You Tube Posts

We have finally been able to post our video fottage on you tube, although this has taken a while. We finished all of our footage weeks ago but were not able to get the videos from the camera to a computer, edit it down and then publish it on you tube. Lukily we were able to make an appointment with the technition Kyle who sat with me and showed me how to do everything. We changed one continuos video clip into various seperate clips or diary entries that could easily be posted onto youtube. They can be found by searching for 'lonely hearts'.

Creating Chris

We needed a villain character who would tempt the character of Rachel and get her not only to communicate with him in the virtual world, but eventually meet him in the real world. For this villain, we don't need a male actor.

It seemed almost too easy for me to create the character of Chris. It took no more then 10 minutes to create a completely false Hotmail account and once Chris had an e-mail address I could sign him up to a whole host of communicating sights on the Internet. Using nothing more then me and the click of a button there is now a virtual character, who to anyone else using the Internet, could be real.

Chris is a performance on all levels. Not only is he a performance in the fact that I created him and we will play him, although he may be perceived as real, he is a character. He is also a performance in that we have decided that his real age is 49 and his appearance rather shabby and unattractive, but, his character is pretending to be 27 and will use a false picture.

What we want from the performance

This piece is a performance on many levels, creating the characters and giving them blog and myspace accounts is a performance in itself, but giving the two characters a story and the medium of video brings even more performance elements to this.

We want the piece to alert people (parents and the children/teens themselves)to the dangers of the Internet and how, what seems like fun, can spiral out of control. Creating accounts and putting video's on youtube is so easy, virtually anyone can do it and virtually anyone after that can view or have access to it. Internet stalking, harassment and friendships that get out of control, are all too common.

We designed the piece to be as natural as possible. We signed up to a range of different communities on the Internet to give us a '3D', realistic effect. From the clothes we wear, to the way we act and the language we use we want to come across as believable, realistic 16 year old girls.

My opinion is that, especially with serious matters that effect you personally and/or the ones you love, that if you see something that seems real you are more likely to believe it, take it seriously and want to take action.

So far

We have now pretty much finished filming our 'webcam' diary of the two girls. It has been a fun but laborious process. We set the camera up behind my computer so as to create the effect for us of how filming on a webcam would look, the height and the positioning with in a room. We tried to make our make up and clothes give an effect of us being younger, Olivia had to take her lip piercing out. Some of the diary entries are just two girls being silly and others are far more personal. We believed that this was natural, and looking at other webcam dairies on youtube, they are also a mix of the two. The dairy looks really natural. We didn't script any of it but instead gave ourselves out lines of what we wanted to come across in each entry. I think scripting it would have taken away some of its spontaneity.