona credits their song placement in this video with boosting their album and song sales on iTunes and concert attendance. The video is really awe inspiring which is why its recieved well over 1 million views in just a couple weeks.

I mentioned using the term “amateur” loosely because the producer wasn’t specifically paid by the aquarium to make this piece – however Jon Rawlinson the creator is a gifted professional cinematographer and filmmaker in his own right. Perfect song selection matched with the vast open “zen-like” beauty of the aquarium…could the marketing team at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium created a better online marketing video? I doubt it. Enjoy.

So this is an interesting one. It was put out by LaPoste a traditional French mailing company and its had over 480,000 views since it’s upload three weeks ago.

Here’s a case of a poorly crafted viral campaign. The video is definitely geared to a youthful audience showing a Macbook transforming into a jet. Timely considering the release of the most recent Transformers movie.

However, when you go to the landing page they created (bear with me…my French is a little spotty), it’s for their new online service where you can fill out a form and send a registered letter and then have a record kept of the contents of the letter electronically on their site for three years. When you get to the landing page there isn’t even a line of text or link to the video to function as a visual reminder for why you went to the site. No engagement.

This isn’t a service geared to the 20 or 30 something, this is a service geared to the less computer literate crowd most likely from an older demographic who may not know that there are other digital mailing services available. This video has no target for that age group in any way, it’s being viewed by mostly teenage boys and Mac geeks. Don’t believe me? Take a gander at the comments.

So many missed opportunities.

While the video is very entertaining and would be fantastic as a Macbook or Transformers viral video, I feel like LaPoste missed the mark with their audience and their objective for creating the video. Still worth watching though.

So this week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday Video is actually a web site design. But it’s a video on YouTube. No kidding. This interesting approach to web design was for a creative agency, who chose to build their entire website within YouTube. They utilized YouTube’s annotations and video tagging to create the entire “website”.  The buzz from this “website” has led to more than 370,000 views in a little less than a month.

It’s an interesting concept in terms of online media buzz as it was featured on Creative Culture’s Creativity Top 5 among other blog and online references. I just wonder from a website traffic analytics and general online marketing perspective how much important information are they missing in exchange for this clever approach? All the same, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Air New Zealand apparently has absolutely nothing to hide. To illustrate this point the flight crew stripped for the above commercial donning only body paint, don’t worry…it’s office safe viewing. More than 90 Air New Zealand staff members are featured in the campaign, with eight donning only body paint.  In a little over 2 weeks the video has over 1.7 million views on YouTube alone.

Here’s the making of video with quotes and quips from the actual employees who were part of the body painting video shoot (also clean).

This is episode 8 of a great little animated series on the YouTube channel awomansworld. The series, channel and accompanying website called Only in a Woman’s World are all part of a marketing campaign being done by the FritoLay to promote their “healthier” snacking options such as Baked Lays and 100 calorie snacks, although you’d never know it. The short animations are just little humorous bits that all end with a “brought to you by…” and a teaser call-to-action to visit the Only in a Woman’s World website.

This episode was released a few days ago and already has over 12,000 views. Their YouTube channel is ranked 8th overall for subscribers and is the 8th most viewed channel this month.

While not the top viewed video of the week or anywhere near it, this was a masterfully created short video by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York that draws connections between artistic motivations and our everyday lives. It was by far the most creative and engaging marketing video I had seen all week. This is the first in a series of short films MoMA has commissioned by director Azazel Jacobs where he takes the museum’s audio tour and links it to the life of the young man viewing it.

Google recently invited people to create short videos about their Google Chrome web browser, and Chrome Shorts features a collection of short films about the browser. Here was my favorite of the bunch which has just under 300,000 views since being uploaded 3 weeks ago.

However you would have thought with the media push Google has put on promoting Chrome that they could have pushed at least one of the eleven videos they created over a million views by now. They have been plugging the browser on their front page and running television ads and let’s not forget the fact that they OWN YouTube. Should they have staggered the release of the videos? Embedded the videos on the Chrome landing page? Just goes to show that even the company that owns YouTube can’t force a video to go viral.

This was a clever video which utilizes YouTube’s HD settings. The video is a setup using a camera trick all plugging the new Samsung I8910 HD phone which shoots video in full high definition quality. It was shot in one take, no editing and with no computer effects. It’s received over 800,000 views since it’s upload a little over a month ago. Can you figure out how they shot this? They leave a number of clues along the way…I noticed a couple. If you want to know the answer they have a making of the video “Camera Trick Revealed” showing all the clues and the answer to how they shot the camera trick.

Once again this week there weren’t any big commercial winners in views of short form video. Could it be because of a  “Susan Boyle Effect” because her video had over 64 million views just last week so people are browsing less elsewhere? One of the real standouts this week is a video called “Carousel” directed by Adam Berg.

While there is no mention of the product in the video itself, the description promotes Philips latest entrant into the television market which displays in the same 21:9 ratio frame cinema proportion television, so no more black bars. This clever video was conceived to work as an endless loop.