Lonely Girl

FireIce

12 Sep 06, 14:56

One of the biggest Web 2.0 stunts is hurtling towards its conclusion, as whoever's behind YouTube's newest starlet, the vlogger "LonelyGirl 15," appears poised to come clean.

This spring, videos of "LonelyGirl 15," a supposedly home-schooled 16-year-old, surfaced on YouTube. She detailed her so-called life in a series of high-quality clips. "LonelyGirl," aka "Bree," made videos in which she spoke about her made-for-TV religious father, a lazy eye and her friend "Daniel."

But the popular videos--they racked up around 1.5 million views by the end of August--seemed fishy. The quality was just a little too good; the story arcs a little too Hollywood.

People began to wonder whether the videos were Web 2.0's first "Blair Witch" campaign--a promotional effort for a movie masquerading as user-produced content. But the very things that lent the 1999 "Blair Witch" campaign an air of authenticity--the grainy video and shaky camera work-- were suspiciously absent from the LonelyGirl 15 oeuvre.

By the end of August, the videos had been viewed around 1.5 million times, drawing worldwide media attention. The U.K. paper The Times ran a credulous article, "Worldwide fame for a lonely girl," which included an e-mail from Bree explaining that she found vlogging more fun than her usual routine, in which she found herself "stuck studying the Treaty of Versailles or Occam's razor." The article even included an expert weighing in with the opinion that people post video logs as a form of therapy.

But other journalists were skeptical. Virginia Heffernan of The New York Times devoted several blog entries to sussing out whether Bree was genuine and, if not, who was likely behind the videos.

By last week, three consumer-detectives who had corresponded with "Lonely Girl" figured out that Bree's e-mails were originating from Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency. The revelations forced the site's creators to finally admit the jig was up, though they have yet to reveal the entire story.

"Thank you so much for enjoying our show so far," they posted on an online forum devoted to LonelyGirl 15. "With your help we believe we are witnessing the birth of a new art form. Our intention from the outset has been to tell a story-- A story that could only be told using the medium of video blogs and the distribution power of the internet."

The authors of the post promise that more details will come out in time. For now, many questions remain--including some questions about whether CAA really is behind the stunt, or if they're being set up somehow.

Regardless, as with "The Blair Witch Project," LonelyGirl 15 undoubtedly will prove far less interesting to people now that it's clear she's at least partially a creation of Hollywood.

Darkness_hacker99

12 Sep 06, 14:58

Erm.. Can summarize in less than 10 words?

meltz

12 Sep 06, 14:59

no video ...

Ito_^

12 Sep 06, 15:01

Originally posted by Darkness_hacker99:
Erm.. Can summarize in less than 10 words?

no need 10, 2 can already.

fake one.

FireIce

14 Sep 06, 14:26

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Her name is not Bree, she is not a teenager and she has not been home-schooled by parents who are super-strict and very religious about whatever it is they believe in, and she seems to have more friends than her film editor pal Daniel. The YouTube phenom LonelyGirl15 is in actuality just another aspiring actress. The New York Times Virginia Heffernan today tells us her real name is Jessica Rose, and she is a "twenty something" graduate of the New York Film Academy who hails from New Zealand and Los Angeles.

LonelyGirl15 is actually Jessica Rose, aspiring actress. But we're not left with a hoax, just the platform for a new narrative form.

The unmasking follows the creators posting a confession that the Lonelygirl15 saga was not the efforts of two teenage friends killing time, but a collaborative effort to tell a story. A Sept. 3 "press conference" from YouTube user Lonesome October, hosted by Bree's mascot, Purple Monkey, also made it clear this was a story being told, and not a real girl.

If you haven't caught up to the 4-month-old LonelyGirl15 saga by now, you clearly have not been paying sufficient enough attention to the new pop-culture byways. YouTube is no longer the home of all of teenage America's funniest home videos. It's a platform for a new narrative form.

With over 30,000 subscribers to her channel, the LonelyGirl15 shorts, which have racked up nearly 5.2 million video views, attracted an audience who had to put some work into seeking out this unfolding soap opera of a beautiful young brainiac testing her wings by posting videos without her parents' knowledge.

Bree -- custom-built nerd bait with her sweetly delivered monologues referencing everything from Richard Feynman to the Coriolis effect -- could turn out to be the first bonafide Web 2.0 star. Her videos spawned responses from the YouTube community, which posted an incredibly high number of their own videos that acted as subplots to the central narrative. Was Bree a fake? Were the YouTubers who early tried to debunk her in on the production? Just what are her religious beliefs? Is her ongoing vlogs on "Proving Science Wrong" spoofing her parents' beliefs somehow? What's the meaning was of Adolf Hitler's spiritual adviser Alister Crowely's picture on the wall? Or the significance of 10/12/06? And are Bree's parents Satanists? And was she to be a sacrifice in the religious ceremony she was preparing for (which even her parents would not be allowed to attend)? Was Daniel her savior or himself a sacrificial lamb? What about purple monkey? And most important, will Bree and Daniel become a couple?

YouTube reaction has ranged from extremely angry and profane to pleas to Bree/Jessica to continue posting. The creators, identified by Heffernan as Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, Calif., and Miles Beckett, a doctor turned filmmaker, have set up a website for LonelyGirl to live and give us the end of the story. But somehow Watercooler thinks pulling it off YouTube will mean it could lose the bit that made it so fascinating, the real-time reactions of an involved audience.

alvin-ncs

14 Sep 06, 15:03