When James Franco and Seth Rogen famously spoofed Kanye West and Kim Kardashian over his “Bound 2” video in 2013, they used the stock media service VideoBlocks to pull off the comic genius.
Now the media company has announced that it is offering a new service called VideoBlocks Enterprise, which is aimed at bigger clients such as ad agencies and movie studios.
“All the video clips in that spoof came from VideoBlocks. While [Franco and Rogen] were on the set of ‘The Interview,’ they got bored one afternoon, downloaded clips and green-screened themselves to produce a sensational viral video,” VideoBlocks founder Joel Holland told TheWrap following Wednesday’s launch.
YouTube celebrities FroKnowsPhoto, SoKrispyMedia and Wrenthereaper use the product on a regular basis to rack up millions of views and the Bernie Sanders’ campaign even published a video with VB footage. Now, Holland expects VideoBlocks to emerge as a major player in Hollywood.
“A lot of times when you see explosion in videos, they’re not actually creating the explosion themselves. They’re downloading them from our website,” Holland said. “You can browse through, find the effect you want and drop it right into your production.”
The new Enterprise product offers a combined $10 million worth of digital assets such as videos, 360-degree virtual reality clips, images, graphics and audio files. Holland considers Getty and Shutterstock as his primary competition, but says VideoBlocks has everything needed to surpass them among Hollywood elite.
“You’ve already got movie studios that use our stuff in major motion pictures,” Holland said, before explaining that “The Good Guy” with Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg used the product for footage of Boston.
Holland predicts that the “future of video creation” is going to be produced by regular people and mentioned that he expects the service to work with Facebook Live in the future.
“We have video clips of locations from all over the world. If you’re doing a video, and it’s about China, you can either fly all the way to China with your crew or go to VideoBlocks and you’ll have tens of thousands of video clips that represent China,” he explained.