Bernie Tumbles

So now that it’s finished I wanted to give a full plug to LOOKBOOK: The Series. 

This series is a very different type of show than LBD. It’s third person, it’s behind the fourth wall, and it’s not interactive. Note: I had sketched out some interactive components for this show but alas the resources caught up to us on this one and thus this plays more like a TV show than the LBD.

I was shooting this series last November (mentioned here) and it was one of the most exhausting, yet enriching weeks of my life. 

As for the show itself, yes it is actually from LOOKBOOK.nu, the fashion social network that many LBD fans saw me utilize in Jane’s LOOKBOOK. LBD fans will also see another familiar face in Wes Aderhold.

With the large amount of brand integration it’s safe to say that the show is heavily branded. But as there are many clothing brands within the show (and sponsoring the show), the real brand is LOOKBOOK.nu the website. 

My involvement with the show is as a Writer, Director, and Executive Producer. LOOKBOOK put together a fund for an experimental project and approached me about coming up with something scripted for them.

I was pretty happy to see that LOOKBOOK allowed me a lot of range as to how dark I could go. For one, having actual language in a “branded show” is pretty unheard of in online video. It’s something that I’m not even quite used to yet. Anyway, I can say that the Cleo character is one of the darkest characters I’ve ever written. 

The series runs 9 episodes with a total runtime of about 50 minutes.

Episode 1 - Episode 2 - Episode 3 - Episode 4 - Episode 5 - Episode 6 - Episode 7 - Episode 8 - Episode 9

I purposely designed the show to fit within the one hour television format. I was also experimenting with act breaks (commercial breaks) and minimal casting. This show is basically a dramatic TV pilot about fashion bloggers with 5 cast members and 8 act breaks.

You can follow the main 5 cast members on twitter here.

The story is very much in the teen soap tone but I am skeptical if you’ll like it as a Lizzie Bennet Diaries fan. This is definitely more into the Pretty Little Liars and darker realm. If you don’t like it for whatever reason then that’s okay, it’s not for everyone. Otherwise, enjoy!

Q: I’m a huge fan of the LBD—thanks for all your hard work! With LBD, I liked how the transmedia elements complemented the story. With Sanditon, so far it’s difficult to get attached to the characters and approach the transmedia (it seems bigger than the story). I just don’t have the time, but I want to have a full experience without feeling like I’m missing out. I know it’s early in the process, but do you have any advice/can you make it more accessible to those who don’t want to role-play?

A: Hi there. Thanks for the great question. Welcome to Sanditon is definitely a departure from The LBD in many ways. Now as for the story, I think it’s jarring because you as the viewer have just come off this crazy ride on The LBD and here we are starting things up (almost from scratch) with WTS. When Lizzie Bennet started there wasn’t all this transmedia/world expansion. It was just Lizzie, Jane, Charlotte, and Lydia. We don’t even mention Darcy’s name until episode 4. 

So in WTS, right now there isn’t big drama, it’s setup. So far you’ve gotten 7 minutes of video, some transmedia elements, and a whole huge fictional town to play in. So yeah right now there’s a lot and it definitely looks overwhelming.

Here are the three ways I think you can choose to experience this. 

1. Just watch the videos here on Pemberley Digital’s YT channel: What you’ll get will be our version of the story of Sanditon. Granted our version is already quite a departure and will continue to be. Heck just the presence of Gigi Darcy and the Darcy name guarantees that. As I said before, right now we’re about 7 minutes of video in and well, it’s pretty much just character and setup at this point. 

2. Watch the videos and follow the official accounts on twitter. Between these two you should be getting 95% (if not 100%) of our story. This is pretty much no different from The LBD experience. It’s probably less crazy because you won’t need to subscribe to 4 YT channels to track everything. 

3. Go all in. Videos, Official Twitter, Townsfolk, Domino, anything and everything. You can get completely lost in this world. It’s big, it’s vast, and it’s grown to such in literally a week. It is absolutely astonishing. 

Is it bigger than the story? Yes and no. There are stories upon stories, upon stories, upon stories happening in the world of the townsfolk. 

There are now over 600 residents of Sanditon, CA. The line between creator and consumer keeps getting blurrier.

— Hank Green (@hankgreen)

May 14, 2013

Now this is just my opinion, but like The LBD I feel you can experience our story pretty cleanly by just watching the videos, and like The LBD you’ll get a richer character story by following the in character official accounts. But UNLIKE The LBD, you can now be a part of the world. You can get your hands dirty and play in the sandbox or stay clean and watch everyone else play in the sandbox. WTS is a massive experiment and an evolution of the format. We’re definitely trying some new things and how you want to experience it is entirely up to you.

So this is the first week in a year where The Lizzie Bennet Diaries doesn’t produce a single video. No, I’m not counting this. I know several of the team members have posted reflections on the journey  and I wanted to do something to the same effect but I really don’t know how to really wrap my head around it all right now. Even though the show is over, there is a lot to do for the property and we have the DVD, Welcome to Sanditon,  and the follow up adaptation. 

There’s a lot of business stuff to take care of and for better or worse, I haven’t had the time to really absorb it all. The morning of Ep 100, when so many of you were watching the last episode, I didn’t get to really process it. I was working on something with Ashley, Laura, Julia, and Mary Kate at one point later that day and as I looked at the four of them together the entire past year just flashed before my eyes. All the work, meetings, late nights, editing, tweeting, world building, story telling, character designing, the praise, the criticisms, the fan art, the hangouts, the ups, the downs, all of that was personified by the four extremely talented and lovely ladies that stood in front of me.  It was… a lot… of feelings.

By chance, I ran into Daniel at a coffee shop yesterday and we reflected on more things. Even though the last episode was released and even if the actors or writers never appear in anything in universe again, there are things to come that we won’t know until they happen. We looked back at the show and its potential legacy. This show will be analyzed and studied for years. It will be honored for what it did well and criticized for what it didn’t do well (perfectly fine to me). I am still under no delusions that what we did was perfect because nothing is. 

The idea that people will study what we’ve done and learn from it is an amazing feeling. Knowing that thousands of people will or have picked up and read Pride and Prejudice because they saw The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is just incredible. The promotion and the appreciation of the classics is just awesome.

I’ve been asked several times if there will be “copycats” in the format and as I am sure there will be, I have no problem with it. I just hope the other adaptations/story in vlog form/whatever style they are copying is done well. I genuinely want everything to be good so I hope they go for it.

In LBD, I’m really happy that we as a team always just went for it. Even the stuff we didn’t end up doing (or do well) we genuinely tried our best to make happen given our resource constraints. Running out of time was an excuse. Running out of money was an excuse. Being lazy? Never an excuse. 

I remember over a year ago sitting in a coffee shop talking to Ashley for the first time and discussing how if this goes well this would be a year+ long journey. I didn’t know how big we’d get and I didn’t know whether anyone would like it, but we were going to try.

I’m sure I’ve pointed it out before, but of all the vlogbrothers videos in history (I haven’t seen them all), THIS ONE was the most important to me and this project.  This single video informs so much about the LBD and I’m pretty sure Hank didn’t make it to specifically influence the show but it has in so many ways.

Aside from the obvious “this is how to vlog” subject matter, the most important thing in the video he says is at the 2:23 point. 

“Do not be afraid to try.”

Thank you everyone for watching the show. The team gave it everything and we left it all on the field. Though our adaptation of Pride and Prejudice has come to an end, the universe we built as an experiment continues to Sanditon and beyond.