Hrag Vartanian

It’s happened, Episode 1 of some new YouTube series has been posted and pushes some boundaries for online video. Here’s the premise & the first episode (04:48) of this minimovie:

…shot entirely in the popular online world Second Life…Filmmaker Douglas Gayeton came across a series of seven video dispatches by a character named Molotov Alva…a man by the same name mysteriously disappeared from his real world California home in January 2007. Gayeton put Alva’s dispatches together into a documentary of seven episodes. Will he find the answers he’s looking for?

What’s interesting about this?

First, the fixation on the “straightworld” sounds like lingo lifted from a b-movie script…maybe this “type” can spawn a new vlogging genre, and Second Life will be to vlogging what Los Angeles was to the b-movie (one of its premier locales).

Second, this concocted character Alva Molotov has potential, more info here, here, and here (big download of a book Molotov reputedly wrote, which he prefers to call FACTION [fact+fiction]–10MB)—he’s the one on the right in the photo.

Third, the sexiest part of this gimmicky (well, somewhat anyway) shtick is that it reports to be a fictional offshoot of a the beats, the weathermen and all those other “straightworld” hating peeps (in today’s New York, we called them hipsters…see TheBurg.tv).

Fourth, the vid shows cool possibilities and more finessing of the technology than I have yet seen.

Fifth, considering the director is Douglas Gayeton, who “…wrote and directed, together with William Gibson, ‘Johnny Mnemonic’…” there is something behind the madness. Master of Media from the University of Amsterdam, writes “…Molotov Alva encounters everything from Furries to Cyberpunks to Neo-Luddites to Sex Slaves to the King of the Hobos…”…which makes me think that Gayeton’s experiment may eventually become a cult-classic like “Bladerunner” or “Logan’s Run.”

Sixth, it is supported by SubmarineChannel out of the Netherlands, which is:

…a digital channel, focusing on the boundaries between popular culture and media, art and digital culture…SubmarineChannel targets the new generation of creatives, offering a unique stage for their work to be shown, a fertile ground for new projects and collaborations to be established.

SubmarineChannel.com is part of the Amsterdam production company Submarine, …with financial support from The Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science & The Department of Social Development, City of Amsterdam. This is a SubmarineChannel production in co production with VPRO and Vrij Nederland Magazine.

So, my bet is that there are some creatively gifted minds at work behind this YouTube experiment…bring it on.

Sixth, The video responses are funnier than the episode (click onto the YouTube page to view them), the fact that “My Second Life” has obviously triggered this kind of response tells me that there’s something there.