Did I Kill LonelyGirl15?

in 2010 your boy entered a contest won the keys to the Internet's pioneer web series and then sat behind the wheel as it crashed and burned into the ground my name is Austin and depending on who you ask I killed lonely girl 15 but like with a lot of things that's only true from a certain point of view stick around and I'll tell you mine web series are a dime a dozen nowadays there's tons of award shows dedicated to them they even have an Emmy category times have changed I mean arguably one of the best shows the past decade didn't even air on TV it was a web series the back in 2006 YouTube was still in his infancy and the idea of a compelling narrative story playing out over online video instead of TV was unheard of that's when lonely girl 15 dropped hi guys presented is the video Journal of a 16 year old girl named Bree LG 15 became an internet sensation almost overnight when the show debuted have played things nonfiction like maintaining the illusion that Bree was a real girl she had a MySpace page she even chatted with the fans this eventually spawned an all-out investigation by internet sleuths into proving the whole thing of hoax eventually the creators of the show came clean and LG 15 started to hit the big time as the first real successful web series it broke ground on what exactly an Internet show was supposed to be the one biggest web hit on vh1's big enogh 6 Awards and was featured in tons of publications and would eventually generate a number of spin-off shows some successful some not with an increased audience came the pressure to make a bigger show so the fictional Bree left her house at LG 15 eventually evolved into a multi character series with a complex story involving secretive evil organizations and big-time action sequences it all started out great but somewhere along the line the series lost its Flair by December of o8 the storyline was a mess of plot holes and viewership averaged only a fraction of the numbers it used to pull in on the regular if lonely girl 15 taught us how web series are born it also taught us how web series die sensing the stagnant future of the franchise the creators of the show at equal entertainment put the series on hold and announced a contest called LG 15 the show is yours which allowed fans to submit pilot sodas and trailers of spin-off shows based on the lonely girl 15 mythology the selected pilot got to become an official LG 15 franchise show the first season of TSI why got off to a rocky start but eventually produced the first fan spin-off LG 15 the last being a fan produced show the quality wasn't on the same page as the original series and the absence of the original cast probably didn't help matters either the last struggled to gain traction with an audience outside of its dwindling fan base and by the time it reached its conclusion most folks were hoping things would just go back to the original series that cliffhanger the show ended on would be resolved and closure would finally be brought to a franchise that had seemingly run its course instead the creators at equal retooled a few things about that fan contest and launched TSI y2 this time offering a $5,000 production budget to the winning pilot and granting them first dibs on the new social networking platform that equal had been developing called umbrella hope on equal side was likely that the new show would give them an opportunity to test out umbrella and maybe generates a new business for their company all while saving a pretty penny as for the original LG 15 series the folks at equal stayed mum on their plans right so here's where I come in first some background I discovered LG 15 in probably mid 2007 I followed it on and off the next year at the time I was a little smart mouth whippersnapper who was working on being a stereotypical film student I was learning how cameras editing visual effects all that jazz worked and as I slowly became more proficient in the trade I wanted to try out new things I distinctly remember telling my buddy Lance one day as we were watching LG 15 together dude if I had their resources I could make a show so much better than this by early 2008 LG 15 was starting to hit those plot hold bumps and so one night I decided to make a fan video I turned my new camera on in my bedroom and filmed a quick little ditty about the latest story developments I became Mason a snarky teenage kid who poked fun at the show's flaws but did so in character I uploaded the video men went to bed woke up the next day and suddenly I'm the most popular dude of the dwindling fan base I guess at the time the videos editing made it stand out from the rest of the fan material most community members got a good laugh out of hearing their show get ripped on for seven and a half minutes by a kid who laid down jokes grounded in the show's increasingly confusing mythology after getting my first dose of real attention and reading some pretty encouraging comments I started thinking to myself yeah I can make some more of these over the next few weeks I started creating videos that tied into the flagship series the official LG 15 channel would put out their latest episode within a day a new mason video would pop up in response pretty soon after that I started getting you know the hate messages that come along with the internet so I got discouraged I decided I've got too much going on in my life and I can't do this anymore so I killed the fan character Mason off I put an end to the thing right so that's the background let's fast-forward now and get back to TSI why - so $5,000 and the use of the official LG 15 site sounded like a pretty sweet deal so I wrote up a story treatment for a spinoff under the title of LG 15 outbreak I shot the pilot and submitted it went to bed woke up the next morning BAM Mason fever few days later I got the golden ticket in my inbox I had won the contest the show was mine so what I'm gonna do now is tell you how I wanted outbreak to go the whole point behind the title outbreak was that the series would revolve around a rescue attempt of the original show's main character Jonas who was being held captive by the bad guys in the last official episode the hope was that outbreak would be a bridge series to return to the original show my series would conclude with a trade Jonas for Intel and in the main series had a starting point from which to make a return in my mind outbreak would tide fans over while equal worked out how they were going to restart the original series so yeah needless to say that ain't how it went down from the start of production I realized I'm in way over my head the original contract for the show was two episodes a week for eight weeks for a total of 16 episodes in retrospect that was a sufficient amount but me wanting to I guess prove a point or something said now let's shoot for way more than that in total we ended up producing 42 episodes maybe three of which I was actually happy with turns out making a show on a limited budget with high expectations from a frustra at fanbase was a lot harder than I was expecting production had all kinds of problems heavy winter storms made shooting ten times more complicated and made locations we had secured suddenly unusable technical problems including broken cameras glitchy editing software and non functioning microphones made post-production of episodes a total headache and a half the schedules of the cast were hard to align so the main group didn't get to film together as much as we had wanted further the social platform umbrella that equal had been developing was going through some let's just call him growing pains and certain functions we were expecting didn't arrive making puzzles and supplemental story material a challenge in and of itself most of them had to either be scrapped or remade on the fly this presented more problems when it came to producing episodes as puzzles were meant to be integrated into the videos that's kind of hard to do when the puzzles we shot around suddenly start getting scrapped at the last minute so yeah it was tough also YouTube presented its own challenges uploading back then was nigh impossible on the internet setup that I had and sometimes episodes were released later than we wanted even if we managed to get the videos uploaded on time there was no guarantee that the social platform on equals end would be ready for them I guess such as the nature of producing a show in Missouri than piping it through to Los Angeles for inspection site integration and eventual release and that's not even to mention how awful I was at trying to keep the storyline from unraveling due to various factors I can't imagine it would be profitable to explain changes in our original story vision were necessary plot points got rewritten and it started to become pretty apparent that outbreak wasn't going to have a lot of outbreaks in it after all while all this was going on I had to keep in mind the fans and audience members who are watching every step of the way now don't get me wrong most of the fans were supportive of the show despite some of the problems but there was a good number of folks who let's just say weren't thrilled with the product keep in mind I'd never done anything like this before I was a fan who wanted to play in the big leagues and suddenly I realized not only had I been signed and called up but I've been named team captain coach and general manager point is 20 years old the pressure was getting to me the whole thing tested every fiber of being I went from being the guy that poked fun at a web series to the guy responsible for the future of that web series it was a no-win situation I wanted to swoop in revamp the series unshackle it from story problems that had boxed itself into and provide a clear path for the show to continue after my departure in retrospect this is totally not what TSI Y was designed for outbreak was a fan show that tried to stand on the same level as the original series it didn't meet expectations and chances were it probably never would have outbreak pulled in okay numbers more than the first DSi Y show but it didn't reinvigorate the franchise and it didn't save the series what it did do for me was give perspective on what it means to be on the creative end of something and experience on how to deal with folks sometimes unreasonable expectations see while all of this was going on there was this this guy let's just call him bad rebel 88 he was let's just say an outspoken member of the LG 15 community mad rebel 88 hobbies include as far as I can tell hating on everything around him and reveling in his own lack of empathy bad rebel 88 isn't a troll he's worse than a troll he's a step down from Matt he's an Internet sociopath bad rebel 88 isn't snarky for the sake of humor he's just mean being mean is his favorite thing he continuously hurled insults at the LG 15 creators lambasted them over the years for the poor quality of the show's writing and the franchise's dwindling audience he did this all the time he'd hurl personal attacks at the creators and he might page after page of angry scribblings directed at anyone who dared to have a different opinion than him on the quality of the show mad rebel 88 likely did this as a way to express his frustration with a show that he at one time loved maybe thought that his constant mean-spirited hyper criticism would cause the creator's to try harder Dork diligently to make sure the show would meet his standards maybe behave the way he did because he didn't like the fact that a community he was a high-profile member of was shrinking what he didn't realize and probably still doesn't is that he was one of the reasons why it was shrinking it comes out constantly being a jerk to everybody around you doesn't really do well for building a community mad rebel 88 was whether he knew it or not a one-man wrecking crew he was essentially a man running around inside of a burning building pouring gasoline everywhere and then complaining that nobody was putting out the fire his toxic behavior did nothing to inspire the creator's to work harder on the show and in fact it probably discouraged them from giving their all I mean why on earth would they invest so much time and effort to create a product that would please an audience when the most vocal member of said audience would only trash them and berate them the creators for their part remain constantly respectful of bad rebel 88 but things never improved when outbreak started bad rebel 88 had a new target me I was the object of his disdain he hated me with the heat of 10,000 Suns never had I dealt with an Internet hater like this before bad rebel 88 hated me with such a passion and fury that it made creating hard think about it our team would go through an unbelievable amount of stress and hard work to create an episode and minutes after releasing it bad rebel 88 will be sure to let us know that our show was bad and we should feel bad and he'd pepper into his criticism as many personal insults as possible way to go dude I still gets me mad thinking about it who would write something like this who would say that about somebody really felt that community love back then that rebel 88 reinforced what I already knew people on the Internet can be real jerks but in spite of pitiful people like that I got through it outbreak concluded and we ended up shooting on par it wasn't going to change the world but we did it we had a job to do we set out to do it and we got it done after outbreak was over equal took a look at the franchise as a whole saw that the view count on the channel was stagnant and so they put the whole franchise on hiatus and they never went back to it if you're looking back on the whole thing it's easy to make the argument that outbreak was the final nail in the coffin for the franchise lots of folks hold me personally responsible for the end of the series to them I'll break left a sour taste in their mouth and I was the one that finally killed lonely girl 15 you have to keep in mind that around this time the community was frustrated frustrated by the lack of progression in the show the main flagship series going on hiatus not a lot of good communication between the creators and the audience and some of that frustration came down on me maybe I deserve some of it maybe I deserved all of it maybe I didn't going back and reading some of these comments it's kind of weird I guess I didn't realize I was so disliked by various people in the community and man is that really what people thought about me I mean oh is that the impression I actually give people did I really lack that much self awareness 7 years ago or is that image of me just a projection by a select few is it an affectation as opposed to the truth I don't feel good about myself either way but man I just want to make something for fans of the same show as me from my point of view well surprise surprise I'm a bit more forgiving on myself I didn't know that outbreak was gonna be the end of the entire series if I thought that I obviously would have ended things differently I was a fan who is put in charge of producing a fans season I didn't have control over the main flagship you want my opinion I didn't kill LG 15 I just wasn't able to save it I was a fan who got the opportunity to make a fan show that would be recognized as official canon it was a great opportunity and I'm thankful for it and I loved doing it I didn't have a los angeles-based production crew like the flagship show I didn't have their actors than have their sets didn't have their props I didn't have their infrastructure I had a small budget a few guidelines and then had to give it my best shot within the framework that I was given I was the most experienced of the fans who entered TSI why to and in terms of web shows I was inexperienced this was my first time at bat with a web series I made mistakes but I mean I also did some things right for its part the LG 15 franchise was recently acquired from equal by discourse productions and web series extraordinaire Jenny Powell is taking over as executive producer the show is evidently restarting and to the production team behind the new installment I say good luck nothing but the best I don't regret doing outbreak and sure I mean if I could go back and do it again I give you a laundry list of things I can do better now but it was the best I could do at the time it was the best I could do with what I was given maybe you Doug outbreak maybe you didn't maybe it was the coolest thing since sliced bread you maybe were disappointed or maybe it was just okay in your mind nothing to write home about whatever your opinion on outbreak what's done is done I can't go back and change anything I can only keep creating and hope to improve with every project I get asked sometimes if I'm ever going to do a web series again honestly I really couldn't tell you I've been focusing the past few years on feature films doing festival circuits I've been working on an animated series slowly for the past two years but sure okay yeah outbreak left me a little gun-shy the 2010s thus far have been more of an extended learning experience for me than anything I'm getting better at my craft but honestly it's going to take me a bit before I'm ready to hop back into the saddle and let the internet watch me ride IFIF I really need to figure out better metaphors it's been about half a decade since outbreak wrapped and I don't know I guess I felt like talking about it tonight so there you go thanks for watching this video don't forget to Like and subscribe for more or don't I don't really care you

Channel: AustinMcConnell

Views: 1,305,519

Keywords: lonelygirl15, lg15, outbreak, lg15 outbreak, lg15 the last, lg15 the resistance, austin mcconnell, austinmcconnell, webseries, the outbreak of 2010

Id: cstiCjIk14w

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2016