Founded by director Jon M. Chu and producer Hieu Ho, DS2DIO (pronounced “D-Studio”) brings together a wide array of dance-oriented content, from the b-boy competition series The Arena to dancing showcase S2DIO CITY.

Chu, whose work includes the second and third Step Up movies as well as the upcoming G.I. Joe: Retaliation, is also an established web creator, already had a close relationship with YouTube, dating back to his 2008 dance battles with Miley Cyrus.

“When they wanted to look for high production quality content, we got the phone call,” Chu said via phone. “We were kind of hesitant, trying to figure out what YouTube wanted — because there was no dedicated dance channel, but there are a ton of dancers on YouTube. We had to be sure that if we were going to do this, we had to lead it — show that high-quality dance content can exist online.”

Also included in the channel is Chu’s scripted series The LXD: League of Extraordinary Dancers, which premiered originally on Hulu in the US, but is now un-geo-blocked for the first time.

And plans for more scripted content are in the works, including a Step Up-esque drama with the working title of The Floor. Another unscripted series, Dance Fantasy, will bring the “dance fantasies” of celebrities to life — both series are in development for Spring 2013.

And the DS2DIO team is also focusing on new types of engagement: For example, the series Master Class teaches new moves and routines — which aspiring dancers can film themselves attempting, then submit the videos to the original choreographers for direct critique. “We’re trying to utilize all these tools to create this unique experience for the audience,” Ho said

As the channel is relatively new, the most-viewed videos on the channel are currently promotional content like the original DS2DIO trailer or a short featuring Justin Bieber. However, the series Remixed, which brings an established dancer and musical artist together to collaborate on an original piece, has established solid five-to-six figure viewcounts. “Seeing two artists come together and create something has been really fun to watch — because we haven’t seen that kind of profile before,” Chu said.

Remixed, at over 10 minutes an episode, is a bit longer than other shows on DS2DIO, as the issue of video length is far from resolved — especially depending on the platform. Chu brought up The LXD as an example, which before its 2010 premiere on Hulu was originally planned as a YouTube series.

Accordingly, the aim was for episodes to be no longer than three minutes — when they made the move to Hulu, though, they had to dramatically increase the length of episodes. “There’s a whole different culture for people watching Hulu videos. People were annoyed by watching a two minute ad for a five minute video”, he recalled.

Having returned to YouTube, though, Chu and the DS2DIO team are still figuring out the sweet spot. “I still think YouTube is meant for shorter length [content], but every few months we can get a little longer,” Chu said. “Right now, I think we’re in a five or six minute world — and that’s inching up every several months.

“Coming back to YouTube is a really interesting experiment because YouTube is also trying to change what people think. That’s what the whole initiative’s about — expanding the identity of what content on YouTube is,” Chu added.

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Old Spice: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like

What could have been a few well produced and charming television ads became a phenomenon in July, when, over the course of 24 hours and 180 personalized YouTube videos, the Man Your Man Could Smell Like became a living force. No character in a commercial has felt as real and connected to its audience; no advertising agency has ever demonstrated such a profound understanding of what works online. I’m looking forward to 2011, and seeing if Wieden+Kennedy can clear the bar they set so high.

The LXD

I’m going to be blunt about this: The LXD, created by Step Up 2 director Jon M. Chu, could have easily been one of the best web series of the year. Unfortunately, weak plotting and stiff, unnatural dialogue kept me from really connecting with it (and I have a really high tolerance for bad writing when it comes to dance; I own and love the film Center Stage.) However, the dancing, the cinematography, the production value, oh, and the dancing… Visually, The LXD at times approaches the level of art.

Stiller and Meara

Watching your parents fight? Never fun. Watching Ben Stiller’s parents fight? Always fun. Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller are two of comedy’s greats, and the two minutes a week they spend bickering about today’s pop culture are pure pleasure.

Urban Wolf

This intriguing thriller’s first season ends on a dramatic cliffhanger, but even if we never see that ending resolved, and never learn more about the mysterious man being pursued by the surveillance cameras of Paris, the experience will remain satisfying. Largely dialogue-free, intimate in scale but international in scope — Urban Wolf was fresh, unique and impressive.

Vag Magazine

Vag Magazine Episode 1: “Fumbling Toward Ecstasy” from Vag Magazine on Vimeo.

I said when I reviewed it that this would probably make my end-of-year list, and here it is. Through the final episode, Vag was an addictively funny satire of third-wave feminism — one of the rare comedies, ever, to find truly funny material in menstruation. I dearly hope we get a season two from Leila Cohan-Miccioand and Caitlin Tegart in 2011.

Honorable mention, by the way, for another female-led scripted comedy: We Are With the Band was a real charmer this year.

Dan Savage: It Gets Better

One of the most moving dramas in web video this year was a real-life one, as thousands of people turned on their webcams to tell young people not to give up on life, because life after high school “gets better.” What initially started out as an opportunity for gay adults to reach out to gay kids contemplating suicide was eventually diluted to a more generalized anti-bullying message, one that even President Obama contributed to. Despite the drift away from the campaign’s original intent, though, this was the perfect example of a meme for social progress.

Stupid for Movies

There’s something decidedly familiar about watching two 40-something white guys argue about films in front of a velvet curtain. But as conceived and directed by Mike Rotman, Stupid for Movies was a smart, web-savvy update to the ol’ Siskel and Ebert, thanks to a fanatical devotion to live-streaming — a format which became a big deal in 2010 and will likely grow into a phenomenon over the next year. Stupid for Movies is now the flagship series of a live streaming empire, one that has big plans for 2011.

Ark

If I wasn’t a big sci-fi fan, there’s a chance this wouldn’t have made the list, but even for non-geeks, Ark (financed by defunct 60 Frames) was a clever, well-made thriller that made excellent use of limited resources and decent visual effects to tell the story of a spaceship filled with mystery. The mystery is so engaging that over five months since watching it, I’m still anxious to know what happens next . This is a series that desperately deserves a season two.

Fanboy Funhouse

Nerdy t-shirts. Nerdy references. Great writing. Puppets. A guilty pleasure, but a well-made one; I loved it then, I love it now.

Honorable mention: Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? was a 2010 discovery for me, despite several years of life online, and was another nerdy favorite.

Black Box TV

Tony Valenzuela’s thriller anthology series is an inspiring hybrid of high-quality production value and YouTube interactivity, unafraid to experiment with live-streaming and other forms of audience engagement. On a creative level, the series may have taken some knocks due to casting YouTubers over more experienced actors, but on a whole, it was incredibly innovative. This may well be what the future of web content looks like.

Of course, it really was, overall, an outstanding year for web video. Plenty of great shows got left off this list (I deliberately focused on stuff new to 2010, which sadly omitted great shows like The Guild and Know Your Meme). What would you have included?

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Dateh’s bread and butter earlier this year was creating videos to promote his first solo album, but since then he’s been focusing on the fun that can be had with mashups. Earlier this summer, Dateh’s Top 40 violin mashup blending Lady Gaga’s Telephone, Ke$ha’s Blah Blah, Rihanna’s Rude Boy and Usher’s OMG was featured on Perez Hilton and racked up over 1.1 million views. It is also incredibly catchy, and the video accompanying it employs a dynamic and engaging use of split-screen.

On a more professional level, he scored the entirety of mega-dance web series The LXD‘s Season 1 finale, entitled I Seen A Man, which premiered two weeks ago. The score features Dateh’s quintessential mix of hip-hop beats and classical violin, and accompanies the dance action nicely.

But my current favorite of his projects is the series Violince, which showcases his violin skills as well as those of YouTube-based collaborators like David Choi and Jason Yang. The three episodes released so far have a cartoonish vibe, invoking the spirit of the Warner Bros. at first subtly and then explicitly.

Each project, taken on its own, speaks to Dateh’s abilities. But when you look at the bigger picture, you just kind of have to gawk a little at his range of talent and creativity. Here’s someone with a good sense of humor, strong editing skills and impressive musical ability — and he seems to be just having a blast.

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Seriously, it’s really good.

However, if you’re just tuning in for the dancing, patience is demanded. For one thing, every episode of The LXD opens with narration from an elderly gentleman intoning about the ancient and secretive order of dancers around whom our story revolves, serving as a framing device for each stand-alone episode. He does not do this while dancing.

In addition, the 13-minute first episode, “The Tale of Trevor Drift”‘s feature film-esque pacing means that it takes seven minutes and thirty seconds before we see more than two dance steps put together. The dancing that does finally occur is great — well-shot, well-edited and beautifully executed by episode star Luis “Luigi” Rosado. But that’s quite a long time to wait for the show to deliver on its promise of dance antics.

I do feel the need to emphasize here how well-visualized the dancing is in LXD. Many times, a dance sequence (in any medium) will be so heavily edited and filled with close-ups that you can’t really appreciate the dancer’s skill. But Chu and his team emphasize long master shots, a minimum of editing, and a relatively judicious use of slow-motion, all of which puts the talent and technique of its dancers on proper display. The production values here are without question top-notch.

However, when the focus isn’t on the dance, LXD can come off as unfortunately stilted. For one thing, the dialogue varies from bland to awkward, such as one of the first lines from Episode 1: “Are you hungry, Trevor? We have some very delicious food for you.” And LXD features, according to a press release, “some of the world’s best dancers” — but that definitely does not make them the world’s best actors. While we haven’t met the full series cast yet, few of those introduced so far show signs of being even double threats in that respect; Rosado and Chadd “Madd Chadd” Smith, who stars in Episode 3, are the exceptions to that rule.

It’s also disappointing that this “legion of dancers” seems to be male-only, based on both publicity images and the make-up of the first three episodes; Episode 3 is the only one to feature any girls, and they both seem likely to be one-off characters. This seems strange, given that both Step Up 2 the Streets and Step Up 3D star female dancers — clearly Chu knows a girl or two who can pop and lock. But apparently for this project, their services were not required.

Part of LXD‘s premise is experimentation not just with dance, but with genre and style — a fact that was pretty obvious when I visited the production on set at a Western ranch.

Of the three episodes of Season 1 made available for review, though, it’s only the third that really shows signs of that experimentation. With its comic book-inspired imagery and a score heavily influenced by Danny Elfman’s Batman and Spider-man, the success it has in emulating the comic book genre makes it the most promising of the series — I’m very much looking forward to seeing what other genres they try. And while I’m not a fan of the dialogue, the complex mythology surrounding the LXD is skillfully woven into each episode, also furthering my intrigue.

The other non-dance-related aspect I really enjoyed of the first three episodes was Veronica Mars alumni Ryan Hansen making another web series appearance (he was also a major character in The WB’s Rockville USA). Hansen doesn’t have much range as an actor, but he brings some hilarious comic relief to the first episode.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this project evolves. For whenever the medium people are using to communicate is dance, and not dialogue, LXD really shines. And with the exception of the first episode, there isn’t too much dialogue.

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You might be familiar with the LXD dance crew thanks to their live performances on So You Think You Can Dance, this year’s Academy Awards and this year’s summer Glee tour. But unless you watch the below video, you WILL NOT KNOW:

• What inspired director Jon M. Chu to create the LXD (hint: Miley Cyrus is directly involved).
• What the difference is between dancing on Glee and appearing in a web series, courtesy of dancer/choreographer Harry Shum, Jr. (who appears in both projects, as well as Chu’s first feature film Step Up 2 The Streets.
• Why LXD ended up on Hulu as opposed to YouTube, and what paths its international distribution might take — hinted at by producer Scott Ehrlich.
• Why a series that’s all dance, all the time is revolutionary — at least, according to “King of Krump” Lil C.
• Not to mention lots of other secrets!

So watch, be merry and forgive any moments of shaky Flip camera cinematography. The first season of The LXD launches July 7th on Hulu — we’ll have a review then.

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