Posters for The Art of Punk, Bryan Ray Turcotte's new documentary series for MOCAtv, include the well-known logos for major punk bands.

The logo is simple. Four heavy black bars sitting side by side — one up, one down, one up, one down — creating a wave effect: a black flag flying in the wind of discontent.

Few logos are as universally recognized and revered as the one Raymond Pettibon designed for L.A. punk legends Black Flag — although The Dead Kennedys' "DK" symbol certainly would be a runner-up, along with Crass' circular design, each evoking the band's volatile energy and bold simplicity.

Filmmaker Bryan Ray Turcotte has the Crass logo tattooed on his upper arm, and at the screening for his latest project, he's not alone. As audience members file out of the packed theater at downtown's Museum of Contemporary Art, all three band logos are visibly immortalized: on skin, on T-shirts, on jackets, patches and buttons.

Which is fitting, since tonight's screening is for The Art of Punk, Turcotte's series spotlighting the logos and fliers used to promote the three bands. Turcotte made the three 20-minute documentary films for the Museum of Contemporary Art's new MOCAtv channel on YouTube; all three screen at MOCA tonight, and they're being rolled out online this month, beginning with the one about Black Flag on June 11. The Dead Kennedys' doc will be posted June 18 and the one about Crass on June 25, all at YouTube.com/mocatv.

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Courtesy of Hulu

Maya and Jacob, two teens caught in a love triangle in Carlos Portugal's East Los High.

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(Note: An original version of this piece said Carlos Portugal directed the film Quinceañera. That film was actually directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland.)

Ever sat in front of your television and thought: why can't that one Univision telenovela and that ABC Family teen show just combine into one crazy, exciting series I can watch in one place?

Time to flip open your laptop or settle in with a tablet because Carlos Portugal heard your plea. Earlier this week, Hulu premiered his show (which he produced and directed, co-creating with Kathleen Bedoya) East Los High, a love triangle played out by Hulu's first all-Latin cast. Portugal wanted to mesh the drama of telenovelas with the very modern issues teenagers face today, discussed in shows like Gossip Girl.

The Population Media Center, an organization that uses entertainment for health promotion, initially approached Portugal with the task of creating a show set in Southern California that would address Latina pregnancy. Portugal has lived in Los Angeles for about thirty years and chose East L.A. as the setting for his show and the filming location.

"This is a real L.A. show," says Portugal. "It's really grounded in the culture and what L.A. is about and I'm really excited about that."

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Paramount Pictures

Erica Oyama and husband Ken Marino

Erica Oyama is the great comedic mind behind the scripted comedy web series Burning Love on Yahoo. The show parodies reality dating shows like The Bachelor, and recently released its third season while winning a Webby Award for Special Achievement of the Year.

The first season made the jump from tiny to small screen with it's television premiere on E! this past February. Oyama's husband Ken Marino starred in that season as the goofy fireman bachelor Mark Orlando, who is back in season three to compete with former contestants for a grand prize of $900. (They're currently writing the film adaptation of Go The F**k to Sleep together.)

Erica has been interviewed extensively by the media about the process of writing the show, so we thought we'd ask her some deeper, much more embarrassing questions.

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Ryan Brackin

Adam Nix (director-editor-cinematographer), left, Ben Roy (co-creator) and Evan Nix (director-editor) with Denver students from the public school where they shot the pilot for their series Those Who Can't

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*More L.A. Weekly Film Coverage
*Our Special Issue: How to Succeed on YouTube
*12 Comedy Acts to Watch in 2013

Amazon's new production arm, Amazon Studios, is right now breaking new ground by premiering 14 scripted pilots and having the public help decide who will get series orders. But its avant-garde development process goes deeper than that.

Amazon's original programming execs, Sarah Babineau and Joe Lewis, bought some finished scripts that had made the rounds at other networks in previous years but gone unpurchased. Others they bought from unknowns who submitted their full scripts through Amazon's call for submissions on its website. From first-time TV writers to Academy Award-nominated veterans, Amazon gave many of its creators unprecedented freedom in casting, crew, content and production.

This freedom, and perhaps the pure publicity stunt of it all, allowed Amazon to woo established creators who might not otherwise have been interested in having their work displayed at a meat market for any guy in sweatpants in his grandma's basement to vilify or exult. "At first I thought, who wants to work on troll bait?" says famed Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, creator of Amazon pilot Alpha House. "But Amazon is assessing reaction through a variety of different metrics, so whatever decisions they make will almost certainly be more informed and rational than the traditional Hollywood gut calls."

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Courtesy of Dobi Media

Jenna Marbles in Please Subscribe

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*Sarah Silverman, Michael Cera and Friends Create a YouTube Channel
*Our Profile of YouTube Star Jenna Marbles
*Our YouTube Issue

Some people like to have only egg whites in their omelet," declares a tomboyish young woman as she weaves around a sparsely appointed L.A. apartment kitchen, her words intermittently slurred by inebriation. "That's a good way to make an omelet shitty." After a few non sequiturs laced with tongue-in-cheek cooking tips, she blurts out: "You ever feel like your cat is judging you?"

If it sounds random, well, it is. But this Web series starring Hannah Hart, better known by her YouTube handle My Drunk Kitchen, has earned a half-million subscribers and a staggering 45 million views.

Then there's the baby-faced Venice resident with a smattering of facial hair. He plays a Brazilian, soccer-inspired song on empty soda cans, simultaneously managing to bang out multiple rhythms and riff on both a bass guitar and a couple of wooden guitars.

He is Joe Penna, better known as Mystery Guitar Man, and he has 2.3 million subscribers and more than 300 million total views.

He, too, is pretty random.

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Nanette Gonzales

Chris Hardwick hosts the Streamy Awards

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*Our Streamy Awards slideshow
*Our profile of Jenna Marbles, from our People Issue

The 3rd annual Streamy awards, honoring excellence in original online video, streamed live online (appropriately) Sunday night at the Hollywood Palladium. More than ever before, nominees ran the gamut of new and old media faces from YouTube vlogger Grace Helbig (DailyGrace), who won Personality of the Year and Best First Person Series, to Tom Hanks, whose web series Electric City won Best Animated Show.

Newsman Larry King and YouTube star Jenna Marbles summed up the diversity of artists nicely when they presented the first award together. "Here we are with the legendary icon of entertainment," began Marbles, gesturing to King, "And the sexiest person on the Internet," he added. Then, "You guess which is which." King has his own web series Larry King Now on Hulu. Comedian Chris Hardwick hosted the event, which featured performances by Vanilla Ice, Soulja Boy and Shontelle.

The "annual" in "3rd annual Streamys" isn't quite accurate...yet. The awards premiered in 2009, but in 2010 were thwarted by technical difficulties and unexpected butt-naked streakers. There were also creative conflicts behind the scenes and the IAWTV (International Academy for Web Television) split from the Streamys to create their own web awards show, which had their second annual awards last month.

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Clarence Alford Photography

Two crew members battle in front of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle van

Walking onto the set of the new web series Man at Arms, released today, it soon becomes clear that the Sword and the Stone, Tony Swatton's shop of goods, is every (convention-going) boy's dream. There are Roman soldiers, scantily clad female mannequins in leather and metal costumes, and very familiar props -- like Jack Sparrow's sword and Hook's namesake.

Swatton has been in the business of providing handcrafted, custom works for costumes since he was 15, but he truly got his start at the tender age of seven, when he would take rocks that he'd found and throw them into a rock tumbler. "That's why it's the Sword and the Stone, because I still cut gemstones," Swatton says.

Most of his recent jobs involve more metalwork, such as creating horse armor for Spike TV's Guys' Choice Awards. But audiences will see him combine sword and stone firsthand in a future episode featuring Finn's sword from the Cartoon Network series Adventure Time (it's an animated show, but he created a real one anyway).

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Bayan Mogharabi

SoulPancake core staff: Rainn Wilson, Shabnam Mogharabi, Golriz Lucina, and Devon Gundry

In 2008, Actor Rainn Wilson (NBC's The Office) wanted to create a space on the internet where people could discuss life's big questions with total strangers. You know, what Socrates and Plato would have done if they had access to adequate bandwidth and a YouTube deal. Knowing nothing about building websites (Wilson referred to the site for a while as a "flash page thingy"), he partnered with friends Joshua Homnick and Devon Gundry to create SoulPancake, an interactive website full of conversations, activities, photos and calls to action through which users could explore what it means to be human.

As it turned out, lots of other people also wanted a safe place to discuss these questions too. Within 3 months of the website's beta launch in 2009, they had more than 3 million page views and 20,000 active members. Within two years of launching, the SoulPancake founders published a New York Times bestselling book and began producing weekly Sunday morning short programs for the Oprah Winfrey Network.

This July, SoulPancake launched its YouTube channel, one of the 169 channels actually funded by YouTube as part of its effort to bring diverse, high quality programming to the site. They now boast 71,000 YouTube subscribers, 100,000 active members on the website, 3.3 million video views and 9 different web series, with more slated for 2013. Thanks to the advance from YouTube, SoulpPancake was able to rent its first real office in Atwater Village and bring its staff together from all over the country, where they had been working remotely.

The most recent new web series from SoulPancake is Stories from the Street by filmmaker Justin Baldoni. The show features short interviews with people who are homeless and living on the streets of L.A.

"We wanted to keep them really short: Boom this is who this person is," says Baldoni. "Our hope is, after watching an episode, the next time you walk by the homeless guy you walk by every day on the way to work, this time you'll stop and say hi. You might not have a dollar or fifty cents, but what you do have is the ability to make eye contact with them, to say hello and ask them how their day is."

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*Brody Stevens Speaks Out About his Infamous Twitter Meltdown

For three LA comedians looking to expanding their reach, HBO GO is offering a platform through its new batch of original programs, designated HBO Digitals. Available only to HBO subscribers, HBO GO launched early last year and gained fans early on by allowing entire seasons of shows like Game of Thrones to be streamed instantly. Critics have voiced disapproval in its strict availability to cable subscribers, but for the most part HBO GO has been a success in helping HBO catch up to their new competitors in Netflix and Hulu Plus.

In addition to showing HBO's regular series, HBO GO this month started offering up four new digital series of its own, one created by LA-based musical comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates and another by comedian Brody Stevens, a Tarzana native. The other two series include The Boring Life of Jacqueline, about a New York actress's struggles with dating, and Single Long, based on the careers and relationships of a group of Chicago 20-somethings. With the exception of Stevens' Enjoy It!, the only reality series, all of the programming is scripted, produced in five-minute episodes.

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Courtesy of DanceOn

Elle Walker burning the floor with Bryan Tanaka

Take a look at Dance Showdown, the first original show created for the YouTube channel DanceOn. This is reality-style, competition dance crossing easily to an online format -- and doing it better than network television, frankly.

It's pretty hilarious.

Launched in April, Dance Showdown is a cross between So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With the Stars, with a little Charlie's Angels thrown in (the Charlie character being the show's host, hip-hop crew star D-trix). Individual episodes have topped more than 500,000 views, with series' totals of more than 6 million.

The show pairs YouTube "stars" with a slate of "superstar" choreographers -- best to ignore the hyperbole because there is a lot of youth and inexperience here. But that is part of the charm. You, dear Internet voters, are the judges, and you will determine the final winner of the $25,000 prize, to be announced on May 31.

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