The Conversation: HBO's Home Movie Hit
The Neistat brothers share their lives through short films.
July 30, 2010— -- Meet Van Neistat. Meet Casey Neistat. If you don't know anything about the Neistat brothers, don't worry. Pretty much everything you need to know can be learned from watching their HBO show "The Neistat Brothers."
The show is an auto-biographical look at their life filmed, edited and produced entirely by, you guessed it, the Neistat brothers.
Sometimes, the events are extraordinary: climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, meeting Van's biological father, kidnapping a friend and taking him to the Super Bowl.
Sometimes, the events are just plain ordinary: tracking down a lost backpack, going to an art exhibition.
But no matter what the event, the Neistat brothers manage to find something funny, poignant or just plain different about the experience and they way view the world.
"It's like home movies that have been edited so that all of the boring parts of your life are gone," Van Niestat said. "It's just the interesting parts, I guess, of our lives."
The Neistat Brothers stopped by ABC News to talk with John Berman about their show, which wraps up with a season finale this Friday at midnight.
They told Berman they have no formal training backing up their filmmaking, but that did not stop them from making videos long before their HBO show. Their videos like "Bike Thief" and "iPod's Dirty Secret" became viral video hits.
"When you open up iMovie in Apple, the free software, the tutorial, that is kind of where my formal training began and ended," said Casey Neistat.
For the Neistat brothers, making their lives into good television is not about their training or their equipment. In fact, they mainly shoot the show on their iPhones and pocket-sized video cameras. For Van and Casey Neistat, the key is creativity.
"I don't think what we do is that interesting," Casey Neistat said. "It is just about storytelling. That's what we do -- storytelling. And who doesn't want to hear a story well-told."
