“Dog Skateboard” versus “Dogboarding”

Last month, we posted Dog Skateboard by Nate Milton of The Amigo Unit.

Lo and behold, twenty-six days later there’s the release of the viral hit Dogboarding created by the LA-based duo Daniels (aka Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan).

If the Daniels had somehow built on the idea and turned it into something else, it would be less irritating. But they took a one-note gag, redid the exact same thing using a different technique without adding a single idea of their own, and regurgitated it onto the unsuspecting public. At least that’s how I see it. What’s your take?

UPDATE: Daniel Kwan of the Daniels wrote a lengthy comment that says they came up with the idea of dog-boarding in December 2010 and finished the project last December:

I can 100% understand how crazy this sounds, but this is in fact an insane coincidence that we, the amigo unit and ourselves, as two separate entities came up with the same idea at the same time (the internet-influenced collective consciousness is causing us all to come to similar ideas and conclusions? who knows!). We actually finished this project in Dec, but due to some setbacks and misunderstandings weren’t able to release it until now. So seeing as the amigo unit’s video hadn’t come out until a month ago, it would be pretty impossible for us to have copied them.

I don’t want to have to be a stickler about all of this, but we have documents and emails dating back to early december of last year discussing this project. We even have a treatment that says 2010 on it :p. We shot test footage and did effects test, which we uploaded to vimeo as a private link on Dec 13th. We have meta data on our footage that shows that we shot the entire video on location in LA mid december, and even had a rough cut done by the end of dec that we uploaded a private link up onto vimeo to share with people (and we still have that cut up online, still private, but with the text “3 months ago” on it, as in, this video was uploaded 3 months ago :] ).

You can read Kwan’s entire comment below.