ISRAEL: Two eye-catching Israeli internet lip-synchers have received more than 10 million hits on their YouTube clip

A video of two Israeli women "dancing stupid", created as a gift to one of their boyfriends, has captured the attention of millions and has become of the most popular amateur clips on the Internet. The almost three-and-a-half minute-long video features 22-year-old Lital Mizel and Adi Frimmerman lip-synching to the Pixies' hit "Hey" while goofing around in Mizel's home in the Israeli city of Ramle. The clip has been viewed more than 10 million times since they posted it in August last year on YouTube.com, a popular site that features mainly amateur videos and which was recently bought by Internet giant Google for 1.65 billion U.S. dollars. Wearing black tops and jeans -- and at some point white dress shirts and ties -- the brunette women strike poses, bob their heads, strum guitars, dance and jump enthusiastically while mouthing the words to the song. "Heya all! Dancing stupid is fun," reads the caption of the video, located at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_CSo1gOd48. Stupid or not, the clip did more than boost the women's online popularity. After the local press wrote about their new fame several months ago, an Israeli cellphone firm hired them to produce videos for their advertising campaigns. Before making the clip, Mizel had posted others on YouTube that she had created for a college video editing class. They were not as popular as their current hit. "Lital is an editor and she wanted to practice I guess, and I wanted to give my boyfriend a birthday gift, something original," the two girls told Reuters Television in Mizel's house in the Israeli town of Ramle. "So we filmed it one night we saw people posting stuff on 'YouTube' and we thought hey why don't we do something like that." The clip received few hits on the massive Web site for two months. The two then entered it in contest on YouTube that called for amateur videos of people dancing. It soon reached the top 20 most viewed clips on the site and kept rising. "She's a great editor, I love you, It's fun working with her and its a great job. Before we had tiny small insignificant jobs, and insignificant lives. And now it's cooler," Frimmerman says looking fondly at Mizel. How much cooler their lives have become is illustrated by the spoof tribute videos posted by other YouTube users including one where Frimmerman and Mizel are replaced by computer-animated figures and another posted by counter-cultural icon and film-maker Kevin Smith, director of 'Clerks' and 'Clerks 2', a box-office success earlier this year. In the introduction to a promotional trailer for 'Clerks 2' that Smith made especially for YouTube - he acknowledges that, at 35, he is too old to be considered part of the 'You Tube' generation but in a bid to win some credibility on the site the portly 35-year-old does his own version of some of Frimmerman and Mizel's best moves. The great success surprised Frimmerman and Mizel. While their video was viewed by millions across the world, Frimmerman was out of the country. "At first she was in South America when it started to be 3 million and then 5 million and she didn't really I mean she was, I sent her emails all the time about 'Wow Kevin Smith did a tribute to us'," Mizel said. More than 29,000 viewers have rated Mizel and Frimmerman's clip, which has averaged three out of five stars. Mizel and Frimmerman's next project is a new video to be posted as a tribute to their millions of viewers. "We're making a video for the 10 million views we've got its a tribute for the 10 million viewers. We show a clip of people that did a tribute to us and we are saying thanks to all the ten million viewers," they said. LIFESTYLE LIFETSYLES TECHNOLOGY

ITN Source | October 21, 2006

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