Nadia Takla

The Los Angeles Comedy Shorts Film Festival festival directors and producers, from left to right: Gary Anthony Williams, Kelly Frazier, Jeannie Roshar and Ryan Higman

This past weekend at the Downtown Independent was the fifth annual Los Angeles Comedy Shorts Film Festival, featuring ten film blocks of shorts. Topics (and interpretation of "short") varied in the films showcased at the film festival. One moment it's the German porn industry, the next, a guy in bed eating Chicken McNuggets. And I sat through over fifteen hours of it just so I can tell you which comedy shorts you should watch.

Here are our top ten picks from the festival:

10. Post-It
Starring David Neher (the bit player Todd in Community) as Ernie and a yellow Post-It, this short follows the growing friendship between this lonely cubicle worker and his reliable pal who can always be counted on to remind him of what he has to do. Things turn for the worse when Ernie starts to set reminders on his iPhone, leading Post-It to go into a jealous rage. But when Ernie is mugged and forced to withdraw money from the ATM, his yellow-squared friend comes to help.

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Mickey Meyer

Sarah Silverman and Daniel Kellison Get Down To Business

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It's 2 p.m. and I'm sitting on a blue exercise ball in an office at Culver City Studios, across from Emmy-nominated TV writer/producer Daniel Kellison. To the right are the essentials for a late night work-athon: stocked mini fridge, snacks, Bulleit Bourbon. Covering the walls, like the masterpiece of a CIA terrorist tracker, are hundreds of multi-colored index cards boasting the names of some of the best musicians, directors, writers and comedians in town. "It's like A Beautiful Mind in here," Kellison jokes.

Kellison co-created Crank Yankers and The Man Show and was the original executive producer of Jimmy Kimmel Live. He also and spent eight years producing for David Letterman. As of late, he has taken a step away from his old Hollywood roots and become the co-founder of two new original YouTube comedy channels: JASH (Josh pronounced with a Southern accent) and Video Podcast Network.

JASH is a YouTube channel that launched last week, featuring original content overseen by all-star actors Sarah Silverman, Michael Cera, Reggie Watts and famed cult comedy duo Tim & Eric -- with Kellison's help. Kellison's index card collage represents the artists the partners are already collaborating with or hope to in the future. Each partner has complete autonomy to create whatever content they want: short films, sketches, series, one-offs, talk-shows, animation, and music videos, with the proceeds shared equally. (The Video Podcast Network, Kellison's other project, features fully produced visual podcasts from some of the most popular comedy podcasters -- first and foremost, Adam Carolla.)

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Still from Michael Lucid's Dirty Girls

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*More L.A. Weekly Film Coverage
*Spring Breakers Review: Godard Meets Girls Gone Wild

In high school, Michael Lucid was an artsy, friendly kid who floated around from one campus clique to the next. "I was more approachable and kids felt comfortable talking to me," he says of his time at Santa Monica's Crossroads School, where he graduated in 1996.

Because Lucid was likeable and trustworthy, his teenage peers granted him the kind of insider access into their lives that most filmmakers only dream about capturing on film. Filmmakers like Larry Clark (Kids, Wassup Rockers), Catherine Hardwicke (Lords of Dogtown, Thirteen) and Penelope Spheeris (Decline of Western Civilization, Suburbia) all launched their careers by making films that depicted the harsh realities of American teenagers' lives, but Lucid had an advantage over all of these filmmakers: he was himself a high schooler when he shot his gritty, painfully intimate documentary Dirty Girls, which has now become an instant cult sensation ever since it was uploaded to Youtube this month.

Perhaps you've seen the 17-minute film in the roughly two weeks since it's resurfaced on the Internet, 17 years after it was initially shot by a 17-year-old during the course of just two school days. Maybe you've seen the still frame of two messy-haired young girls being interviewed in a high school auditorium -- an image that's become ubiquitous after having been reblogged thousands of times by fans on Tumblr.

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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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Stephanie Carrie

Co-Creators of "Women of LA" Jamie Abrams & DJ Lubel

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Jamie Abrams and DJ Lubel are either comedy geniuses, bitter mysogynists or something in between. Regardless of the label you feel is most appropriate, they are the creators behind the latest comedy music video to go viral: "The Women of L.A.", in which Lubel laments through song his inability to get the women of L.A. to sleep with him, since his "face looks like Andy Dick" and his "only credit on IMDB is an extra on Community."

Abrams and Lubel chatted with us about love, lust, and the controversy their video is stirring in the L.A. comedy community.

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Yung Jake

Although half of Los Angeles will decamp this weekend to the snowy hillsides of Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, not everyone is going for the movies. Starry-eyed attendees relish access to the suits, the skiing and the swag, but what about the art?

Shari Frilot has curated Sundance's experimental New Frontier films and exhibitions for the past seven years, and this year, rather than pushing anyone to see James Franco's film Interior. Leather Bar, (hint: it involves sexually explicit gay BDSM), Frilot is encouraging us to notice Yung Jake, whose work blurs the lines between memes, hip hop and video art.

"He's young, green and pretty hot," Frilot said. After all, not many visual artists would mention a dislike of rapper-turned-actor Ludacris and race-conscious silhouette artist Kara Walker in the same breath. I want to know more, to talk to Yung Jake himself, but he's back in New York for the holidays. He doesn't want to talk on the phone, and he doesn't want to Skype; he says it's too impersonal. He wants to talk over text.

Well, okay.

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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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Photo by Gene Pittman

The Walker Center's festival drew thousands.

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Katie Hill, the 28-year-old program associate responsible for the first-ever Internet Cat Video Film Festival and, some critics allege, the subsequent "downfall of modern society," watched more than 10,000 cat videos in a single month. She is otherwise a normal-looking girl, although watching so many cats in such a short period of time probably changes you in ways not immediately apparent to the naked eye.

"It was a lark," she says of her festival idea. "It's been a whirlwind of craziness ever since."

Flopping down on a sofa at the crowded Silent Movie Theatre this past August, she seems discombobulated. With the festival a week away, the nonprofit film foundation Cinefamily had flown her from Minnesota to Los Angeles to present a small sampling of the videos. "I have cats, and I like cat videos," she continues. "But I was not at the 10,000-video level of love before this. It was quite a game changer for my lifestyle."

In fact, she'd initially proposed the idea to her bosses at the Walker Art Center as kind of a joke. But when they agreed, and the Minneapolis museum invited the public to nominate their favorite videos, thousands of entries poured in. Hill was tasked with winnowing the submissions down to about an hour's worth of footage, or 79 videos.

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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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Fiverr artist Professor Hans Von Puppet created this video above, to introduce this article.

Can you dance a jig in spandex while playing the accordion, craft words in water out of tiny boats, or fluently speak the Dothraki language from Game of Thrones? Then call up Mom and give her a big I-told-you-so, because finally you can cash in on that supposedly 'impractical' skill set. Maybe.

Fiverr.com is a social network for services. You sign up for free and offer your product or service for $5 to buyers in more than 200 countries. Make sure you stand out, though, as there are currently more than a million services offered, with 2,000 more every day.

Here are five ambitious and talented SoCal artists who faced those odds and managed to get noticed among the fray while make some cash to boot.

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