Sharp-eyed fans noticed the one clue placed by the storytellers early on -- a picture of Alistair Crowley, master of the occult.
This decidedly dark twist touched off a furious online debate over the religion of Bree's parents. And gaining force on the Internet message boards were the skeptics -- fans who believed Bree might be too good to be true.
I'd have to say the second or third video, we would have people commenting right on the page saying 'fake' or 'actress.
You can ignore it," Greg said. They thought it was an ad campaign for purple monkey puppets. They thought it was an ad campaign for pink feather boas. They thought crazy things like maybe it will be an ad campaign for Coca-Cola further down the road. The truth was that even the creators weren't sure what they wanted. Flinders and Beckett admit they had "absolutely no plan. But wasn't there a sense of betrayal for all those computer geeks out there who thought they had found their soul mate in this gorgeous young lady who loved Richard Feyman and e.
Even Beckett said he's disappointed. People didn't demonstrate any backlash. Flinders says viewership actually tripled in just a week. We did up his room to look like that. We wanted it to look authentic and so rather than filming with a hand-held camcorder and trying to make it look like a webcam, we just used a webcam.
JESS : First day on set we did a few different videos and they originally, for that first video, where she pulls her tongue out and does all of these silly dances and stuff, they wanted to do a much more complicated video.
So we were like, what could we do if she just did something fun and silly? So I just pulled a few faces and that was just like, this is my party trick. We were pretty obsessive about adjusting the lighting to make it look good. MESH : We would shoot two or three in a day and then edit them that night.
Our goal was always to be a week or two ahead. I would write the episode and then we would shoot it the next day and Miles would edit it the day after that or the next night. It was probably like three days. Three day turnaround. We stayed about a week ahead so if there were any disasters we could go back and fix something. It was a couple of full days here and there; maybe once or twice a week. You could film so many in one day and then the producers Mesh and Miles would put it together and edit it.
Bree and P-Monkey Photo: Wikipedia. If you can get your video onto most discussed for the day, it might get into most discussed for the week, and then it might get into most discussed of all time, and as it started to glide through those ranks, it would start to get into most viewed for the day, and most viewed for the week and most viewed of all time. So we just did that at first. We just responded to a bunch of videos and people started messaging her and once you have that kind of ground swell of approval, it was possible to grow from there.
MILES : Initially Mesh and I were pretending to be the character of Bree, interacting with all of the fans who were talking to her as if she was a real person. In order to convince people that she was real, she had to respond with these comments because everyone else was. It would have seemed really fake if she never responded to a single comment.
I was a very early watcher. I remember when the first video came out. I remember thinking pretty quickly there was more to this than just a girl sitting in her room video blogging and called out early on that I thought it was actually a scripted show. MESH : We never could have predicted the response from the fans. It basically became a medium unto itself. The original idea was that Bree would disappear and then six months to a year later come out with this independent film that explained what had happened to her and that very quickly became irrelevant because this was a medium.
JENNI : Well, what was interesting was lonelygirl15 was not the only thing that was gaining the interest, there were also a lot of actual vloggers at the time who were as well and I think what was different about Lonelygirl was it brought those people who do really enjoy a personality, but it also brought people that love stories, and storytelling.
MESH : Telling a story on YouTube was a medium and the fans were passionate about interacting with these characters every day and finding out what was going on in their lives every day. This realization created a new wave of fervor that seduced even The New York Times , drawing in another wave of fans — and dividing old ones.
What the ceremony ultimately entailed was the transfer of blood from a trait positive member to an Elder. This is a fate Bree eventually suffered, resulting in her season 1 death. Her story continued in subsequent videos with the original characters, including Daniel played by Yousef Abu-Taleb , as well as new characters who became tangled in this web. While the style and mystery clearly took inspiration from the film The Blair Witch Project , LonelyGirl15 was a precursor of its own.
It could also be argued that even regular, genuine vloggers owe some of their success to the web series, as it was the first YouTube channel to use product integration. They still manage to plague YouTube. I had this character that had been in two different screenplays, and she was a young precocious teen. Beckett: Over two weeks we wrote out the whole narrative of what would be Lonelygirl Flinders: We quit our jobs in the beginning.
We had raised a little bit of money to sustain ourselves over the first six months. Beckett: The investors were Visa and MasterCard. There were really three of us who created it: me, Mesh, and Greg Goodfried. Mesh and I wrote it together, and Greg and I produced it. Film Independent in L. I saw an audition opportunity on Craigslist of all places. All the other people went in for the audition dressed to impress—wearing Abercrombie, which nobody wears now, but back then it was the thing.
I had a totally different take—ripped-up jeans, nerdy shirt, the hair going forward. Beckett: Our first day of casting we were pretty bummed. Then Jessica came on the second day. She was amazing. I submitted two separate headshots and they called me in on one of the younger-looking headshots, and I just auditioned. I was homeschooled and I grew up in a very isolated commune, similar to her.
So I knew there were some things she would know where she would be very advanced and for some things she would be completely behind. Beckett: We knew we needed someone who had limited social media exposure.
Jessica was from New Zealand and had just moved to the United States. She had a Myspace, but we took it down. Abu-Taleb: I met Jess and we read together. Man, we had some awesome chemistry.
I actually was more excited when I heard what they really wanted to do. They explained to us that they were making the movie eventually but first they were making a series online. It was going to have all kinds of weird little things in it, like cult activities. This is probably porn, or something really dodgy. Beckett: Yeah, it was a problem initially with Jess. She had gotten cast in something before, and the producer was totally sketchy. I promise! You can talk to my parents. I had an e-mail, but I also checked maybe once a week.
They had us watch a few YouTube channels. I get it. Sort of.
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