h3h3Productions are an American based, husband and wife, sketch comedy YouTube channel. Their channel orients around reaction videos and sketch comedy. The pair released their first video “Girls Who Read”, which is a reaction video to the prom video Girls who read, in November of 2013. At the time the couple lived in Israel. In 2015, the couple moved to New York (where they currently reside), since then the channel has consistently risen in popularity. Since August this year, the channel has reached 2 million subscribers, with the most popular video being “Vape Nation” which is what I will be talking about today. This video features, Ethan Klein, as a “Vaper”, and follows him on a journey to “rip the fattest vape”. We follow Ethan through New York city as he visits vape stores to try different flavours and vapes, to central park to spread the word about vaping and finally the “rip the fattest vape”. This is shot in a “day in the life” sketch style, which includes montages of “funny” events and shots. This video was produced by the couple alone. The low budget and production value has made it easy for the couple to produce it, which also means this style of video would be easy for our someone of my calibre to create.
On the technical side of things, camera angles and shots are basic, shots are varying between long shots, mid shots, close ups and extreme close ups, where as the angles are predominately eye level, with the odd high or low angle. Lighting is all natural lighting sourced from the locations, and sound includes both diegetic and non-diegetic. diegetic includes; speech, vaping, traffic, subway, other people/pedestrians, sirens, and non-diegetic includes; character voice overs, music (electronic, produced hip hop beats & soft, electronic jazzy key beats), FX (sirens). The editing is a mixture of continuous and discontinuous, making use of, straight cuts, jump cuts, overlapping, reversal, extreme cutting and zooming of a scene/moment. All these examples add to the comedic effect.
As I mentioned before, h3h3 have recently reached over 2 million subscribers. By skimming through the comments on their most popular video “Vape Nation”, we can identify that the majority of viewers are male. However, this doesn’t mean it is purely males who view their channel. Through gaining this popularity, many memes and inside jokes have sprouted throughout the community. These include; vaping, Papa John’s Pizza, the “chub and [pant] tuck” action, beanies, and the term “vape naysh”. The series has a dedicated and supportive fan base, evident by those who rallied and raised legal funds to assist the h3h3 Productions husband-and-wife duo, to fight a Copyright law suite they faced earlier this year. In less than two days, $145,000 was donated from over 5,900 people. The couple were sued for copyright infringement by Matt Hosseinzadeh, proprietor of the MattHossZine Youtube channel. The lawsuit has not yet been finalised.
Overall, I believe, through the crew, production value, cast etc. this is something us as uni students can achieve, this is why it is a perfect example to analyse.
Link to table:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JFcxt6RLMpjPKswOW3bjcdVGdvOydDm8A4qebMx2gKI/edit?pli=1