The guys who created Lonelygirl15--the scripted Web series that fooled many viewers into thinking it was the real video diary of a cute 16-year-old girl--are back with a new project.
The re-branded "LG15" production company Eqal, helmed by Greg Goodfried and Miles Beckett, unveiled LG15: The Resistance, a spin-off of the original Lonelygirl15 suspense-drama. It's their third series, after Lonelygirl15 and British derivative KateModern, which found a home on social network Bebo. The Resistance will have its "home" and surrounding community discussions at LG15.com, but it will be syndicated on MySpaceTV, Veoh, Hulu, YouTube, and Imeem.
Fans of Eqal's shows have already been speculating over a Resistancepreview video on the Web for some time now. It'll be premiering on September 20, and features several of the supporting characters from Lonelygirl15 in lead roles. The title refers to the fight against an evil cult called The Order, which also factored into Lonelygirl15 and eventually led to the fictional protagonist's death.
Beckett and Goodfried hope to capitalize on the sort of cult following that surrounded Lonelygirl15, but this time around they acknowledge they'll have to make some tweaks for mainstream audiences. "We've basically taken a ton of lessons that we've learned from Lonelygirl15 and KateModern, and we're applying it to this new series, trying to make it more accessible to a passive audience," Goodfried said in an interview. First off, he said, is to make one longer weekly episode instead of daily videos that can be tough to catch up on.
There will still be daily content, Goodfried explained. "During the week, rather than it being five videos that are these posts that the characters are making leading up to this episode, it's going to be a text blog, maybe a photo post. It's not all going to be video content."
One of their chief inspirations, Beckett said, is geek hero and Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon. "I love Buffy and I'm a big Joss Whedon fan," he said in an interview. The original Lonelygirl15 appealed to Whedon fans, too, he explained. "Some of the commenters on our forum were on the original Buffy forum back in the day. They were calling (the world of LG15) originally the 'Breenaverse'," he said, using a fan-created portmanteau of "Buffyverse" and Lonelygirl15 protagonist Bree, played by actress Jessica Rose.
As for Rose--the face that launched a thousand YouTube comments--she'll be starring in Sorority Forever, a new Web series produced by Warner Bros. for its forthcoming TheWB.com video hub.
Beckett and Goodfried said they haven't seen Sorority Forever. But they don't have a problem with big media capitalizing on the marketing and production tactics that small companies like Eqal conceived. "In general it's certainly great to have the big traditional people and new media companies producing content for this space," Beckett said. "It helps consolidate the medium, it makes advertisers feel more comfortable, and it just makes the market bigger."
The Resistance, like its predecessor, will rely on brand integration as well as advertising. It's a shaky line to tread, because it can easily look tacky or as though the ad dollars are altering the storyline. "I would say for the most part we've had pretty good feedback," Beckett said of brand integration. "We've worked with a ton of brands at this point...(and) all but a couple of the integrations we've done went over really well."
Remember the Web series Lonelygirl15? Protagonist "Bree" might have gotten killed off, but the team that created her wants to go places.
On Thursday, Lonelygirl15 brains Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried--who also created a British spin-off called KateModern--announced the launch of their new "social entertainment" production company, Eqal. Previously, their company's name had been a bit more of a mouthful: LG15 Studios/Telegraph Ave. Productions.
Lonelygirl15, the face that launched $5 million in venture capital.
(Credit: LG15/Eqal)Along with its debut, Eqal has announced $5 million in Series A venture funding in a round led by Spark Capital, with contributions from notable investors, including Silicon Valley veteran Ron Conway and serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen.
Pronounced "equal," Eqal aims to work with both independent content creators and big media companies to produce "shows where the community built around the property is as important as the characters within it."
Indeed, Lonelygirl15 gained a massive cult following on YouTube and MySpace.com, due in part to the fact that many viewers were convinced that 'Bree' was a real 16-year-old video blogger.
Bree was outed as actress Jessica Rose in September 2006, but the show continued; Beckett and Goodfried went on to debut KateModern on social network Bebo.
Encouraging heavy social-networking activity around a Web video series has been a popular, albeit not necessarily successful, experiment. The series Quarterlife built an entire community site, but it hasn't achieved the same kind of cult fame that Lonelygirl15 did.
A new Eqal online-video venture will be announced Monday, according to the company.
"Bree" is no more.
In the "season finale" of the Web series "Lonelygirl15," which was broadcast in a well-publicized event on Friday on the MySpaceTV platform, the cute teenage protagonist met her death at the hands of a religious cult's sacrifice. A dramatic, soap-opera worthy exit indeed--especially considering that Lonelygirl15's videos were mundane enough at first to fool scores of viewers into thinking they were the real Webcam diaries of a flesh-and-blood teenager.
Lonelygirl15 was exposed as an actress last September, but the video series continued and grew increasingly elaborate. Leading lady Jessica Rose, 20, has since gone on to several movie roles and a regular spot on the ABC Family Channel sitcom Greek, but had continued to play Bree in the meantime.
The video series was occasionally maligned for being cheesy and melodramatic, but at the same time, the production team's tactics--guerrilla filming style, use of multiple platforms and social-networking sites, and interaction with a highly engaged viewer community--was also hailed as an influential step in the evolution of Internet video fiction. Unfortunately for the team behind Lonelygirl15, it may be somewhat telling that most people seem to have learned about Bree's death from blog posts on Monday--it didn't exactly create an online uproar outside of the series' loyal viewer community (some of whom refer to it as "Lonelycrack" on the official Web site). But even though Bree's out, it's apparently not the end of Lonelygirl. A British spinoff, "KateModern," has already started, and there's a chance that future Lonelygirls may appear as well. The final episode, after all, alluded to more young girls being pursued by the same cult. We've e-mailed representatives from the series' small production company and will update this post if they comment.
Fake Steve Jobs unmasked, and now this? What a weekend.
UPDATE (7:34 PM PT): A correction was made to this post. Greek is on ABC Family, not the Disney Channel.
(Credit:
LG15)
My, my, Lonelygirl15 sure has come a long way. Not so long ago, everyone thought the too-cute videoblogger was, well, a too-cute videoblogger. Then some online video fans with a shocking amount of time on their hands deduced that she was likely an actress in a staged series of video episodes. (They were right.) Now, leading lady "Bree" (played by Jessica Rose) has gone all professional on us--the new MySpaceTV video portal will be hosting Lonelygirl15's season finale.
Season finale?
On Friday, MySpaceTV--which launched in June and has been rolling out content deals ever since--will broadcast the final episode of the "first season" of Lonelygirl15. But it's a little more complicated than that: the "12 in 12" finale will be shown in 12 segments, each one broadcast on the hour starting at 8 AM ET. Lonelygirl15 episodes have been uploaded to the Lonelygirl15 MySpace page since the series' early days, but this is the first time that they'll be available only on the portal. Lonelygirl, after all, is one of YouTube's biggest stars too.
This announcement of an "exclusive" Web video broadcast may be a sign of things to come, an indicator that perhaps we should be thinking about online video hubs as networks rather than just platforms. Perhaps we'll soon be saying, "Oh, it's on MySpaceTV" or "You can catch it on YouTube" instead of talking about whether a program is on NBC or Fox.
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