Category Archives: online video experiments

Away We Happened

Link: Away We Happened-Episode 1

I just did a summary of this case study in my previous blog post. I thought that everyone’s presentation was so good that I should do another. So we will be looking at why I think this web series should be categorised as an online video. I believe that this mini web series has been catered for the Internet because they are looking for participation through this interactive short. Let’s take a look at some of the criterias:

1. Style/Genre
This series is a rom-com with fast paced cuts, quick and witty with a few cheesy sappy conversations. Sarcastic comments are thrown in as well.

2. Duration
The first episode was about 7 minutes long to introduce the characters. There are more characters introduced into the series later on. The rest of the episodes are about five minutes long ending with a 14-minute episode finale.

3. Audience
Wong Fu Production’s fan base consist of young teenagers who spend most of their time surfing the net. Wong Fu Productions have 2.4 million subscribers so AT&T users are combined with these young fans that this web series raked up 6-million views in six weeks.

4. Is it online video?
bI think that this style of content is catered for the Internet because they are short and just for pleasure. This is a low budget series as well. With the interactive aspect, the votes are all done online under AT&T.

5. Reason
The reason of this collaboration is for AT&T to do crowdsourcing as well as product placement for HTC. The quality of the video is at a professional level but if you check the past videos of Wong Fu Production, they worked their way up to this professional level,

6. Involvement
This series is to gather participation from the audience to submit ideas of how to continue to story. The ideas are then posted to be voted and the most voted will be the next episode. This style of interaction intrigues me because this actually allows filmmakers to know what the audience want to see in a story. Who would go for the more cheesy story lines or the more quirky and funny story lines.

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What interests me in this case study is that I enjoy how they incorporated the participatory aspect in this interactive series. The multi-narrative side of this film intrigues me. Those multi-linear interactive commercials catches my interest as well. This has a slightly simpler style of interaction because you vote for the next episode instead of choosing to ‘run away from the bear’ or ‘dine with the bear’.

That’s it then!

Do the happy Jen dance!

Introducing… Away We Happened (2012) by Wong Fu Productions and AT&T !

Why this video?
I have been a huge fan of Wong Fu Production so I decided to use this film as my case study. Wong Fu consists of three Asian-American who graduated from the same college about ten years ago and they moved to Los Angeles to start a company. They are mainly on YouTube making short skits and some short films – varies from comedy to drama. They have a huge fan base with 2.4 million subscribers. Their audience are mainly young teenagers who spend most of their time on YouTube.

What is this video?
It is a web series called ‘Away We Happened‘ and it stars celebrity YouTube artists like Victor Kim, Jen Buescher, Ki Hong Lee and so on. This mini series is revolves around the relationship of this couple, Daniel and Jean who had their suitcase swapped by accident at a cafe in New York. They met up to return the respective suitcase and their love story bloomed from there.

This show is not fully scripted during pre-production because Wong Fu made this an interactive video so they film the first episode and they give the viewers to continue the story. They will put a list of questions for the people to answer at the end of each episode. At the end of the week, they will vote the best way to continue the film and Wong Fu will post the next video. The series ran for six weeks with six episodes. Each episode is about 5-7 minutes long with the finale running up to 14 minutes long. It is naturally the standard online video duration – short and concise.

Is this series sponsored?
This was a collaboration film of Wong Fu Production with AT&T. It was a low-budget film sponsored by AT&T. Product placement advertising is very heavy here because throughout the video the phones are extremely visible. AT&T used this collaboration as a crowdsourcing tactic as there are plenty of young viewers watching Wong Fu’s films. Within the 6 weeks of the web series, AT&T gathered six million views.

For further analysis, I posted it on my next blog post. Check it our here !