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Lizzie Bennet Diaries Brings a Classic Spin to the Vlog

May 22, 2012 / Michael Andersen

Lizzie Bennet’s mother wants the best for her three daughters. Unfortunately for Lizzie, her mother’s antiquated impression of what is best involves settling Lizzie and her two sisters down with the first rich, eligible bachelors to come along. She even printed out a motivational tshirt for poor Lizzie, broadcasting that “[i]t is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” As a graduate student living at home and pursuing a Masters degree in Mass Communications, Lizzie is taking out her frustrations at her mother’s overt attempts to control her life over social media for a class project she’s calling The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, with a little help from her best friend Charlotte Lu. Sound familiar? No? Maybe this will help: the Bennet family’s new neighbor, Bing Lee, is best friends with an abrasive socialite named William Darcy.

That’s right, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, with a modern twist. Lizzie unabashedly assumes the role of unreliable narrator in the video blog (“vlog”) series recounting her various adventures that serves as the crux of the experience. While Charlotte and her sisters occasionally take over the vlog, the cast is purposefully minimal, forcing Lizzie, Charlotte, and her sisters to don over-the-top costumes while mimicking their parents, William Darcy, and even each other in a format that should be very familiar to frequent YouTube viewers. These videos offer a powerful platform for the sisters’ disparate personalities to shine through, allowing the plot to serve as a pleasant afterthought supporting a steady stream of sisterly bickering.

Since the YouTube videos themselves center around Lizzie’s highly biased take on the story, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries provides its on-screen and off-screen talent with social media outlets suited to their sensibilities, allowing viewers to gain a better sense of the story. While Jane’s fashion-centric Lookbook account and Lydia’s animated gif-heavy Tumblr do little to add to the plot, twitter accounts for Bing Lee, his sister Caroline, and William Darcy provide a parallel view of events that does an admirable job of complementing the vlog entries. While these elements are by no means necessary to the story, many of the show’s most amusing moments are either told (or remixed) over these side-channels.

Haxan Films Provides a Glimpse of the ARG That Could Have Been

April 19, 2012 / Michael Andersen

Haxan Films kicked off promotions for the limited release of its film Lovely Molly last week by mailing ARGNet a care package containing a cryptic disc leading to a series of puzzles and videos on the Lovely Molly website. Over the past few days, all but one of the puzzles have been solved, with a handful of runic characters standing between players and the full message. An additional installment to the Path to Madness documentary about the history of the movie’s namesake character has also found its way onto the website. The newest installment documents the death of Molly Reynolds’ father Ben Palmer through an apparent suicide by screwdriver.

Concurrent with shooting Lovely Molly, Haxan Films shot the raw footage for an alternate reality game that prominently featured this bloody screwdriver. Due to the film’s limited budget, plans for a full-fledged game fell through. The decision to abandon the film’s more immersive plans was a difficult one, so Lovely Molly‘s director Ed Sanchez edited together a video detailing the alternate reality game that could have been. Continue on for a rare peek at a campaign as its team initially envisioned it.

Stepping into Runner 5’s Shoes with “Zombies, Run!”

April 10, 2012 / Celina Beach

A few weeks ago, I was given the opportunity to try a new iOS app by Six to Start called Zombies, Run!, a “running game and audio adventure” that transplants its participants into a zombie apocalypse. The story begins: you are Runner #5, a refugee of a supply helicopter crash, with no identification to prove you’re not from one of the other rival camps, trying to earn your keep in Abel Township by running on supply or rescue missions. Along the way, you collect items that will help the camp, and sometimes obtain information that might help explain who you are, how the world got in this state, and maybe even how to save it.

Images courtesy of Six to Start

At its heartÂ Zombies, Run! is designed as a narrative complement to players’ running music playlist. After starting the mission by loading up the app and swiping the “slide to run” control, the first segment of the story will start, interweaving music from the phone’s iTunes library with additional story segments until the mission is over. While running, a computerized voice informs you of items you pick up along the way: USB Keys, bottles of water, batteries, clothes . . . and often CDC records, information about other factions, or even other apps. In one document, a newspaper article describing a suspicious fire at a university contained a live Twitter account.

Zombies, Run! received its initial funding through a Kickstarter initiative, and one of the benefits offered to early backers was the ability to be inserted into the story, either as an individual or a brand. One of the companies to jump at this opportunity was the app development company ChipotleLabs. Various items recovered over the course of the story including the “Kensaido sword” and “Kensaido Manifesto” hint at a secret ninja society that predated the zombie apocalypse, and whose members work to combat the growing incursion. In addition to providing more information about the world beyond Abel Township, the items promote ChipotleLabs’ upcoming app, Kensaido.

Haxan Films Returns to Blair Witch Roots with “Lovely Molly”

April 9, 2012 / Michael Andersen

It’s been over 13 years since Haxan Films screened its debut film The Blair Witch Project at Sundance. And while the “found footage” format used in the film quickly established its place as a cult classic, the film’s innovative viral marketing campaignÂ that created extensive artifacts insisting on the film’s reality fueled the movie’s rabid fanbase to take over Sundance with sold out screenings. Last year, Haxan Films returned to its found footage roots with his film Lovely Molly, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. And if the package I received in the mail earlier today is any indication, the found footage aesthetic won’t be Lovely Molly‘s only common ground with The Blair Witch Project.

The package I received contained dozens of photographs depicting four riders sitting astride horses with blotted out heads, and a large carved disc. The disc prominently displays the film’s insignia, a dagger with twin horse head quillons surrounded by symbols ranging from ancient cuneiform glyphs and Norse runes to more modern Braille cells. On the back of the disc, a link pointed to a personalized invitation to ARGNet, stating that “Lovely Molly invites you to descend into depravity. Rewards like this await the first five. Simple symbols await a score.”

“Real Escape Game” Locks Players in for Mystery

March 19, 2012 / Michael Andersen

Over the last five years, Takao Kato has locked over 100,000 people in bars, clubs, cathedrals, and baseball stadiums with a deceptively simple challenge: solve the puzzles within the time limit, and escape. And between March 23rd and March 25th, Kato is taking his narrative puzzle experience, Real Escape Game: The Escape from the Werewolf Village to San Francisco’s Japantown for a locked room mystery that is quickly selling out.

The premise, inspired by the popular social game Werewolf, is simple. There are sixteen villagers, three of whom are werewolves. Players have 90 minutes to work together in groups to navigate a series of increasingly difficult puzzles that will help them identify the werewolves, save the villagers, and escape. The game is designed to provide a challenge, and Kato explains that players have direct control over the unfolding narrative, noting

[t]he story unravels with each mystery completed by the players and their teammates. If you do nothing, nothing moves forward. And there are no guarantees that you’re even going to finish everything. So you’re going to have to give it your all if you want to put all the pieces together and finish the final puzzle in time.

Past iterations of Real Escape Game prove that Kato is true to his word: as the Real Escape Game‘s explanatory video states, only 9.6% of participants completed The Escape from the Werewolf Village when it was first conducted at Tokyo Culture Culture, with similar success rates for the game when it played out in Taiwan. After failing to complete a Real Escape Game murder mystery in Tokyo,Â Japan Times writer Edan Corkill explains “the most difficult part of a Real Escape Game is not answering questions but identifying them in the first place.”

Peter Weyland Delivers Stunning TED Talk…in 2023?

March 12, 2012 / Jonathan Waite

Sometimes the journey down the rabbit hole is an interesting one. In a recent Twitter post, Damon Lindelof linked to a sound file he deemed “Rad. Justâ€¦ Rad.” The file in question, available for your listening pleasure at Soundcloud, is a remix which includes audio from a TED talk delivered by Peter Weyland. The message is fairly inspirational, concluding with Weyland’s assertion that he “will settle for nothing short of greatness, or [he] will die trying.” Alas, in this case, a picture tells a thousand words more than the few Weyland used to entertain his captive audience.

Upon further review, the original video was found at a special TED page in which we discover that Weyland looks remarkably similar to Guy Pearce, the wonderful character actor. And lo and behold, the title not only reveals that the TED talk in question occurs in 2023, but that it is “[a] TEDTalk from the future as envisioned by Prometheus director Ridley Scott.” The video adds an additional layer of depth to the talk, picked up by some exceptionally rad hover-cameras that cover the action. And thus the rabbit hole deepens, leading down the trail for a viral marketing campaign for the upcoming film Prometheus.

Quite a few online communities and blogs have been closely following the campaign, and have uncovered a few other interesting, albeit fairly benign, aspects of this particular viral campaign. For starters, there is a fancy web site dedicated to Weyland Corp at weylandindustries.com, which hosts the TED Talk video (don’t miss the bit.ly link displayed on the screen at 0:52, as it leadsâ€¦ somewhere) and provides background information about the company. You can also register as an investor if you’d like to get email updates on the goings-on of the company (which, unfortunate-in-a-suspension-of-disbelief-kind-of-way, clearly come from Twentieth Century Fox US). But wait, there’s more! At the About Us page, there happens to be a flashing light hidden amongst the star field surrounding Earth, and flashing lights often lead to secret sections of websites, no? Without spoiling it for you, there’s a thread at the Unfiction forums where people have done the hard work for you, and the result is a spectacular piece of art not to be missed.

Unfortunately, that’s where the trail ends, for now. The film is set to be released in June, so there are still quite a few weeks for other things to develop, especially as quite a few sections of the Weyland Industries website are suspiciously locked. In the meantime, there may or may not be a glyph puzzle hidden among the images (secret and otherwise) on the Weyland Industries web site, so if you’re holding a flame for the hot new summer blockbuster, this might be right up your alley. However, if you’re simply a fan of awesome and interesting TED talks, perhaps this one is more your style?