• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, January 3, 2007

In its latest original content deal, TheDailyReel.com has signed online video auteur Casimir Nozkowski, best known as co-creator of the humorous site, Cryingwhileeating.com, to produce a video series that brings the same darkly comic approach to documenting everyday life in the Bronx.

Nozkowski is joined in the project by Dallas Penn and Rafi Kam, who respectively run the sites Dallaspenn.com and Ohword.com. The first installment, "Bodega," debuted Tuesday.

Nozkowski helped create one of the Internet's biggest viral video hits last year with Cryingwhileeating.com, a collection of 30-second clips of people crying while they're eating, with captions explaining why they're sobbing. One recent caption, for instance, shows DanielL eating a "bagel with hummus" and crying about "inconsistent weather." The site, which relies on user-generated videos, has generated 65 million hits to date, according to The Daily Reel.

Last year, Cryingwhileeating.com also won a viral marketing contest sponsored by arts and technology nonprofit Eyebeam. Since then, Nozkowski has directed numerous other shorts that have collectively been watched more than 200,000 times on YouTube.

Last month, The Daily Reel signed its first deal for original videos with the YouTube video star known as LisaNova. As with that partnership, Nozkowski is being paid an undisclosed amount by The Daily Reel along with a share of any ad revenues from syndication of the videos to other sites via the Revver video-sharing service.

Previously, Nozkowski collaborated with Penn and Kam on "Ghetto Big Mac," which was selected as one of The Daily Reel's top 10 videos of 2006, and has been viewed more than 118,000 times on YouTube.

Daily Reel co-founder Jeff Stern described Nozkowski's work as "laugh out loud funny, but also really has a sharp point to it." He said the combination of humor and social commentary in Nozkowski's work helped the videos appeal to a wide range of viewers. The first video for The Daily Reel, "Bodega," involves Penn and Kam highlighting the basic "food groups" found in a typical Bronx bodega from pork rinds to 40-ounce bottles of beer.

The series on life in the Bronx will run to a half-dozen videos that will each be available exclusively on TheDailyReel.com for about two weeks before distribution to other sites.