The creators identified themselves to The Associated Press as Miles Beckett, 28, of Woodland Hills, California; Mesh Flinders, 26, of Petaluma, California, and Greg Goodfried, 27, of Los Angeles, California.
Beckett, a self-confessed Internet geek, said he came up with the idea of using short videos as a storytelling technique while a surgical resident. Earlier this year, he met Flinders, a fledgling filmmaker, at a party.
Flinders said he had been developing the character of a teenage girl who was more at home relating to adults than with her peers. The character never quite fit into any of his screenplays, but seemed a perfect fit for Beckett’s idea of telling stories using video blogging.
The two joined with Goodfried, an attorney, recruited the actors to play Bree and her dorky boyfriend, Daniel, and began writing the broad outlines of an open-ended plot filled with the kind of mysteries and clues TV watchers know from the hit ABC show “Lost.”
WE just KNEW a hot Christian girl who worshiped Aleister Crowley was too good to be true! We are greatly saddened that the sanctity of the internet has been sullied by this shocking development: that a dorky guy would pretend to be a teenaged girl just for kicks.
For a classic of the genre, the gold standard is K. Thor Jensen’s riotous Amber_4_ever, a meanspirited prank in which horny keyboard twiddlers put up with Amber’s tales of her father turning into a shower of goldencoins and even accept her colostomy bag in an attempt to get jiggy with the lonely teen.
UPDATE: The NY Times has the money quote:
On learning that Ms. Rose is an actress whose interests, unlike the scientific and religious issues that fascinated Bree, run to parties and posing, one fan wrote, âVery cute, but sheâs really not into Feynmann and Jared Diamond! (Iâm heart-broken. … But a wonderful actress, had me fooled into thinking she was a geek like me.)â?
I came in late on the “lonelygirl15” phenomenon, but after seeing the first installment of the video, my main question was whether any of the people who claimed to believe it was real… were for real. My disappointment comes from learning that they are.