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Post by milowent on Jun 20, 2007 10:45:26 GMT -5
workbookproject.com/?p=260"Today we sit down with Mesh Flinders, co-creator of the web sensation Lonelygirl15. In our discussion Mesh explains how his team built a loyal following for the show, and how they’re starting to monetizing the popular web series." very low-key npr-ish. ---- random notes:no revelations. miles yelled his idea to start lg15 at the karaoke bar birthday party. it sounded like War of the Worlds to him (we've heard that before) wrote an initial 3 month story arc. initial idea was end with a cliffhanger, then videos stops, then make an independent low budget film. we realized digital storytelling was his own thing. we gave interview to LA times around Sept. 11 because people had found out stuff like connection with CAA, a perfect storm had been reached. then turned show into ensemble cast. 6 (?) young actors. kevin schlanser does all the editing. from time video is conceived until put on website, can be anywhere from 1 week to 3 weeks. definitely has gotten easier as practice and hired more people. talks about product placements.s our character need to buy products anyway, the same spiel Greg and Miles have given before. talked about how friending key youtubers was part of their initial plan, and noted you can't really do this as much anymore with youtube's growth. mentions PromQueen, makes a distinction of interaction opportunity with the characters. admits they were fooling the public, but not in a mocking way, but a fun and interesting way. and fans weren't really upset. he thinks they wanted to believe in bree, but knew it wasn't really. aggegrate views: # of people is hard, colllective views, all views is something like 60 million, avg. individual videos get 100-300K views. its not like "eepybird" (that's a mentos video) because that's one little clip, it gets 50 million views, but our videos come out every other day, you can't get 40 million views on that. but our numbers are very consistent. in terms of # of people? its hard to know how many views are unique. website avgs. 30-50K visits a day, a few weeks ago at lesat. website on youtube 100-300K visits a day. probably have the audience of a "decent cable show." closing: there's never been a better time to take a risk in the industry. prices of equipment getting cheaper and cheaper, and with youtube maybe a revolution, as methods of distribution are open to the public. you have access to eyeballs previously only available to large conglomerate media companies.
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Post by wilycoyote100 on Jun 20, 2007 12:35:27 GMT -5
"wrote an initial 3 month story arc....initial idea was end with a cliffhanger, then videos stops, then make an independent low budget film. "
Do we see the seeds of the major plot holes here? If you're only going to exist for three months, why not stick a Crowley picture on the wall (play with their heads), then slap a bandaid on Bree's arm for some misdirection, come up with the idea of ceremony to explain it away and the three months is just about up . .and OOOPS! --"everything blew up in our face!" -- but by now each bit of invention has taken on a life of its own but you can't stop because it's September now and the WHOLE PLANET IS WATCHING and now you''ve got a dad who's compromised his daughter, an evil all-seeing order you can't disappear and, a ceremony that sounded like a cool idea in August but now it's October and you don't get to just stop and MAKE THE MOVIE! so now you have to film a ceremony on a webcam (first shark jump) and what do you do with the bad dad (kill him .... traumatic shark jump), and, well, there goes the NUANCE and the STORY not to speak of the CHARACTER and pretty soon the place is crawling with gayliens..... ....or not....
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Post by hyemew on Jun 20, 2007 14:32:56 GMT -5
"definitely has gotten easier as practice and hired more people."
...Then why was it better back then? :-D
"wrote an initial 3 month story arc....initial idea was end with a cliffhanger, then videos stops, then make an independent low budget film."
I don't have time at the moment to list to it, but if that's what he said it leaves out a key component of the original plan! Have this girl with an intriguing mystery behind her vanish just at the time she's about to do some possibly satanic ceremony, have her worried fans take this to the police, get on the news like one of those Elizabeth Smart/Natalie Holloway Nancy Grace-fests, end up being known to everyone through that, and then appear a few weeks later saying hey guess what! It was all fake! Now give us a movie deal!
I'm rather glad they weren't able to do this, because talk about devious. Whether they want to admit it or not, there would have been a whole lot of worried fans and if this actually became a real missing person story then imagine the outrage they would have received when admitting she's not real. I don't think it would have gotten exactly to those extreme proportions because pretty quickly with no family coming forward or any real identity to confirm others like us would be suspicious, but I think if they had let it go to the extent they wanted a whole lot of people would have been turned off by just how sneaky it was, toying with people's emotions and all.
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Post by wilycoyote100 on Jun 20, 2007 15:03:19 GMT -5
Hye: Time to take a breath or two....this isn't Iraq. Just a couple guys trying to get a deal....
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Post by commonjoe on Jun 20, 2007 15:29:43 GMT -5
You mean it isn't real? No wonder the police keep ignoring my calls.
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Post by curiousgeorge on Jun 20, 2007 16:37:16 GMT -5
I think Wily's suggestions that the prolonging of the (so called) plot due to the extension of the show has a lot of merit. I bet they were like, "WTF do we do now?!?". This has been postulated before and I can totally buy into the dilemma they faced. It was probably pretty hairy situation to be in...I can even be sympathetic to the Glenn debacle and the road that fiasco sent them down.
BUT!
That is only relevant for the short time after this time period. The laying on of all the pink herrings and plot holes since then is still not excusable... As for the character assassination of Bree (the latest implications), that is just reprehensible.
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Post by milowent on Jun 20, 2007 18:35:42 GMT -5
If you're only going to exist for three months, why not stick a Crowley picture on the wall (play with their heads), then slap a bandaid on Bree's arm for some misdirection, come up with the idea of ceremony to explain it away and the three months is just about up . .and OOOPS! excellent. they had a 3 month story arc that was its own story. the creation of the original plot holes were not a problem, as bree just disappeared at the end, and everyone was supposed to freak out, and that's the end of a really freaky story. i thought mesh was hard on himself by characterizing it that way. i didn't think it was that bad myself. its not like this was a master plan to take over the world. it was conceived in a karaoke bar and birthed quickly. yeah, hye may complain, but at least the creators never adopted the gaylien plotline. at least not yet. or have they?
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Post by hyemew on Jun 20, 2007 18:58:11 GMT -5
Hye: Time to take a breath or two....this isn't Iraq. Just a couple guys trying to get a deal.... What? I'm not worked up. That is what their plans were and I do think it would have caused a national uproar (AGAINST THEM) if things had unfolded as they were aiming for, however they didn't and we should all just be glad about it I guess.
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Post by VanillaFlava on Jun 21, 2007 17:56:50 GMT -5
It's not the first time the theory of this being their original plan popped up on the Cove. I think we discussed this several months ago. It's interesting to hear it confirmed, and yes, let's be thankful they were in the end smart enough not to go down in a blaze of notoriety. Although, they would have made Opra this way for sure.
Sadly it also explains the nice early tension arc and the subsequent struggling to reign in that madly out-of-control plot.
Well, interactive story-telling does exit (and has been for quite some time), they neither invented it, nor have they provided a particularily noteworthy example of it. The show had and maybe has merit in other departments, though. Still, I wish they stopped pretending this will all be so great, right when the new website comes out. RealSoonNow(tm).
The stuttering over numbers is funny. Despite the wildyl inflated numbers communicated before, the show did reach a respectable audience. It really just scratched the surface of the kind of audience a truly successful show could hook, given Internet distribution.
On that note, do you guys think Eisner is happy with Prom Queen? I guess it reaches a similarly sized audience (maybe smaller) than LG15. I have the nagging feeling they were hoping for a much more pronounced phenomenon though.
What is missing from the shows to really hit the mainstream?
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Post by hyemew on Jun 21, 2007 18:13:04 GMT -5
LG15 had the perfect storm which led it to getting as much publicity buzz as could be hoped. I think Eisner had happen to just cut right into this niche and get similar publicity, but that just wasn't possible. I don't think any of this is ready for main-mainstream where everyone will be tuning into their favorite webshow as often as they are with tv shows. LG got the biggest buzz possible, being the first, for the foreseeable future. I think another show would have to do something pretty extreme or new to get this much buzz again, and even then there's no guarantee that will translate into views.
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Post by robtomorrow on Jun 21, 2007 19:33:08 GMT -5
As with everyone what I picked up that was most revelatory was , "wrote an initial 3 month story arc....initial idea was end with a cliffhanger, then videos stops, then make an independent low budget film. It definitely seemed well thought out up until 10/12/06 "The Ceremony", after that it was evident that they were playing it by ear, making it up as they go, and creating a mess. But it was interesting to hear what many of us have suspected confirmed. A couple of days ago I said that the C's believe themselves to be Pioneers. Mesh in this interview actually used that word.
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Post by milowent on Jun 29, 2007 0:05:26 GMT -5
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Post by Tempestarii on Jun 29, 2007 8:27:13 GMT -5
So.....with just the right combination of chloroform, rope, inflatable butt plug, and a handy mini creme brulee torch it *might* just be possible for me to step in and save LonelyGirl15.
Just saying.
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Post by oweniscool on Jun 29, 2007 8:33:28 GMT -5
The lone comment to this article is by MILES BECKETT: Really? You don't say! "Elaborate" really is an understatement, though we already know that much of this elaboration was never planned. ETA: Wow, I just read the (short) article, and it's one of the first actual media stories that updates what's been going on in the series. Usually they say "LG15 is about a girl vlogging about her overprotective, religious parents..." blah blah blah, even though the story has long left that point. This article raises an eyebrow at the changes:
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Post by jayhenry on Jun 29, 2007 16:06:48 GMT -5
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