lonelygirl15 was an interactive web-based
video series which began in June 2006, and ended on August 1, 2008,
with a Japanese dub slated for release in 2009.
The show focuses on the life of a
fictional
teenage girl named Bree, whose
YouTube
username is the
eponymous "lonelygirl15", but
the show does not reveal its fictional nature to its audience.
After the fictional status of the show was revealed in September
2006, the show gradually evolved into a multi-character show
including both character
videoblogs and action
sequences, with a complex story
universe involving "trait positive girls"
who are sought by an evil organization called "The Order".
Lonelygirl15 first came to international attention ostensibly as a
"real" video blogger who achieved massive popularity on YouTube.
The show
was eventually proved as a hoax by suspicious viewers as featuring
a fictitious character played by American
-New Zealand
actress Jessica
Rose.
The three
creators of Lonelygirl15, first revealed by the The New York Times, were Ramesh
Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County,
California
, Miles Beckett, a surgical residency dropout turned
filmmaker, and Greg Goodfried, a former attorney with Mitchell,
Silberberg and Knupp, LLP.
The series began on June 16, 2006, and was slated to run through
August 1, 2008. New videos appeared, at a clip of four to five a
week, first on YouTube and
lg15.com, also on
MySpace. As of July 2008, the series has had more
than 110 million combined views.
Lonelygirl15's first
spin-off show,
KateModern, ran from July 2007
through June 2008 on
Bebo, and took place in
the same fictional universe.
Along with Amanda Goodfried, an attorney who worked with Creative
Arts Agency (CAA), the creators of
lonelygirl15 created
LG15 Studios to produce original interactive content online. LG15
later morphed into
EQAL in April 2008, with
receipt of $5 million in venture capital to expand their
offerings.
The Lonelygirl15 series finale took place on August 1, 2008, with
three ambiguous episodes. The first showed Danial and Jonas heading
their own ways as Sarah films everything and the rest go to the
hospital. It was shot on a beach and was the last scene from the
previous episode, filmed from a different angle. The scene left
several unanswered questions, leaving fans frustrated. The last
video again claimed that someone else had taken control, their
numbers are growing and on the video clips of Jonas and Sarah said
that they have chosen their leader and the first disciple. It also
said that 'they' were now controlling and manipulating them. A
reference or the channel for the new series that will be taking
place in United States with old characters from the series along
with characters from KateModern. The finale started at 8am and
included 12 episodes released over a 12 hour period in one
day.
lonelygirl15 spawned spinoffs such as
LG15: The
Resistance, which ran from September to December 2008, and
LG15: The Last, which started airing in January 2009 and
is still running.
A Polish spin-off under title
N1ckola started in January 2009.
It has
also been announced a new series will take place in Italy
with a
partnership between EQAL and CBS. Also, a Japanese series
will take place with a partnership between EQAL and Shinto
Tsushin.
History
Lonelygirl15 debuted on YouTube posing as a real 16-year-old video
blogger with the eponymous username. At first, the videos covered
normal, everyday subject matter, as the title character dealt with
typical teenage angst, but quickly morphed into a bizarre narrative
that portrayed her dealings with secret occult practices within her
family and included the mysterious disappearance of her parents
after she refused to attend a "secret" ceremony prescribed by the
leaders of the family's cult. In lonelygirl15's earliest videos,
she posted video replies to, and
dropped the
names of popular YouTubers. To further the initial illusion
that Bree was a real girl, a MySpace page was set up for her and
she began corresponding with many of her fans.At first discussion
regarding why they thought lonelygirl15 might be a fake went on in
her video comments. In early August 2006, a fan named HyeMew began
a discussion at the previously stagnant www.lonelygirl15.com
message boards and raised an all-out investigation into the who,
what, and wheres behind lonelygirl15. Soon the message board became
invigorated with discussion about even the tiniest details in each
of her videos, everything from the quality of the lighting to the
flora seen in her outdoor videos. Fans used the forum to collect,
organize and share their findings, making the investigation a truly
collaborative effort. Fans pointed to small inconsistencies within
the videos as evidence that the story might not be genuine,
wondering if Bree's posts were part of a teaser campaign for a
television show or an upcoming movie (similar to the
viral marketing used to hype
The Blair Witch Project or
Cloverfield). Others thought
that the blog might be part of an
alternate reality game.
Bree aka lonelygirl15 in a video
blog
Los Angeles Times
reporter Richard Rushfield was the first to provide proof of a
hoax, when he wrote of Shaina Wedmedyk, Chris Patterson, and an
anonymous law student, who set up a
sting on MySpace to reveal that the
Creative Artists Agency was behind
the videos. Eventually it was revealed that 16-year-old "Bree" was
played by 20-year-old New Zealand actress
Jessica Rose.
Media sources seized upon the story, covering both the search
process and the eventual "
outing" as a
fictional series.
Afterwards, numerous news sources and talk shows featured
interviews with the creators and actors of the series itself.
New York Times reporter
Virginia Heffernan expanded on
the series of revelations on September 12 out with an article which
confirmed Jessica Rose's identity, and revealed the identities of
her "co-conspirators", Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and
filmmaker from Marin County, Calif., and Miles Beckett, a
doctor-turned-filmmaker. Software engineer Grant Steinfeld was also
involved in this project, as a photographer. Amanda Solomon
Goodfried assisted in their efforts to hide their identities as
well as posed as "Bree"'s online alter-ego. Goodfried's
father-in-law, Kenneth Goodfried, handled various legal matters.
The personnel involved worked under a
non-disclosure agreement, according
to Grant Steinfeld. Steinfeld has verified most of this information
to the
Times, and provided photographs he took of Rose on
set of as proof. Also on September 12, the three main creators gave
an interview to the
Los Angeles Times revealing the third
major partner as Greg Goodfried.
Since the fictional nature of
lonelygirl15 has been
revealed, the storyline continued to develop via new videos posted
to both YouTube and
Revver. However due to
the recent partnership with YouTube and Myspace, videos stopped
being posted on Lonelygirl15's Revver account, and now are only
viewable via Youtube and MyspaceTV. The relationships between
future LG15 properties and various online video websites, what will
be shown exclusively on which services etc. is not known at this
time.
After the hoax was discovered
- Jessica Rose participated in a United
Nations campaign in 2006, to fight poverty through an online
anti-poverty video. Rose portrayed the lonelygirl15 character as
she sat by herself in her bedroom talking to the camera. The
subject matter in the video focused on poverty relief, which breaks
from the regular subject matter of the show. The video was posted
on an alternate account, separate from the main channel.
- On November 20, 2006, lonelygirl15.com announced that the
spin-off OpAphid was the official Alternate Reality Game of
lonelygirl15. OpAphid began in late September with what
many speculated was a well-produced fan effort, and this
announcement merges its characters OpAphid, Tachyon, and
10033/Brother, into the series storyline and continuity. In early
February 2007, it was revealed that Glenn Rubenstein was the original Puppet Master behind the OpAphid
Alternate Reality Game and
also the creator of its characters, OpAphid, Tachyon, and Brother.
Due to internal issues between the Creators and Glenn, OpAphid is
no longer the official ARG.
- A 2006 episode of Law & Order: Criminal
Intent was "inspired" by the lonelygirl15
phenomenon. The episode "Weeping Willow" featured a blogger named
weepingwillow17, played by Michelle Trachtenberg (who starred in
Buffy next to a
character called Willow Rosenberg).
Willow and her boyfriend were kidnapped by men in black who demanded her fans donate money
to a website to save their lives. The investigators did not know if
Willow was real or fake. Various other video bloggers were also
seen decrying weepingwillow as a fake, just like many did on
YouTube. The site on the episode was named YouLenz.
- On
November 9, 2006, DEE, a Montreal
artist,
released a song and a music video entitled
lonelygirl. The lonelygirl music video was
shot in an almost exact replica of Bree's bedroom. In February
2007, it was featured by YouTube and got hundreds of thousands of
views.
- Wired magazine ran a
story on YouTube titled "YouTube Grows Up" in its December 2006
issue, featuring Rose on the cover.
- The lonelygirl15 blog won Biggest Web Hit Award on
VH1's Big in '06 Awards.
- In the "Best Series" category of the inaugural YouTube Video
awards in March 2007, the series "Ask a
Ninja", "Ask a Gay Man", and
"Chad Vader - Day Shift
Manager" finished first, second and third, with the
lonelygirl15 series finishing fourth. The New York Times
attributed Lonelygirl's finish to the YouTube community's ill will
towards the series.
- On August 3, 2007, Season One of lonelygirl15 celebrated its
finale with an exclusive on MySpaceTV known as "12 in 12" where 12
videos were uploaded over the course of 12 hours from 8 am PST to 7
pm PST, culminating in the highest one-day viewership ever for the
series. A "summary" video from the first season was offered as a
part of the event, and it logged in over a million views on its
own.
- In the last episode of the Season One finale, Bree's character
is killed off by the order during the ceremony in the season finale
and her trait positive blood was transfused into one of the order's
elders. The reason for her character's death was attributed to Rose
not renewing her contract for Season Two.
- Rose is now going to be appearing in a MySpace show called
Sorority Forever, and is
now appearing in a new YouTube show called Hookingup.
Marketing
lonelygirl15 was the first Internet series to introduce
product integration when the episode
"Truckstop Reunion" featured the characters eating and
displaying Hershey's Icebreaker's Sours Gum.
In another example of a product integration first,
lonelygirl15 landed on the front page of
Variety
for the integration of a character from
Neutrogena in the storyline over the period of
more than two months. Dr. Spencer Gilman became such a popular
character that Neutrogena made him "Employee of the Month" and gave
him his own e-mail account on the company's corporate
website.
Trivia
- The series was developed under the working title The
Children of Anchor Cove.
- lonelygirl15 has various signature items/props that
appear in its episodes. Recurring props include a pink feather boa, a safari
hat, Bree's beloved puppet Purple Monkey (a.k.a. "P.Monkey"),
her teddy bear Thor, and her green,
stuffed animal turtle, Owen.
- Much of the music for lonelygirl15 has come from
Magnatune and CC
Mixter, and is under Creative
Commons licenses. Initial lonelygirl15 videos featured
RIAA-controlled music such as Roy
Orbison and Nelly, but the series quickly
moved to only using music that could be used legally, largely all
Creative Commons licensed. lonelygirl15 has since teamed
up with Amie Street to sell music
featured in episodes.
- "Weeping
Willow", a sixth
season episode of the television
series Law
& Order: Criminal Intent, was inspired by the
Lonelygirl15 videos. In the episode, a vlogger
named Weeping Willow (Michelle
Trachtenberg) is kidnapped during a live Internet video, and
the kidnappers demand ransom through additional videos.
See also
Footnotes
- Trademark Application
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2ETsRObMQI
Youtube.com
- lonelygirl15.com
- YouTube - lonelygirl15 Song / Video parody / lonelygirl:
DEE
- http://www.vh1.com/shows/events/big_in/2006/index.jhtml
VH1.com
- cnn.com
- NYTimes.com
- reuters.com
- Northjersey.com
- Open Music Comes of Age - Creative Commons
- Lonelygirl15 • Information
- [1]
- lonelygirl15's Amie Street Music Store
- ]
References
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