I Talked To My Parents [10.26.06]

[Terryfic]

milowent said:

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but only he made everyone able and want to buy one!

I totally agree Milo, even if LG wasn't the first IMS, it sure did go a long way in popularizing them.

buckwheat said:

C'mon, LittleLoca or EmoKid were hardly nuanced narrative (which is what I feel M and M brought to YT for the first time.) It may be that the disappointment with LG at this point is less with M and M, as with the YT medium itself and with the possibilities for it that early LG raised. . How far can one take nuanced narrative in this medium, anyway? Possibly, M and M reached the limits of what's s possible and were forced by the limitations of producing two minute episodes in a teenager's bedroom (and keeping it PG!) to finally move it towards ARG/soap opera, (not their strengths). How many Proving Science Wrong could even we take?

I couldn't agree more with this point as well, LittleLoca and EmoKid do pale in comparison to LG. LG was a much more ‘nuanced narrative’ with far more wit and charm. All I was pointing out was that it was not exploring entirely new ground.

I hope your theory that an IMS will inevitably have to become a soap opera/ARG due to the limitations of the medium is wrong. I suppose it is still too young to be able to tell. Personally, I don’t think this is the case, I feel that followers of Dogma 95 could really use this medium in lots of interesting ways.

I think the mistake made with LG was the belief that it did have to move past PSW, that it needed a strong plot to survive. If you compare it to what it was originally mimicking you will see that normal blogs don’t have a strong plot, or really much that could be considered a plot at all, yet they remain popular. I think that of course you need some story, but it should play out in the background more organically, with fun little episodes, like a PSW, in between.

[buckwheat]

"It is still too young to tell." This is the operative statement at this point with respect to IMS. There's no way to know what a talented group like the LG gang can do if they have a production budget and don't have to develop it on the fly....

[Alissa Brooke]

buckwheat: They DON'T have to develop it on the fly. They could sit and plan it out instead of churning 1 or 2 or 3 out every couple of days.

[buckwheat]

I agree......Let's tell that to the creators......

[noasinger]

I'm not so sure -- I sat out of following Little Loca for quite a while, and now that I've come back in to watch Stevie's character, I find her nearly as charming as Mesh's young girl. They're both smart and inquisitive young ladies exploring their social boundaries. Everyone knows that that's where the real magic lies, and that's part of what lies at the heart of comparisons with Austen and some of the others.

I do have to say that now that we're getting some better insight about how organic Mesh and Mile's project really has been in its development, that seems to be answering some of the concerns which I've been expressing over the past weeks about how segments of the audience are misappropriating some of the series' memes.


(hush up, JayHenry! this only bodes well for the "shirtless at the burn" thing -- and we've both been right in some ways.)

[milowent]

the value of art is in the eye of the beholder. but i also thought jason bateman's 1st show, "It's Your Move" was art, so what do i know.

[buckwheat]

By working "on the fly" I didn't mean to imply that they didn't know from the first where LGwas going, and have been waiting each day for direction from their audience. I feel sure that M and M had a vision of LG from the very beginning, but have been forced to scramble on a day to day basis to put it together, write and film episodes whily having to pay their actors and keep afloat themselves, while dodging potential fatal technical missteps that could have outed them in July or august, then dealing with overnight fame and all of its ramifications in September, and its aftermath. And did anyone notice that during that furious week in September when they seemed to be everywhere in the news, they still didn't miss a single posting.....

[trash180]

jayhenry said:

<snip>
If they're scripting like that, then what they've really managed to do is adapt the "choose your own adventure," not the epistolary novel, to the Internet. And, while that's perhaps significant in the world of entertainment, it's a far, far cry from art.<snip>

Have we come to the point where we choose?
Gemma in her first canon video states that the order is not going to let her quit the ceremony.

Bree almost immediately states that she told her parents and they said she can quit the ceremony and are gonna straighten out with the decanz.

Who is right? (This is where talk about what it all means and where it's going on the phorum, and come to some sort of consensus that may or may not be realized in the next video.) Do they meet expectations, confound expectations or somehow do both while seem like doing neither. This whole interactivity thing might be too self conscious to work well for a story.

[Joss]

Well.. Actually Gemma does not seems pretty convinced herself.. Because for what she says it seems she is out of it now.. Like she is in London to "escape" from it.

On the other hand she still talks of the "community" like being part of it..

She tells Bree she has to choose who to trust.. And at the same time she says that whatever Bree thinks does not matter for she is in no position to choose.

So.. I think she tries to tell Bree how to be successfull in something she did not achieve herself. She pretends to be happy like she is now but holds resentment against her parents for all the times they took her freedom form her.. She says she can do whatever she wants now but still havent figured out how it is to live without the community..

She is too confused to give anyone any kind of advice.. Yet she talks to Bree like she is in control..

Hmmmmmm