Dinobrite Productions sets eyes on national attention
The founders of Dinobrite Productions are once again grabbing the attention of “Tosh.0” fans, this time through the show’s competition among colleges nationwide.
Daniel Tosh, comedian and host of the Comedy Central television series centered around viral videos on the Internet, will be taping a live episode of “Tosh.0” at a college campus, and the winner will be chosen through the “Tosh.0” College Campus Invasion. The competition encourages schools to submit a video convincing Tosh and company to come.
Dinobrite’s video, created by USC graduates Joey Thompson and Fabio Frey, lists the top 10 reasons why Tosh should come to the University of South Carolina — reasons ranging from the Confederate flag in front of the Statehouse to the broken locks in all of the women’s residence halls. The video is posted to Tosh’s blog online, where the number of views are tracked and viewers can give video a virtual thumbs up or thumbs down. As of Tuesday night, Dinobrite’s video had just over 7,800 views and a 93-percent thumbs up rating.
“(The University of) Miami is still beating us in views, but we have a higher ranking in terms of thumbs up,” Frey said. “And we’re not sure which determines the winning at the end, so we’re just doing everything we can to help out our chances.”
In an effort to increase their views and spread the word among USC’s student body, Dinobrite has created an unofficial competition with the University of Miami through a Facebook event page with a link to the video. “Get Our Tosh Video More Views and Thumbs Up Than Miami’s” had 972 people listed as attending as of Tuesday night.
“Our mentality behind thing now is, we think we have the highest production value video, so now we want the most views and the highest thumbs up,” Thompson said. “We talked to the supervisors, and they just pick the video they like the most. At the end of the day, it’s the people at ‘Tosh’ who choose which they think is the best video.”
The video features both current USC students and alumni, including the university’s famed Boombox Guy (computer science graduate student J.J. Shepherd) and characters Demarcus and Chang (played by fourth-year pharmacy student Anthony Le and fourth-year theatre student Bakari Lebby, respectively) from a Dinobrite video featured as the Viewer Video of the Week on an episode of “Tosh.0” in February 2010.
“I think there would be an element of fun, but it would also give the university a lot of national recognition,” Frey said. “People would be talking about it.”
Thompson echoed the sentiments that winning this competition would be beneficial for the university and supported by the student body.
“We have a good baseball team, we’re going to have a good football team and if we get this, then USC’s going to look like a pretty happening place,” Thompson said.
Readers can watch and rate the video through “Tosh.0’s” blog on the Comedy Central website or show support by joining the Facebook event. The competition runs through July 31. If chosen, Tosh would film the episode at USC sometime in the fall.