Carvajal’s hybrid “Apehood” video gets Webby nod

Nelson Carvajal’s “Apehood,” a hybrid movie trailer that combines characters from “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” with the setting from “Boyhood,” has been nominated for a 2015 Webby Award.

“Apehood” is one of five videos competing for “People’s Voice” honor in the Video Remixes / Mashups category of the Online Film & Video media type, one of five media types recognized by the Webbys.

Carvajal, a researcher with “The Steve Harvey Show,” began working on “Apehood” on the night of Thursday, July 10, and uploaded it to Vimeo a few hours later, in the wee morning of Friday, July 11, the first day of the opening weekend for both films.

“I thought it was a good idea to combine a Hollywood blockbuster and an independent film,” he says.

Using an old version of Final Cut Pro on a 13-inch Macbook Pro, he removed all the people from the “Boyhood” trailer and replaced them with characters from the “Ape” trailer to spin a heartwarming yarn about a primate who grows up to lead a revolution.

“‘Boyhood’ was propped to be this seminal movement about growing up in America,” Carvajal says. “I turned it on its head and made this sort of Frankenstein video.”

Since then, “Apehood” has been featured in USA Today and Vanity Fair and played nearly 40,000 times. It is one of several Carvajal videos to earn the “viral” description.

His first experience in massive organic online popularity began in 2013, when he created a compilation featuring a glimpse of every film that ever won the Oscar for Best Picture.

“I did a super cut,” he says. “Over eighty movies.”

The resulting four-minute clip, which currently boasts more than half a million views, made headlines in The Hollywood Reporter and Entertainment Weekly.

Nelson CarvajalCarvajal’s videos exclusively posted on Vimeo

Although Carvajal has been tapped to make similar videos for the likes of Fandor, Indie Wire and Roger Ebert’s website, he prefers to keep his personal projects exclusively on Vimeo, because the content is “curated” and the people who watch it are “serious movie fans.”

That doesn’t stop the work from getting spread to Vimeo’s less-serious, more cat-loving counterpart. After going viral, Carvajal’s videos often get downloaded and posted to any number of individual YouTube channels, none of which are his.

But the perpetually good-natured Carvajal doesn’t seem to mind because the work is usually credited to him. “If I’m getting pirated,” he says, “I must be doing something right.”

Webby winners will be determined by online voting, which officially closes on April 23, and announced on April 27. The 19th annual awards ceremony will be held in New York on May 19. The 2014 competition attracted 12,000 entries.