Project Draft

Title: Million Views Project – Deconstructing Viral Web Videos

Abstract:

Short internet videos are a new, wildly popular, emergent form of entertainment, perfectly suited to the increasingly low-attention span culture we now occupy.

For this project, I am attempting to deconstruct the elements that comprise viral videos that achieve a degree of internet notoriety and popularity. In doing so, I hope to help my reader understand how the average web user views, processes, and in turn propagates video media that he or she encounters. My assumption behind this project is that the internet audience is, contrary to popular belief, predictable, and while trends and general tastes are certainly mercurial, there exist common elements that are in fact shared by self-created and self-propagated media.

I will distill a number of theoretical "formulas" for popular internet videos from shared elements found in popular internet videos. The core of my project would be to then test the actual effectiveness of my formulas by applying it to a number of self-created videos and tracking their popularity. As there is often an author/viewer correspondence present in these videos, I will also fabricate and assume the various personas behind each video, responding to the viewers as necessary. In this way, this might be considered an interactive video project, or more specifically, a series of short interactive video projects linked by a common thread.

I will analyze commonly seen elements in popular videos, past and present, and distill them into generic formulas that I will then use as a blueprint to create videos of my own. Meanwhile, I will also document the making of process to yield insight into the thinking behind each decision. I intend to use the web video format as the primary way of presenting information, and necessarily will be also creating a webpage for the project as well.

The goal for each video is to reach one million views each. Videos that fall short of this goal will still yield insight as to why they did not take off – and will be analyzed as such.

While my audience is also an unwitting test subject, the real audience for this would be for the more academically minded, as they are aware of the fact that these videos are constructed with the sole purpose of achieving a high degree of internet popularity, and are also privy to the thought processes behind them. I intend for my final delivery format to be a website documenting my thinking and process, as well as containing the various videos themselves.

Significance:

The sheer volume of viewership and visibility of particularly popular internet videos opens up a world of yet unexplored possibilities in both the commercial as well as the creative realm. The fact that many memes from viral web videos have successfully migrated from internet culture to popular culture indicates that this form of entertainment is by no means confined to the boundaries of electronic medium. As of now, there have been no prominent traditionally scholarly analysis of this new form of entertainment, perhaps owing to the difficulty in writing about a primarily visual, constantly moving medium. It is a topic uniquely suited to a multimedia based scholarly approach.

The implications of this project are potentially far reaching. This medium by and large is a medium created and propagated by this generation, and a distillation of it would yield insight into the mindset of my generation. Moreover, in a realm where views are tied to advertising revenue, formulas that guarantee high amounts of views could have a wide array of practical applications.

Timeline:

Due to the constantly changing nature of this project (for example, response videos might be shot after the first is uploaded), it is safe to assume that I will be shooting/editing/uploading constantly throughout the entire process. For videos that have not hit the goal of one million views before the presentation date, I will have projected numbers based on hits per day.

∑ Summer/Pre-Summer
o Create user accounts on YouTube/Video websites
o Acquire props
o Conduct Research
o Test or actually shoot videos (to be uploaded later)
o Contact team members
∑ September
o Confirm proposal
o Shoot and upload videos
o Track data
∑ October
o Shoot and upload videos
o Track data
∑ November
o Shoot and upload videos
o Track data
o Prototype/draft presentation
∑ December
o Shoot and upload videos
o Track data
o Prepare “Making of” videos
∑ January
o Track data
o Conduct interviews
ß Tom Gunning?
ß Creators of LonelyGirl?
ß Ad Agencies?
o Prepare “Making of” videos
∑ February
o Track data
o Conduct interviews
∑ March
∑ April
∑ May
o Present Final Project

Budget:

I don’t anticipate the budget to go any higher than $500 for acquisition of props and transportation/gas. All other video hardware/software is freely accessible.

Advisor

Frank Chindamo, adjunct professor in the SCA Writing department, CEO of Fun Little Movies.

Resources

Video editing software and video hardware is already readily accessible: Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, DVD Studio Pro, Dreamweaver, After Effects, Shake.