So, I know I'm a little (read A LOT) behind the general masses on this one, but I read the piece in Wired this month about the Lonleygirl15 phenomenon on Youtube. It's a pretty good piece, and it raises a great question--how will content designed strictly for the interweb differ from film/tv prototypes? The creators of Lonelygirl seem to believe there's a kind of authentcity to the handheld single cam focus with the assumption being that the subject is filming themselves.
After checking out a few videos on their site--www.lonelygirl15.com/ I'm not sure I understand how their format would translate with different genres? In particular I'm thinking about how their typical episodes last roughly 2 1/2 minutes, and are released every couple of days. This clearly equal low production value, but take it past the "dear diary" format and I'm thinking there would have to be loads of changes. Also, while I can see how some of the lighting, props, camerawork, etc. would have to be downsized for the average computer screen I think some cinematic features should be preserved. Just case it's on the web doesn't mean it has to be low budg and guerilla-like. On the other hand what do I know? The amount of comments the lonelygirl15 eps. get is pretty amazing averaging about 300 comments each time, so we're talking about at minimum 1,000 unique hits each week (and I know I'm lowballing that figure big time). Clearly the interweb masses have spoken.
1 comment:
Rekha, I agree that the low-res of streaming video loses a lot of the aesthetics associated with film and even TV compositions. But I wonder if placing value on that type of composition is on the way out--just look at Inland Empire. Most would agree that Lynch is an auteur, but his use of DV in I.E. is pretty-ugly. He may still be concerned with shot composition and aesthetics, but it could never be called beautiful.
The other HUGE question I have for the future of webvideo as a genre is this: would LonelyGirl have been successful if everyone knew it was a fiction? This may be related to the larger question of authenticity in creative production--James Frey comes to mind here. But the success of LonelyGirl was certainly based on the appearance of sincerity. Would viewers still be engaged if they were positive the clip was staged? I'm not so sure. I know that most of the clips I view online were not clips created for the internet.
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