Where is ze frank

Frank is intrigued, charmed, and inquisitive about the biological world. His brief movies have a gentle, almost tender quality. He gives creatures personalities and names, fabricates plotlines, and teaches facts like a scientist.

He was trained as one at Brown University and coauthored a neuroscience journal article on the visual cortex. His intentionally eccentric pronunciations of certain words—birds are bee-yurds and young animals are all beh-behs —have a cult following and their own T-shirts. He writes catchy songs that go viral about puffins courting and spiders shaking their butts. Speaking of animal butts, Frank does talk about them, to the delight of young viewers.

His research is solid, and his facts are fascinating. This celebration of intellect and accomplishment, along with concern for the natural world, is a most welcome antidote to the clogged media pipeline of stories about the preferred beauty products of celebrities. In addition, he oversaw the Media Labs group, which developed animated properties like Instagram character Good Advice Cupcake and Weird Helga, that now reports to chief marketing officer Ben Kaufman.

About a year ago Frank quietly began posting new videos to his YouTube channel, which has 2. The series, called True Facts , has focused on unusual animals like the frogfish and the Bobbit worm. Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day. BuzzFeed is in the midst of a reckoning of sorts amid industry-wide challenges in digital media. Frank started out as a viral content creator himself, and joined BuzzFeed after it acquired his company , Ze Frank Games , in In , he oversaw the establishment of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures — which sought to churn out both short clips and feature films alike.

I can't understand what's going on, but they just go back and forth. She gets frustrated and argues with the bot when she refuses to do things.

I look at the future as being human-assisted AI publishing or AI-assisted human publishing. At Buzzfeed, we empower our employees to make front-line decisions about content and we have pretty simple data loops that inform them about whether their content is doing the job that needs to be done. So in a sense we have this very bottom-up organization of creative labor that has allowed us to be very successful, especially when a new challenge comes into play.

So we had to look for audio-independent work. And the length people seemed to be watching was somewhere around a minute and a half or so. So given those two constraints, our front-line folks tried tons of different things.

And what worked was food. So that grew into Tasty. AI can start to bridge the gap. It can get pretty exciting. Another challenge is that we use data in the form of words or numbers to measure the success of a piece of content but the work that we're doing is increasingly in the form of images and audio.

So that feels like a pretty big disconnect. It essentially means that our metrics are overly biased towards rational constructs like titles, frames and words while the content itself is moving more to sub-rational and emotional states.

And I think technology-assisted idea spaces can help there too. So one of those data loops might be sharing—like we want to understand how to make content that people share. And then we can go deeper and say we want to make content that makes people share in a particular way. We kind of categorize a whole bunch of different jobs that content can do that are not just about consumption—it's not just content that can make you feel a particular way or think a particular way.

It can be content that gives you an excuse to reach out to someone or allows you to express a certain part of your personality. I appreciate how difficult this problem is. As a creative person, I worked for many years in a more conceptual space where I really focused on my particular synthesis. But I was also keenly aware that so much of the work that I did as an individual creator was building off the backs of trends.

As I've gotten older I see it more as a philosophical problem, you know, how do you think of your own value while still appreciating how much your idea space is influenced by others?

And in the meantime, I wasn't developing other skill sets like how to work in groups of people or understanding the complexities of the economy. Eventually, I approached Jonah with an idea of how Buzzfeed could faithfully translate the work they had done around viral content into video. And so that ended up in the acquisition.