For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet (where have you been?), LonelyGirl15 is the saga of a cute, vulnerable teenage girl by the name of Bree. Bree video blogs earnestly from her bedroom and belongs to a strange cult that wants her to go through some kind of creepy ritual. She posts her videos to YouTube and gains a huge following. Drama ensues.
Bree is played by actress Jessica Rose, of whom Wired says, “there’s something about [her] that the webcam loves. Her distractingly large eyebrows and small, round face are bent and stretched by the fish-eye lens into a morsel of beauty that fits perfectly in a pop-up window.”
The recent Wired article also details the attempts of Lonelygirl creators Miles Beckett, Mes Flinders and Greg Goodfried to engage with mainstream Hollywood:
Their first sit-down with a major broadcaster was, Goodfried says, an “exercise in futility.” Beckett tried to explain to the executive that the central theme of online entertainment was interactivity, as opposed to the passivity of television. He wanted to create shows in which the line between reality and fiction is blurred, where viewers can correspond with the characters and actually become involved in the story by posting their own videos. The exec responded by walking them through his fall lineup and pointing out that the network’s Web site had great supplemental video material for the season’s upcoming shows.
Beckett is clearly frustrated. “The Web isn’t just a support system for hit TV shows,” he says. “It’s a new medium. It requires new storytelling techniques. The way the networks look at the Internet now is like the early days of TV, when announcers would just read radio scripts on camera. It was boring in the same way all this supplemental material is boring.”
The LG15 crew has a different vision. They want to create entertainment that fans can touch through interactive role-playing and video blogs of their own.
When Business Week wrote, that blogs are “going to shake up just about every business — including yours,” this is what they were talking about. The question is, do you want to be remembered for doing your industry’s equivalent of reading radio scripts on camera while your competitors discover the TV drama?
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