On Tuesday, I attended a NewTeeVee event at the Metreon in San Francisco where one of the producers of LonelyGirl15, Greg Goodfried, spoke. While I’m not a teenage girl (the audience for LonelyGirl15) and I think the videos are insipid, overly melodramatic, and the acting is horrible, I find what they’re creating completely fascinating. They are building a new genre of interactive storytelling and video production that will bleed to other consumers besides teenage girls.With the launch of the UK version of LonelyGirl15, called Kate Modern, the LonelyGirl15 team will hopefully prove that LonelyGirl15 wasn’t just a one hit wonder and its interactive storytelling model can be replicated.
Listen to my discussion with John Scott on Green 960 discussing interactive storytelling and LonelyGirl15
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What is the LonelyGirl15 model? What makes this form of storytelling so unique?
- It’s micro programming – Very low barrier to consume. In less than two minutes you can touch base with a character.
- It’s variable programming – Want to consume two minutes or two hours? Want to participate or do you want to be a voyeur? Depending on your time and the level you want to contribute, LonelyGirl15’s highly digestible short form programming, Web content, wiki encyclopedia of characters, and chat features allows viewers to dial up or dial down their involvement.
- The characters are a part of your life – The producers want you to think of the characters as friends, people whose lives you have a vested interest in. That’s why most of the videos “break the fourth wall” with the actors talking directly to the viewer as if they’re a friend.
- It looks like your life – Goodfried feels strongly that LonelyGirl15’s video needs to maintain a low “anyone can create” type of production look and style. It has to look like a video your friend would create. And in effect, that’s what happens when viewers respond to LonelyGirl15. The viewers’ videos look as if they could be content woven into the storyline.
- The show is a social network living on a social network – The programming, friends talking about friends, is simply mimicking the space it’s living on.
- It lives in a place where others are already creating personal content – MySpace and YouTube, two of LonelyGirl15’s distribution networks, already have content being created in very much the same style as LonelyGirl15. That makes LonelyGirl15-type programming comfortable to the audience.
- Development costs low, interactivity high – No need to create your own comment system or video chat feature, instead just jump on board a social network or video sharing site that already has these features built in. Plus they’ve got an audience.
- It’s a game – There are puzzles and questions the characters ask of you, pleading for you help. Viewers feel compelled to participate. Often viewers will have to complete actions to move the story along. For example, here’s a line of dialogue said by a character on LonelyGirl15:
“So it appears the meeting location is in a dark alley way. A very dark alley way. If I don’t return and you find this, remember, box between 21st and 22nd and Idaho and Montana south to north count three brown bins, make a left.”
- The fictional world bleeds with the real world – As you can see in the above quote, the characters talk about real places because they live in the same world their viewers do. And when instructions like this appear, people can either physically go to them or look them up online to see what’s there.
- Product placement can become intrinsic to the storyline – Audience is connected with characters, and the characters are connected to the products and services they’re using on the show. So by transitive property to the show’s characters, the audience too is connected to the products and services. In the example Greg Goodfried mentioned, one of the characters on LonelyGirl15 is working as a research scientist for Neutrogena. He’s got a MySpace page and in support of the storyline and bringing it into the real world, Neutrogena made this fictional character “Employee of the Month.”
- They can experiment with different storytelling forms – This started as a single character in her bedroom talking and it’s exploded into more characters, a syndicated spin-off, a wiki, and they’re trying a “24” style finale to the season of LonelyGirl15 where 12 episodes will be uploaded in 12 hours and viewers will be invited to participate and move the story along during that time. What’s great is they’re not severely invested in any one model. If any one doesn’t work, no big deal, they can just move on to something else.
- They’re not locked into one distribution model – Similarly, the LonelyGirl15 team can experiment with multiple distribution networks like YouTube, MySpace, Revver, and Bebo. When something doesn’t work, they can move on. The production and distribution is dynamic. They’re not locked into one model, nor are they beholden to a studio dictating timing of distribution. According to Goodfried, that’s why they turned down an offer from CAA (Creative Arts Agency).
- People can really click to buy – As the entire video market continues to figure out the “click to buy Jennifer Anniston’s sweater” model, the LonelyGirl15 team is already doing it with links to purchase music played on the show or products used by characters.
- They are involved with their audience – Part of the writing and production model involves reading viewers’ comments and responding to them by name in subsequent videos.
- It’s a soap opera – People get attached to characters and need to find out what happens next. And LonelyGirl15’s melodrama makes Days of Our Lives look like the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour.
- It’s local – Even though LonelyGirl15 received worldwide attention, it has a very local element, allowing people to interact in their locale. I thought the show was based in Southern California, now I’m not 100% sure. But the producers made it clear that they do want to franchise the model out to different cities. Currently, the Kate Modern version is in the UK, London I believe. They hope to go to Tokyo next and many other cities.
Brian Monahan at the IPG Emerging Media Lab weighs in on the same subject on his blog.
