lonelygirl15: The Future of Entertainment?
November 24th, 2006 by Ed Lau |This month’s Wired magazine ran a story on internet sensation lonelygirl15, dubbing her vlog as the future of entertainment. In case you have, in fact, been living in a rock (or just a rock without internet…), lonelygirl15 is Bree, a 16-year old girl who put out 2 minute long videos on YouTube which was discovered in September to be an elaborate fictional drama created by two guys in California. Bree is actually Jessica Rose, an aspiring actress. The article exposes the backstory of lonelygirl15 and chronicles the creation of one of the hottest commodities on the internet right now.
I remember when I was first introduced to lonelygirl15, one of the very few people I subscribe to on YouTube, which usually has nothing but ridiculous videos about pancakes or, more often than not, people getting kicked in the groin. A friend messaged me one day and told me in typical internet fashion. I remember as if it was yesterday…
Friend: Dude, you gotta see this chick on YouTube…
Ed: Man, this isn’t going to be one of those, again, is it?
Friend: No dude, totally not messing around this time.
Ed: …wow, she’s…
Friend: Yeah, dude…I’d totally hit that.
What did I say about typical internet fashion? However, I’m not one to disagree here.
Ed: Hahaha, yeah man, she’s really pretty. I’d hit it too.
lonelygirl15 had an audience from day one due to some great “marketing” with her first video, a great comment on another rather popular vlog girl’s post. It was easy to see why people watched. Bree was a naive, teenaged girl in a strictly religious (although it is never quite clear what religion that is) home whose parents kept rather isolated and sheltered. She has a friend named Daniel who she gets into arguments with and is a usually unseen secondary character in the videos. As the creators say in the Wired article, girls could identify with her for her boy troubles and us guys…well, she’s hot…what’s not to love? While some of her early videos were humorous, it wasn’t until she got emotional and vunerable that she…well, hit the big time.
Some people thought it was fake from day one. The videos were very well edited. One fan even pointed out that, for some reason, all the stuff in her room was from Target. The red flag for me was when she said she had a big fight with Daniel…but previously said that all the expert editing in her videos was done by him, an aspiring film maker. How on earth could you have a fight with someone and then ask him to edit your blog that says you just had a fight with him? It all seemed too strange to me…but I let it slide. I mean, she’s hot and hot has no place for logic.
The thing about the lonelygirl15 phenomenon is the interactivity with the audience. Never before has storytelling been like this. You can actually e-mail Bree and she e-mails back. Well, someone that is posing as Bree e-mails you back. The creators say that the content is very user driven. With the e-mails, Myspace, YouTube conversations, IMs, etc…the videos are simply a part of the entertainment that is lonelygir15. I mean, imagine you could converse with the characters in your favorite sitcom as if they were real people. I mean, imagine you could talk to Michael Scofield of Prison Break as he and his brother flee from the law or Blackberry Barney from How I Met Your Mother as he picks up the second hottest bridesmaid.
This sort of thing reminded me of something similar that was released back in 2001 that was groundbreakingly creative but ultimately flopped due to lack of interest after the hype died. The game was called Majestic which was supposedly a spy thriller that had no CD or install. You sign up and download an “episode” which starts a storyline that plays out through e-mail, fax, phone calls, and instant messages. The concept was rather brilliant really, putting the user in a nearly real situation that required them to use real life methods rather than magic PDAs that most games have to solve the story. However, Majestic was poorly received and was shut down in 2002.
The idea behind lonelygirl15 is actually rather brilliant but my lone criticism is…how do you market something like this? Obviously YouTube played a big role in lonelygirl15’s popularity, putting Bree’s videos in an easily accessible medium and in order to maintain the same level of interactivity, I assume that the show must stay on the internet if not on YouTube. What is the next step? Wired says that the creators and Jessica Rose are now represented by a agency and that they are getting all sorts of calls from TV networks and such. For what? I’d love to know what they plan on doing with this because it is an incredibly interesting and creative thing they’ve done. I mean, how much more interesting are things when they’re ‘real’? Anyone remember how they marketed The Blair Witch Project?
Who knew a full fledged serial drama could sprout from the same place that has 13876168 different variations of The Star Wars Kid…
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I saw her on Jay Leno a while back…
…I’ve linked to your blog on my site. Waiting for you to return the favor, laters.